At the St. Ignatius homecoming party in the piazza overlooking the field. There is a buffet, beer and wine, a bounce house for kids, and loud soft rock music on speakers. A crowd mostly men, but also women stand talking, as children, some of them very young, run around chasing each other, occasionally dodging through grownups’ legs.

Off to one side is a cluster of older men, some of them quite large, the 1962 nationally ranked champions: Ray Calcagno in his baseball cap; Tom Kennedy welcoming people the way Pat Malley would, making sure they are seen, recognized. Ray says his brother Ron is already over on the St. Francis side. He’s made his choice: it’s his son’s team versus the school whose breakout team he quarterbacked. Some people call this the Calcagno Bowl.

Among the cluster of older men, stand Gene Maher and Rudy Lobrado, Vince Tringali guys who look like they could still budge a blocking sled.

The piazza overlooks two fields, one of which is ready for football. Lights on, beams filtered by swift, moving fog like smoke from some unfriendly neighbor’s barbecue. Teams are lined up, full rosters, 40-45 players for the anthem, St. Ignatius in red, St. Francis in white with brown and gold trim.

It’s the end of September, which should be the golden time in San Francisco, even in the Outer Sunset. Instead, it feels like mid-August-cold, foggy, wet. Fogust, in the local lexicon. A reminder that we are just a few blocks from the ocean.

From the metal bench seats, close to the field, the St. Francis side is partly obscured by low blowing, south to north fog. The visiting crowd, which appears fairly large, vanishes then reappears with the moving fog. This is only the third game with lights at St. Ignatius, which much have been a tough sell in a mostly residential neighborhood.

In the stands, kids, some of them not much more than toddlers, run around constantly in what is very much a family event. There are people in everything from T-shirts to ski gear, team jerseys , puff jackets amid band noise and cheers.

On the sidelines, the two teams cluster in the full-spectrum assortment of high school football, the most inclusive of the major sports. In addition to providing an ideal showcase for abundantly talented athletes like Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts, football stretches to include the minimally talented. The ideal roster size is about forty-three players, which makes for a wide variety of physical skills. Too small? Learn to punt or place-kick. Too slow? There is always the offensive line. Too undisciplined? Become a pass rusher and let fly. There is room for everyone to learn and earn respect for the game. Richard Nixon, a player whom one coach described as having “two left feet” remained enough of a fan to send in plays from the White House to the coach of his hometown Washington team.

“Duke,” a high school coach once told Larry Duke, later a successful commercial artist, “you got two speeds: Slow and Stop.”

These are the kinds of lessons that last.

St. Francis kicks off to SI, who go three-and-out and then punt. St. Francis follows with a sustained drive which includes several big plays, then hits for a touchdown on a 32-yard pass play. St. Francis looks strong, fast, well-coached, and deep.

St. Francis tailback Keola Keanaaina is their stud running back: he can pound the ball inside and break away outside. He’s fast and can break tackles or simply run through them. He is their workhorse.

After the kickoff, St. Ignatius is again forced to punt. An impressive kick corners St. Francis deep in their own territory. It doesn’t matter. They start a long drive, punctuated by big plays:

Keanaaina scats, then bashes. They score again: it’s 14-0.

At halftime, Ron Calcagno holds court underneath the north-end goal post. He’s lively, animated, jaunty, with big hands and forearms that make him look like he could still wing a pass to the sideline on an Out pattern. He also still has his waggish sense of humor.

“Well,” he asks, “how much do you want?”

It’s his old gag, challenging the other side. How much do you want his team to score before he pulls his first-string guys. It’s clear already who has the best players, is better coached, better prepared. It’s like a battle between two armies, with much more ammunition on one side.

There is no pontificating. He is still doing what he was meant to do: assisting his son in seeking out what is best in individual young men and helping it develop. Not bad for a man in his seventies.

Fifty seconds into the second half, St. Francis scores again: Keanaaina on a short run. It’s 21-0, and it feels like this game is pretty much decided. And yet, after the kickoff, a St. Ignatius running back busts a 71-yard run followed by a 21-yard touchdown pass and run along the sideline. Then St. Francis scores again on a 62-yard pass play. It doesn’t seem to matter that SI’s punter and coverage can trap St Francis inside their own 10-yard line: they can score from anywhere. St. Francis substitutes freely, but Keanaaina is still pounding the ball. With five minutes to go in the fourth quarter, it’s 42-20.

In the stands, the adults in St. Ignatius hats, shirts, and jackets appear to be drooping, as kids continue to run about, keeping warm in shorts and flipflops by moving.

On the way out, a darkened playfield is thick with kids, playing pitch and catch, tag, wrestling, dancing. With the game over for them, they’re having fun, gathering after two years of COVID confinement. Football, and all that it means, has helped sustain them.

—THE END —

In August of 2023, the PAC-12, a 108-year-old athletic conference and traditional host of the Rose Bowl, collapsed.

The disintegration had begun the previous year, with the departure of the league’s most glamorous teams, USC and UCLA, for the Big Ten. When the league was unable to replace the departing schools, or to successfully negotiate a major television contract, the universities of Oregon and Washington followed USC and UCLA into the Big Ten.

Then Colorado, just starting its anticipated revival under Deion Sanders, decided to return to its previous conference, the desert-and-mountain oriented Big 12. They were soon followed by Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah. The Pacific Coast conference had shrunk to just four teams: California, Stanford, Washington State and Oregon State.

Attempts were made to blame the collapse of the PAC-12 on the players, the transfer portal, the name-image-likeness endorsements- but the greater fault lay with an ineffectual league management, tainted by greed to the point of avarice.

A dozen years before, when college conferences like the SEC and the Big Ten signed television contracts with networks like ESPN, the Pacific Coast PAC-12 chose instead to put together its own and presumably more lucrative PAC-12 Network, a patchwork of local and regional cable TV outlets. It was, at the time, a benchmark contract for college sports.

The Network functioned like a corporate organization, with a highly paid CEO with perks and bonuses, a sizable staff, and expansionary ambitions. But without an established network connection it lacked clout. Attempts to negotiate attractive times and national exposure were disappointing. And scheduling proved a disaster.

To accommodate its complicated TV schedule, game times would fluctuate, so that fans never knew for sure whether their teams’ games would be played in the afternoon or at night. For alumni, many of whom were season ticket holders, this was a disaster: you never knew for sure whether you might be driving home late on Saturday night or be forced to stay overnight in a hotel. Not surprisingly, attendance and season ticket sales dropped. With reduced national network presence, support among distant alumni dwindled. Recruitment became more difficult. So did hiring and retaining big-name coaches. Outstanding players in hotspots like Southern California, left for schools like Alabama, Michigan and Florida, where they would be seen. When Pete Carroll left USC, the league’s most prominent team entered a down cycle, and when Oregon and Stanford rose into the top ten ranked teams, not many people noticed.

As the SEC and Big Ten negotiated increasingly extravagant network contracts, the PAC-12 package, in comparison, shrunk. Playing in a later time zone on a cluster of related stations, they were just not visible.

In the four surviving schools, the damage extended beyond football. Stanford and California especially had outstanding, nationally ranked women’s sports programs which were essentially supported by revenues from football, which were shrinking to the vanishing point. And now the big draws- the traditional rivalries-would be gone.

It was like the national anti-gravitational pull of money generally, away from the bottom and middle, flowing ever stronger, toward the top.

Jake Dickert, coach of one of the surviving schools, Washington State, put it this way:

“To think as recently as five years ago, that the PAC-12 would be in this position, and that local rivalries would be at risk, is, to me, unbelievable.”

Like other men who have endured a sickly youth, William James had a lasting admiration for what he termed “hardihood.” The eldest child of an independently wealthy and propertied banker who was also something of a Swedenborgian theologian, James was educated by tutors and in private schools both in America and Europe. Fluent in German and French, William, along with his brother the novelist Henry James, grew up acquainted with the literary and intellectual currents of the mid-nineteenth century. At his father’s urging, he studied medicine and earned an m.d. though he never practiced as a physician During his late teens and early twenties, William James suffered a period of physical and mental illness, including several prolonged periods of depression which included contemplating suicide.

Seeking a cure for what seems to have been a psychotic break, he undertook extended treatment in Germany where he began to study philosophy and to publish articles in literary reviews.

It was during this time that James, who had lost two younger brothers killed in the Civil War, became a pacifist, suggesting at one time that instead of young men entering the military they should enter public service “in order to get the childishness knocked out of them.”

Returning to America, he entered Harvard medical school where he completed his M.D. degree and, after a period of teaching physiology and anatomy, concentrated on the studies of psychology and philosophy, fields in which he became eminent.

In the course of his writing and teaching, James came to value focusing on the practical consequences of ideas as opposed to getting lost in abstractions or mired in pointless metaphysical arguments. As James grew older, he came to believe that mankind was better off evaluating the fruitfulness of ideas by testing them in the common ground of lived experience.

It was at this point, late in his career, when James gave his talk, among his last, which became the essay The Moral Equivalent of War.

In an earlier study, James had investigated a feeling that underlies the fundamental motivation of football. “If I am on an isolated mountain trail,” James wrote, “faced with an icy ledge to cross, and do not know whether I can make it, I may be forced to consider the question whether I can or should cross the ledge. This question is not only forced, it is momentous; if I am wrong, I may fall to my death, and if I believe rightly that I can cross the ledge, my holding of the belief may itself contribute to my success.”

In another, later essay, James concluded that “A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs…a government, an army, a system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.”

Has any sweat-suited, ballcapped, whistle-wearing coach ever said it better?

When James gave his talk, at Stanford in 1906, his last public utterance, the United States was still living in the long shadow of the Civil War. The defeated South was in the process of reconstructing the old racial order by the establishment and enforcement of Jim Crow. In 1896 in Plessy v. Feguson, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal”. The country had recently come off the Spanish American war, which James, in his speech categorized as a squalid territorial grab. He also posed, at this early date the strong possibility of future war with both Germany and Japan.

Regarding the Civil War, which we are still celebrating with staged re-enactments, William James conceded its enduring patriotic and miliary potency, that for all the national loss of blood and treasure that, were any citizen offered the choice of resolving the issues of the war by sacrificing its glory and tradition, no one would agree.

Showing war’s horror and irrationality has no effect, James contends, on man’s fascination with it. War or the imminent possibility of it has become the normal state of things. Peace is considered an exception. Money spent on preparation for war, labeled as “defense spending” are the least opposed of taxes. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life without use for hardihood would be contemptible.

As his moral equivalent to war, James proposed a kind of civil conscription as opposed to a miliary one. Instead of being assigned into the armed forces, every young man would be required to contribute a term of service to the society he lives in, to building and maintaining the roads and waterways, constructing homes and buildings, maintaining railroads and fishing fleets.

Quoting H. G. Wells, James points out that in many ways, military organization is the most peaceful of activities, with an atmosphere of service and cooperation, where advancement is based more on self-forgetfulness than self-seeking.

Clearly neither Wells nor James had ever experienced military service.

Also, Wells and James were writing in the years before fascism, when first Mussolini, then Hitler imposed military organization and values on civic life, producing the kind of aggressive and ultimately belligerent war machines that William James feared most.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter gave a televised national address titled “The Moral Equivalent of War”, in which he advocated applying James’s idea of combining political unity and civic virtue to addressing the energy crisis. The speech produced neither public mobilization nor congressional action and became characterized in the media by a derisive acronym, MEOW. Some of the values Carter suggested were, however, applied to his later, modestly successful home-building program, Habitat for Humanity. Moral organization was apparently more effective from outside of public office than within it.

A more successful application of war’s organizational and motivational values is in football, beginning with the mass physical grind of training and the division of players into offensive and defensive platoons, the instruction and learning of strategy and tactics and the tireless use of military metaphors: passing attack, throwing the bomb, the shotgun and the blitz, linemen in the trenches, outside punt coverers as gunners, the long march of a campaign that begins with reporting to camp.

Important games are drenched in military display: the uniformed presentation of colors, enlarged flags, jet flyovers, standing at attention for the singing of the anthem. The question is whether this mass expression of nationalistic feelings relieves these sentiments or enhances them. Yet that too is resolved by the game’s first hit.

We inherit the warlike type, James said, and for most of the capacities for heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.

James contrasted the rapid development of method and appliances in the naval and military affairs of his day with the fact that the typical house of that era was still as poorly ventilated, badly heated and clumsily furnished as those of fifty years before. It’s easy to imagine his conclusions about the effects of the military-inspired technological development of recent decades on today’s electronic, digitized, and imminently artificial-intelligenced America.

With football’s deepening command of the national imagination has come an expanded demand for public support, especially at the local and regional level. Demand for tax breaks and public funding for stadium improvement or replacement have become part of the game at the professional level, often leveraged by threats to move to another city. It seems as if there is always another community eager to mortgage a significant part of its future to acquire the major league status of a pro football team. This, while its own public high schools may be struggling to support teams at all.

There is also the public health cost of concussions and other injuries which have to be treated by local hospital staff as well as the allocation and expense of long-term care. Somebody has to pay for this, and one senses that it isn’t left entirely up to the players union and the NFL. Perhaps we are coming to an era of veterans-administration type of support for old football players, with the stadium improvements and new construction serving as the football version of war memorials.

Yet whenever a Super Bowl site comes up for selection, there are always cities scrambling to make their bids. Surely this will be the boost the local hotels and restaurants need, an increase in tourism that will more than offset added burdens on transportation and policing. Plus, there are the political benefits of putting your city, for a few days at least, at the center of world-wide attention. It is desperately hard, as James says, to bring the peace party and the war party together. Yet here they are, at a college football game, administrators and faculty, brought to their feet along with students. vendors and gear-wearing fans by the excitement of a game-breaking play. A shared moment of emotional release without the risk of life or territory.

Patriotic pride and ambition in their military forms, says James, are only expressions of competitive passion, but they are first forms, and need not be the last. “Why should men not someday feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect?”

It might even be worth, in place of a blood tax, a donation to a school athletic department or a donor collective.

“It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up.”

The spark that failed to catch in public works and energy conservation appears to have exploded in football.

In May of 2023 the Texas legislature passed a bill. modeled on the vetoed Oklahoma measure, designed to block NCAA oversight of name-image-likeness activities among college athletes. In legislation which appears likely to be adopted by other states, Texas would prohibit an athletic association, conference or other organization with authority over intercollegiate sports from penalizing the institution or its athletic program “for performing, participating in or allowing an activity required or authorized” by the bill. This pretty much offers a green light for NIL activity on the part of Texas universities and on the dozen or more donor collectives already active in the state. According to On3, coaches and NCAA leaders say NIL agreements sometimes disguise ‘play for pay’ deals choreographed in advance by collectives. The Texas bill would remove the effectiveness of NCAA penalties such as individual player suspensions or the denial of a team’s bowl participation.

Then, just days later, a Texas congressional representative introduced a draft federal bill in the U.S. House that would include most of the reforms that NCAA officials had been urging third-party administration, pre-emption of state laws, an anti-trust exemption, and the prevention of classifying athletes as employees.

There was skepticism about whether the federal bill would pass. But one thing was clear: the game of who-controls-the-game was not yet over.

Wiliam James believed that “the ordinary prides and shames of man” are capable of organizing a moral equivalent such as he had suggested. With football, the physical equivalent is there. The moral remains a challenge that needs to be met.

Deion Sanders, rebuilding football at Colorado, believes that even the NIL and transfer-portal changes have valuable life-lessons for players. “You can’t want a lot of money,” he told On3, “to get paid like a professional…and be treated like a kid…You got kids working their butts off at these local restaurants just to make it through college.

“We gotta prep these kids for life, this ain’t just about football. There’s gonna be ups and downs. But you gotta get your butt back up. It just so happens we play football, and there’s a scoreboard up there.”

At a league-wide once-a-year gathering like this, you’d expect there would be a conventioneer spirit of cutting loose among teams’ management, but if there is any serious partying going on here it’s likely among the owners. For team staff it’s a pressured grind not so different from players’ training camp, with its own make-or-break evaluations. Who was the small-college player you could have picked but missed, the bust you swapped too many picks for, the job contact you could have made, but blew? In the boiler-room stress of the round-by-round picking and choosing, it’s management who are truly on the clock.

Kansas City is a beef town, and there are steak houses and barbecue joints to make one’s imagination dance, but not much time to savor them in the cluttered, sweaty draft team rooms. It’s the deals and not the parties that continue into the night,

In the morning, the crowd starts to gather again on the lawn, families picnicking, individuals straggling in, people suited up already in team gear and made-for-camera costumes in a kind of grass and grounded self-placement. There are no luxury boxes here.

ESPN is on the air at 9 a.m. with continuing analysis and coverage. In the screen corner clicks the digital clock, At the anchor desk inside Union Station, the analysts discuss the late-blooming cornerback, late birthday for the cycle but with coordinated smooth moves, who has made a big jump in times; the undersized six-foot 264-pound defensive tackle not a top athlete, with short arms but a quick first step and promise to develop. It’s a separate insider language, like bidders at an auction or touts at the track. Now there’s anchor desk speculation as to who was slighted in the first round and why. Whose value has declined, whose expert prediction has been overlooked. All the talk there isn’t time for in the heat of games can be indulged in here.

There are teasing reminders of the impact of late-round draft choices: Tom Brady, not picked until the sixth round; Joe Montana in the third; Brock Purdy picked dead-last in the tenth. The message is: keep watching or you’ll miss something important.

The exquisite torture of an uncertain outcome extended for a full day and more.

Along with the stripped player appearances, and shortened wait time between announced choices there is added pressure in the team rooms. There is more maneuvering - teams trade up, trade down as the process accelerates. Picks are abruptly updated, yet there seems to be highlight footage on every player, no matter how obscure.

On the outdoor stage, Commissioner Goodell has switched to weekend casual, sports coat, slacks, no tie, as if he’s just another guy relaxing at a game.

Will Levis is picked by his hometown Tennessee Titans and embraced by a neighboring beauty as the greenroom episode comes to a happy ending.

The Pittsburgh Steelers, with a pick from a trade with the Chicago Bears choose Joey Porter Jr., a Penn State linebacker, from a school known for linebackers and who is the son of a former NFL linebacker. At moments like this the process seems like a lock legacy: the kind of choice made by a prep school admissions committee. But hey, they say he’s fast enough to cover wideouts.

It’s Saturday, college game day, and this is the only game on the board. In the twenty states where sports books are legal, and in the nineteen where online betting is allowed, the money is going down on who goes where and when. There are collectives’ agents and corporate NIL representatives watching too, phones in hand as if it was midseason. Lock in the player now you might have to pay a fortune for later.

As always, the NFL continues to promote itself. Its breadth and its reach. In a cutaway, the broadcast goes live, to Germany, where a roomful of football fans has gathered. “The NFL Fan Club of Hamburg announces that for the hundred and sixth draft choice, the New England Patriots have chosen Jake Andrews, tight end, from Troy University.” The mind takes a cultural jolt. There will be more.

American football arrived in Europe with the occupying forces after World War II. The different bases all had teams which played against each other; local people responded to the contact and energy, the speed and size of the players, whom one British writer described as “nylon-kneed mastodons”. A documentary film, popular in the Netherlands, showed game film, with the hits underscored by sound effects of falling, shattering crockery. Like gangster films, American football acquired a following. Cee Cee Green, a former scatback at Poly High in San Francisco, recalled starting for his Army team in Frankfurt, and running the opening kickoff back for a touchdown. It won him a change of duty: “After that, all I did was play football.”

American football found a European following. There is now an NFL regular season game played yearly in London, and there is talk of a permanent franchise.

There is an abiding quality about the Draft. Outside on the lawn, people come and go but the crowd remains its costumed, animated self, while on television the picks continue even as the audience leaves to do dishes, walk the dog, buy groceries. When you return, it’s been going on all the time you were gone, like the ocean.

Jake Haener, the Fresno State quarterback who changed schools in order to start, has been drafted by the New Orleans Saints. He is considered at 5’11” to lack “length” and is prone to move around looking for open passing lanes. He is regarded as a prospective backup; but he was the most valuable player in the Senior Bowl and bears himself with a poise that it would be foolish to bet against.

In another live remote from Germany, the NFL Fan Club of Frankfurt announces that the Carolina Panthers have selected Chandler Zavala, a guard from North Carolina State, as the 112^th pick in the draft. If only NATO or the UN could match this instant connectedness.

Among the fans on the lawn and the alumni followers watching at home, there is an additional courtship going on. Each pick mentions a college someone shares pride for, whose team now more than ever is seeking their support. Universities are increasingly concerned about large sums going to NIL collectives rather than the athletic departments that traditionally draw donor dollars. To reach hidden donors, both universities and donor collectives are working with fundraising organizations that collect fan-based information and can stage and support reunions and other potential donor events. For these groups, Draft Day presents a powerful example of how this can be done. It has helped turn annual alumni giving day into a growing national practice.

The problem is that both the college athletic departments and the donor collectives are drawing on the same donor pool. There is a struggle to find new sources among schools’ various databases, the alumni and supporters who have promised to donate money, but never got around to it. There are an increasing number of school alumni events, and also increasing turnover among university administrators, worn down by the complexities of negotiation and compliance. It’s tough to be always combining a handshake with hope for a handout.

In another remote, London’s NFL Club signs in, announcing the Jacksonville Jaguars’ pick of Ventral Miller, a Florida linebacker. There will be three NFL games played in London next season, at least one of them involving the Jaguars plus individual games in Frankfurt and Munich. Somehow the British pronunciation of Jag-you-were is overlooked.

The Draft has to be, among other things, the biggest male shopping event of the year, with a degree of speculation, contemplation and evaluation dwarfing Christmas plus a year of family birthdays. The aftermath of choices made or missed can linger in the mind for years. Regret, which Dean Acheson memorably termed “the most useless of passions”’ can be fully indulged in here. Everyone’s team has, at one time, missed a big one.

In 2004 Maurice Clarett, a former Ohio State running back, sued the NFL over the draft, claiming that in denying him permission to enter the draft until his college class had graduated, the league was in violation of anti-trust law. Though a federal judge initially ruled in his favor, Clarett’s case was overturned on appeal. Then, in a surprise move, Clarett was unexpectedly drafted in 2005, in the third round by the Denver Broncos. Despite an unimpressive training camp, he was signed to a four-year contract which the Broncos claimed he failed to live up to. There were also character issues: Clarett had beefs with his coaches, and was released at the end of training camp. He eventually played with a few non-NFL teams and served time in prison following a robbery conviction.

The draft system that Clarett challenged is the product of a collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the National Football League Players Association. The Players Association’s main purpose is to see to the best interests of the players who are part of the union already. The entering players are essentially on their own; or at least they have been: with the coming of the name-image-likeness endorsements, the transfer portal, and the supporter collectives, agents, attorneys and other representatives that go with them, there is a third-party element involved now, which may make the three-year college requirement irrelevant. Yes, the younger players may be physically at risk, but what football player isn’t? “Protecting players,” On3 concludes, “is a noble idea, but some warn it strays into paternalism.”

The Philadelphia Eagles are having a big Draft. They are the first team to pick five defensive players from one school, the National Champion Georgia Bulldogs. Now they trade with Detroit for a veteran offensive player. From Georgia.

Max Duggan, a Texas Christian quarterback who had heart surgery to remove a blood clot, then lost his starting job, then led TCU to the national championship game, is picked by the Los Angeles Chargers.

In the fourth round, the Dallas Cowboys pick Viliami Fehoko, 6’3”, 276, a defensive tackle from San Jose State. He is one of Ron Calcagno’s prized Samoan players from St. Francis High.

Georgia’s entire starting defense has been drafted in the first five rounds. In a demonstration of the demand for mobile quarterbacks, and the need for capable backups, a dozen quarterbacks have also been drafted in the first five rounds.

With the combination of pressured inside dealing in the team draft rooms, and the giant lawn gathering of the world’s largest, longest tailgate party, the NFL Draft is a tribute to the American ability to turn anything into spectacle.

At the end of the third draft day, the hosts and guests at the anchor desk sum up the completed draft. As in any competition there have been winners and losers. The Eagles and the Seattle Seahawks clearly got stronger, while the Cowboys’ draft has been underwhelming. The Pittsburgh Steelers have beefed up their offensive and defensive lines. The rebuilding Houston Texans got a franchise quarterback, an outstanding pass rusher, and a standout linebacking prospect. The Arizona Cardinals and Cincinnati Bengals have also upped their game. The Cleveland Browns, on the other hand, have mortgaged their future, trading away multiple draft choices for a talented but troubled quarterback. Yet if history tells us anything, the surprise of the draft will probably be someone who has been undervalued or maybe not even drafted at all.

The biggest winners are ESPN, the network, and the NFL. What had begun in the eighties as “a glorified press conference” has been nurtured and grown into an event rivaling the Super Bowl in its hold on the nation’s attention. In 2020, reports Vanity Fair, “with the sporting world at a standstill and the public starved for live entertainment, the NFL draft drew 15.6 million viewers.” The Draft’s blend of spectacle and intimacy seems to offer a collection of moments that can at least catch the attention of almost everyone. Plus there is the intriguing possibility that in an increasingly programed era this marathon live broadcast will catch someone completely off-guard. It’s like the Academy Awards with jockstraps.

Outside on the lawn, the crowd has begun to drift away. The team jerseys and hats, the T-shirts and face paint and pennants will be tucked away until September, when the opening of league play offers people another opportunity to declare themselves. Oh, there will be training camp and trades, end-of-summer exhibition games and another college football open-portal period, but nothing like the game-on feel of the draft for months. The fans, like the players, await that first, transforming hit.

Ronnie Lott, pro football’s classic hall of fame safety, recalled playing in his first pro game. His team, the 49ers, were opening against the Chicago Bears. Walter Payton, the Bears’ star running back, slashed for seven yards on the first offensive play. In the pileup, there was giggling. Payton and 49ers linebacker Hacksaw Reynolds, who had tackled him, were at the bottom of the pile, laughing they were back, at the start of a new season, playing football again. Players and, at the same time, fans.

The annual NFL Player Draft has been described as an oasis in the off-season desert of football. If so, it has evolved, or been developed into football’s Mecca, the place to which all faces turn in hope and, for some, a kind of worship. There are ritual, costumes. drama, ceremony, analysis and exaltation focused not just on two teams as in the Super Bowl , but on all of the pro teams, each in its turn, as well as the standout college players live and on film, and appearances by some of the most famous coaches, all of this covered by three days of live television, as if it were a war or a national disaster.

The draft is being held in Kansas City, home of this year’s NFL champions and winners of two of the last four Super Bowls, a city still warm from the glow of its Super Bowl win and the naming of its quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, as the league’s Most Valuable Player. He will be here along with other notables but also as the embodiment of what other teams would like their quarterback to be, for it is his combination of skills and style of play that have transformed the game. There is not a team here that would not welcome the opportunity to select the next Mahomes.

The event is centered around Union Station, a cavernous terminal transformed for three days into a football cathedral, or mosque. Inside a vast closed space, with distant graphics filtering light like stained glass windows, a panel of experts sits at a long. curved desk like a TV anchor desk, evaluating, forecasting and promoting the Draft. Two of the experts are women, and at least one man a former NFL player. Guest coaches, former players, sports journalists come and go, taking places at the desk, set on a deck above a crowded floor below. In effect, hosts and guests are vamping, filling time and warming up the audience for the start of the draft. A box which is shown in a screen corner on television, has been digitally counting down for more than three hours.

In meeting rooms at a nearby hotel, and at distant sites at the teams’ headquarters, the individual draft teams-general managers, personnel directors, coaches, scouts- are gathered, deliberating like political staff among themselves or working the phones, discussing positions, deliberating swaps involving draft spots and players, sometimes both, trying to work discordant elements into a coherent campaign. This is, literally, where the deals are done. And where the individual picks are made.

Outside Union Station on a vast green lawn, a stadium-sized crowd gathered in what resembles an enormous tailgate party. Only this is not for one team, but many. There are people in both college and pro team gear—jerseys. hats, t-shirts, pennants, face paint, even a few mascot animal heads. The people chat, visit, wave. Though there is no game, they stand in an enormous, shared sense of anticipation and celebration-where else could you go, dressed like this? TV crews circulate among them, collecting footage for later reaction shots, giving an unlimited number of people the opportunity to look foolish.

Back at the anchor desk, the panel discusses players, individual statistics, potential choices. There are player walk-and-talk interviews, assessments, highlights on film, even baby pictures, with cutaway glimpses of the team meeting rooms as the panel speculates on trades teams might be making to get higher choices. There is a casino sense of sustained risk.

People are watching: the ESPN broadcast is as commercial-heavy as a regular season NFL game. Yet it goes on all day. The appeal is narrow and broad at the same time. Not just what your team is going to do, but the rest of the league. Who else may be gaining a star or an edge? Plus, what young man is about to become rich and maybe famous?

The announcement stage is outdoors, under an awning in front of the lawn. The crowd is being worked: Patrick Mahomes is introduced along with his star receiver Travis Kelce. The projected first-round choices line up dutifully onstage behind NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. A businesslike man in a business uniform dark suit and power tie. He makes the ritual announcement of silence in honor of three players who have died in heroic non-football circumstances, followed by the ritual presentation of colors and the hand over hearts of the national anthem. Then, standing at an onstage mic while appearing on a giant screen alongside the stage, Goodell declares the Draft open.

In a gesture contrary to the nation’s economic inequality, the NFL allows the teams with the poorest last season record to draft first. The Carolina Panthers, coming off a disappointing year during which they fired their head coach and traded away their star running back, have further advanced position by trading with the Chicago Bears for an even higher choice. The Panthers, in a term that originated on Draft Day are, according to Commissioner Goodell, “On the clock” for the Number One pick. The cameras cut away: expert speculation, film highlights of potential nominees, crowd shots of people leaning forward expectantly. Finally, the suspense fully milked, Goodell announces that the Panthers have picked Alabama quarterback Bryce Young. He is from a school with a winning tradition, and is this year’s Heisman Trophy winner but there are experts’ reservations: at 5’10” he lacks what the NFL calls “length”, for a quarterback an ideal 6’3” or 4; but he makes up for this with another desired quality: he is “twitchy”, a prized combination of elusiveness and agility that lets him evade the speed rush of large, fast defensive ends.

Young is ushered onstage, wearing an awkward man-into-boy combination of a suit and tie and a baseball cap bearing not his school’s or new pro team’s logo, but that of the NFL DRAFT: it’s clear who holds the key light here. Embraced by Goodell, the somewhat shy Young makes a short speech, tossing the usual bouquets to family, coaches and teammates, in shock that the circumstances of his life have just completely changed. A few years back, Carolina had drafted, with their first choice Cam Newton, a quarterback of ideal length and a cannon passing arm who led the Panthers to their only Super Bowl, then flamed out after a short career. Bryce Young is clearly the desired next Cam Newton.

The NFL draft is, at base, a simple procedure, a league official or guest reads an onstage announcement of a decision that has been made in a private room, followed, after deliberation, by another. Yet it has been dramatically enhanced into a spectacle holding a crowd estimated at 125,000 and a national television audience in a state of sustained suspense. Outside on the lawn, there are people in Alabama crimson and Panther black-and-blue waving their arms and dancing, celebrating not only Bryce Young’s Number One pick, but also themselves for being here.

Next up are the Houston Texans, a rebuilding team who have hired a hot young coach who is Black, an exception in a league of overwhelmingly Black players. Damico Ryans comes fresh from coaching the league’s best defense at San Francisco and much is expected of him in Houston. The Texans choose as their first pick C.J. Stroud, an Ohio State quarterback who checks all the mobility and size boxes, but is rumored not to have done well on the league’s S2 Cognition test, an academic exercise designed to measure perception speed, search efficiency, visual learning, distraction and other mental qualities, yet who nevertheless passed for 85 Ohio State career touchdowns. Introduced and embraced by Goodell, Stroud is young, boyish yet polished in his suit and tie, ballcap pushed down over his dreadlocks, and celebrated with a live cutaway to a watch party at his high school in Cucamonga. The reach of the embrace of the NFL Draft is as wide as its desired audience, large and at the same time intimate.

In an off-camera jury-room swap, the eager Texans have traded up to the Number Three pick, who is Will Anderson. Jr., a 6’ 3” Alabama linebacker. Tall. limber, poised, composed, he is in line with coach Ryans’ defense-first inclinations.

With the Fourth pick, the Indianapolis Colts select a player who has started only twelve games in college But Anthony Richardson, a quarterback from Florida, has the kind of dimensions coaches drool over: he stands 6’ 6”, tall enough to see around the biggest oncoming pass rusher, and runs forty yards in 4.4 seconds, fast enough to outrun the quickest of them. Combined with a strong arm, he can pass from in or out of the pocket. If the heart for the game is in him, he is an ideal specimen.

Next, Seattle chooses a defensive player. Devon Witherspoon is a shutdown cornerback who this past season, it is said, allowed only one completed pass—and that for lost yardage. Sometimes these evaluations hinge on facts, and sometimes on folklore. The shrewd analysts in the rooms are also ultimately fans.

The player introductions and speeches thanking God and family continue. Tyree Wilson, a tall, long-armed pass rusher from Texas Tech wearing a floral wallpaper suit hugs Commissioner Goodell up off the stage floor like a coal sack.

The favored first pick of the draft, Jalen Carter of Georgia, a 6’3” defensive tackle who is 315 pounds and fast, has fallen to the ninth pick, due to “character concerns”. When he appears, as a Philadelphia Eagles draftee, he is wearing a pink suit with a purple shirt and a matching pocket hanky, which can relieve your character concerns, Or not.

For supporters or even just observers, there is something in the draft for everyone. If your team is lousy, like the Texans, this could be the start of a dramatic turnaround, the moment when everything began to change, and you were there, present at the creation. If your team is mediocre, as most teams are, this could be the bold stroke that extends your season by pushing you into the playoffs. If you’re contenders, this might be the sleeper pick, unnoticed by the opposition, that gets you to the conference championship and maybe the Super Bowl. It’s a moment of triumphant expectation with few if any hopes dashed.

With the Number 15 pick, the New York Jets choose Will McDonald IV, defensive end from Iowa State, 6’4”, 235, an edge rusher “with no OFF switch “. As a teenager in Wisconsin, he lived for a time in his car and worked at his namesake, McDonald’s. Now the NFL---and the NIL—await.

In the afternoon, the parade of the chosen resumes. There are women among the presenters now, usually associated with football in some way, and occasionally pre-teen children just finding their way into sports. There are cutaways to players’ families and in a few cases, wives. Lives are changing, and there is a sense of departure like that surrounding the arrival of military orders or the aftermath of a death or accident. There are tears and vows, bad jokes, reminiscences and shared national reckoning, moments public and at the same time private.

Will Levis, a projected first-round Tennessee quarterback who has unexpectedly fallen to later is shown in greenroom cutaways, waiting anxiously while flanked by beauties (family? Fans?) It’s football as soap opera.

Live TV is never easy, says Laura Rutledge, a host on ESPN. The green room where she works is one long preparation and navigation assignment. The preparation artists have to know everyone in the room and to be nimble, given that the draft never follows the path the experts expect. For the opening round there were seventeen players in the room, plus family and friends. Rutledge had to be an observer of the chatter and emotion, gathering information to prompt interviews and gain insights. Because of the pace of the draft, Rutledge was likely to get maybe two usable questions on tape in a day.

All this goes on within the vast drone of American life: reels of commercials, news bulletins mostly football-related, public-service pitches, blurted reactions of people in school or team jerseys, and always the insistent hum of money.

Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens, it is announced, has signed the largest contract in American sports history: $250 million for five years, with $175 million of it guaranteed: he doesn’t even have to show up to be paid. A reminder that we’re still in the America of the gold rush and the oil boom.

Outside the afternoon crowd began to resemble a rock concert. There are headbands and music, drinking and perhaps drugs, and an overall swaying sense of event unity. Faces that say: I’m here at last among my people.

Onstage and in the rooms, the draft moves on downward toward last year’s top ranked teams: it’s the losers who lead the news today. All thirty-two teams have their say, then, with the second round, the roll call begins again.

The individual player entrances, the suits with ballcaps and ritual speeches have been abandoned for film clips and shorter waits for pondering decisions. The wait time between choices is cut to seven minutes. The individual presenters remain but the show gains pace.

There is the suggestion of gems hidden in the succeeding rounds. The last player chosen in the final round of last year’s draft ended up starting at quarterback in the NFC Championship game. Even in an atmosphere of extended practicality, there is room for the miraculous.

The COVID pandemic transformed the United States. It also transformed football’s audience: with the lockdowns and the discouraging of group gatherings, the hunger for human contact of any kind mushroomed among the closed-in population. The sight and noise of crowds, the experience of exceptional athletes in action, even the satisfaction of a good clean hit drew a television audience beyond anything else on the air. At the college level, the disruption of schedules and cancellation of games drew intensified notice to the state of the men playing the game. It was during the pandemic that the rules were relaxed allowing college players to earn money from the endorsement use of their names, images and likenesses, and that the transfer portal, permitting players to change schools without an eligibility penalty, was opened.

There were other pandemic-related changes: players whose teams had games cut or cancelled were granted additional eligibility, so that some players ended up playing as much as five years of college football. All this, taken together, was an impressive example of how much people missed football when so many other forms of public activity had been foreclosed. Football was mostly outdoors, it displayed physical excellence, released emotion and in the final score, presented a resolution. What more could a quarantined person ask?

Amid the growing heat of the transfer portal and NIL driven recruiting era, a pattern was beginning to emerge. While the initial attention seemed to go to players at the glamour positions—quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, the teams that built dominant and enduring success like Georgia and Alabama, devoted equal if not more attention to attracting and enrolling linemen. Players with blazing speed, and great hands couldn’t make all that much difference if they couldn’t get past the line of scrimmage. The demand shifted toward linemen: large yet mobile tackles, trap-running guards, edge rushers who could chase down a sprint-out quarterback became priorities. It intensified so quickly that by the start of the 2023 NFL draft, five of the ten most coveted players available in the transfer portal played the offensive or defensive line.

Somewhere, Doc Erskine, Vince Tringali and Pat Malley were saying “I told you so.”

You could mold linemen. They didn’t force you to commit to a system. They got injured-all players did-but theirs were the kind you could play through; you weren’t suddenly deprived of your ability to run or cut or lose your elusiveness. Their play might not get all that obvious attention, but that wasn’t all bad either. You didn’t hear all that much about prima-donna guards or tackles. But for people who studied the game, their value rose.

The use of the transfer portal by college players reached a new extreme in December of 2022 when the incoming coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes recommended it to his entire team. Deion Sanders, a former NFL cornerback of flair and flash that rivalled his considerable skills, had been hired away from Jackson State, a Historically Black College where, in his first coaching job, Sanders had racked up a 27-6 record. Brought in to revive Colorado football, which had just come off a 1 and 11 season, Sanders was offered a free rein and seized it. At his first meeting, he announced his intentions to his new team:

“Go ahead and jump in that portal and do whatever you’re going to do. Because the more of you jump in, the more room you make”.

NCAA rules limit Division I schools to a total of eighty-five football scholarships. Each Buffaloes player who transferred out created a scholarship spot for another player to transfer in. This was promising to be a roster flip rivalling what Sonny Dykes had done at Texas Christian, which had advanced TCU to the National Championship game.

The Colorado players got the message, especially when Sanders’ former players began transferring in from Jackson State. One of them Shedeur Sanders, Jackson State’s quarterback, who was Sanders’ son. Another player had been rated as the nation’s top recruit. Coach Pride, as Deion Sanders styled himself, advised his Colorado players to consult with their position coaches to find out where they stood, and to get information about entering the portal, but when players asked for game film to document their performance, it was denied. By the end of the following spring practice, according to The Athletic, fifty-one Buffaloes players had entered or said they planned to enter the portal.

Questioned about the drastic nature of the purge, coach Sanders pointed to the team’s previous rank of 127^th in the nation in points scored per game, and 131^st in points allowed.

For the players transferring in, Colorado offered in addition to playing in a Football Bowl Subdivision program, the possibility of a national spotlight and NIL endorsements. By the end of spring practice, the Buffaloes had accepted 29 transfers, with more surely to come.

It’s a high-risk, high-attention program with increasing demand for a limited pool of top-tier players. Sanders accepts this, insisting that it’s necessary for the team to move on from many of its existing members. “This process is gonna be quick, but we’re gonna get it done.” Then he adds; “It’s gonna be on me now.”

If Sanders achieves the quick turnaround at Colorado that Dykes worked at TCU the transfer trend could accelerate even further. Unlike pro football, where entering players sign a standard contract requiring three years’ service before a player is eligible for free agency, college players are free to transfer after freshman year. When it is pointed out that these are significant life decisions for young men just getting out of their teens, it’s also pointed out that if you’re old enough to play football-make the commitment, endure the sacrifices, take the hits-then you’re old enough to choose where to play. It’s another equivalent between football and war: old enough to fight, old enough to vote.

The college version of the three-year wait for free agency is the pro football ‘s rule that college players are not eligible for the NFL draft until the year their college class graduates. For some already-matured college stars this means a denial of earnings and a risk of career ending injury. Signing obvious stars directly out of high school has become acceptable in pro basketball- Kareem Abdul Jabar, LeBron James. But football careers are usually short, and the internal rewards of a college education are a wise alternative. Perhaps the NIL endorsements might offer a useful option, a way to make a less stark choice. A standout college player might choose to stay in college to enhance his NIL value as a starter rather than entering the NFL and serving a couple of years as a backup. It’s at least more of a choice than players had before,

The development of large, agile, super talented and super compensated college football players has expanded beyond the backfield to include the line. Georgia’s recent back-to-back national playoff champions included three linemen who weighed more than three hundred pounds and could meet the gold standard of sprinting forty yards in less than five seconds. One of them, Jalen Carter at 6-3. 310, a pass rusher who has also played tight end, fullback, and can even punt, was rated the top prospect in the upcoming NFL draft. He had the agility to pursue the new, more versatile pro and college quarterbacks. These strong but quick large linemen, if they stay healthy, will likely expand the category of college football millionaires.

The fact that most of these new, agile, multi-talented Black players are starring at state universities that until fairly recent times would not even have admitted them represents a challenge to some of the deepest beliefs of many people who live in those states and follow those schools. Your state university now annually contends for a national championship. It defeats, often obliterates other states’ universities. Its league, the South East Conference is the most respected in college football. Its performance sustains your interest for most of the year. It reflects well on where and how you live.

And yet: how does it feel when a young man whose people you once ignored or dismissed does what you aspired to do, does what you dreamt of doing since childhood better than you ever possibly could? When the school that is the proudest expression of your state’s identity celebrates that young man as a hero? How do you admire, cheer for and respect such a young man at one moment, and ignore or dismiss him the next? How, under such conditions does one be a Gator, Dawgs, Tide or other Southeast Conference fan and retain feelings of white superiority?

One way is to categorize such young men as hirelings, well-paid mercenaries who will play for your school this year and. moving on to another school, maybe even play against you next year. Who will probably leave before graduating and move to the pros, which is probably what they intended all along. Another way is to reject the entire idea of university education and embrace the sub-world of conspiracy theories and bristling male-aggression symbols, insisting that that world is more genuine, more real.

But even deeper is the core realization that someone is doing what you dreamed of doing at the university you dreamed of attending, for the team that you often refer to as “We”. And that part of that We is no longer fully you. More significantly, how do you persuade your children, who want to play or even just follow football, that some people are inherently less than you?

It’s a challenge comparable to a change in or a loss of religious faith.

While elite college football players grapple with the choices presented by the NIL and the transfer portal, many players at the high school level are wondering if it is worth it to turn out for football at all. At Saratoga High, in the affluent foothills above Silicon Valley, whose football teams gave Ron Calcagno’s St. Francis Lancers all they could handle just a few seasons ago, a recent season ended when the final two game had to be cancelled due to poor player turnout.

Surely the pandemic was part of this, and the increasing concern over CTEs and other injuries, but Saratoga was not alone in its football decline. Across the country, with the notable exception of the South, schools that used to have kids lining up for football, are having to recruit students in order to have enough players to field a team. Or, in some seasons, reducing the program or abandoning football entirely. These are painful individual choices, affecting public schools more than private ones, which can have the effect of pinching off football in most places at its traditional source. Just fielding a team becomes an existential struggle.

While there is definitely a strong genetic bond among football players like the Mannings, Barry Sanders and his two sons, and Ed and Christian McCaffery, Oliver and Andrew Luck, there is a similarly strong bond among coaches. There are Jim and John Harbaugh, sons of a coach who faced each other in the Super Bowl; Mike (Washington) and Kyle (San Francisco) Shanahan; Bill Belichick and his two assistant sons; Sean McVay of the Rams and his grandfather John, general manager of the five-time Super Bowl Champion Forty-Niners. There is something in the combination of demand and fulfillment, a challenge that speaks to certain parts of people that offsets the family absences and preoccupation of coaching, a means of connecting with the father who was away for half of every year. Even when you are dissuaded as Ron Calcagno attempted with his son, the allure is there, the promise of not just a job but a meaningful and replenishing life.

Like migrating birds, star or potential star football players head south during the winter, visiting the name-brand football schools- South Carolina, LSU, Auburn, Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, Tennessee- where they are considering enrolling. Some are high school standouts, usually accompanied by a parent or a coach, making their first long trip away from home. Others are college players who have entered the transfer portal. Like birds, they make multiple feeding stops, touring campus dorms and training rooms, being courted as they are observed, identified. classified sometimes in exotic new categories—edge rusher, wideout, shutdown corner—by coaches, athletic assistants, and occasionally tempted to roost by the lure of NIL bait offered by representatives of the school supporter collectives. Sometimes they gather in sponsored camps, showcase events where they display their skills before coaches and scouts. It’s a growing, undefined and largely unregulated process, where the rules are not yet clear and where some of the biggest ones---like eliminating the eligibility pause for transfers-can change in the course of a year.

The travelling players are ranked and rated by online publications, which cover their visits to competing campuses and their performance in the sponsored camps, analyzing the number of schools they are considering and the likelihood of their commitment to one school or another and how it reflects on their present or potential value. It is like reports on the futures market in commodities-grain, corn, hogs- studied by investors, in this case the alumni and fans who support the teams individually or through the collectives, and serves, in addition to the scouts and coaches, as a kind of off-season pastime. Like a hot-stove league in baseball.

Commitments by these young men are gathered as tokens, signs of how a school’s team will perform in the coming year, leading to evaluations and anticipated ranking before a single practice is held. It amounts to a highly competitive recruiting season that can determine the outcome of the official season that follows. And the schools that don’t plunge in seem destined to pay a price for their reservations.

At Stanford, new coach Troy Taylor is committed to maintaining the school’s combination of high athletic and academic standards. But Stanford has not excelled in football recently and has lost players to other schools through the transfer portal. Taylor believes that character, in the school’s values and program, in the quality of instruction the coaches provide, and in the long-term values of the students the university attracts, will prevail.

It’s a stance that some Stanford alumni and supporters dispute. Allen Thorpe, a former Stanford soccer player whose son is a Stanford football kicker, maintains that Stanford has the resources to compete in the current recruiting market on its own terms. Along with several other alums, Thorpe founded Lifetime Cardinal, a collective designed to provide players with not only financial, but also career and counseling support, in the form of alumni mentorship, internship and valuable employment connections. Lifetime Cardinal has reportedly already made payments to Stanford football players. The university, which recently settled a lawsuit by agreeing to renovate or rebuild its women’s sports facilities, is dealing with Lifetime Cardinal at a distance. When the collective scheduled on on-campus meeting, their representatives were denied use of the athletic department’s Andrew Luck Meeting room. They convened instead in a tailgating area outside Stanford Stadium.

Character, it seems, is still at issue. A recent incident, involving a top pro prospect from a championship college team, reported the player crashing his new SUV while driving recklessly, resulting in an accident that caused the death of two people. There are still life lessons to be learned from football that don’t begin and end with money.

For the overwhelming majority of young athletes, the idea of signing a sponsorship deal is a wishful fantasy. More than 95% of high school athletes will never sign such a deal. “And most deals,” says Ron Nocetti, executive director of the California Interscholastic Federation, “that do materialize won’t amount to more than free slices at the local pizza parlor.” Yet almost every player knows of these deals, and some of them will play with or against a player who may be in line for one. There will be a tendency to regard that player as a freak, or a target.

And for the star young player himself, there are intense new pressures. If he is from a poor family, as many of these players are, he may find himself that family’s breadwinner as well as the focus of its hopes, someone who cannot afford to get injured or make a behavioral mistake. Whatever he does, he is observed.

Most thoughtful football people are aware that the present Wild West bidding war for top talent cannot continue unregulated. If it does, some colleges, like some high schools will be forced to reduce football to a club level or to abandon it completely. California State Senator Nancy Skinner, who introduced the original NIL measure while in the California state assembly, says that the endorsements should be managed by the individual universities, establishing a department to do so, instead of leaving it up to third parties, that is, the collectives. There is also the issue of different states having differing NIL rules, and just how one state school can recruit players from another state, so that to harmonize these different state rules federal legislation of some kind will be required, a painstaking process involving both Congress and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This will take time and patience, unless as is often the case, the process is accelerated due to some sort of scandal.

There is also, along with the increased influence of money in college football a heightened exposure to gambling. Sports gambling is now legal in thirty states, and athletes, most of whom are competitive by nature. will find it increasingly tempting to capitalize on their inside knowledge of the game by betting on major national outcomes. It’s just a step to putting money down on the team one plays for, especially when there are star players getting rich simply by doing what you are doing. Even if sports betting is illegal in your home state, doesn’t your team travel to a state where you can give it a try? Some of the donor collectives have formed relationships with sports books, as have at least two universities. When millions are being taken out of this game, aren’t you entitled to at least a modest share? In April of 2023, the NFL indefinitely suspended five players for betting on NFL games, the largest group suspension in more than thirty years. Shortly after the suspensions, two of the payers were cut from their teams. This action was taken by a league that had made a formal agreement with gambling companies which allowed ads promoting gambling on the broadcasts of its games. The rules for players had not quite been relaxed to the level for owners.

When the University of Chicago, a onetime football power, abandoned the sport in the late nineteen thirties, the explanation was that football was draining finances and attention from the university’s essential mission of education. Among the suggested alternatives was the notion that if for prestige reasons, a university absolutely had to have a football presence, it could simply hire a coach and players to represent them, thereby preserving the independence between education and athletics. Though never considered seriously at the time, such a pay for play arrangement appears to be evolving in the current college climate of NIL endorsements and an open transfer portal.

In response to these changes, according to The New York Times, the NCAA is lobbying Congress against legislation that would ensure that players are recognized as employees of the schools they play for. This would, among other things, counter the one-sided nature of the fan collective agreements, which allow the collectives to cancel their support at any time without advance notice. Since the only existing rules are set by individual states, with no real alignment in the way they operate. the players who provide the product are at present overmatched. Any overall solution will surely involve negotiating the existing differences over the extent of federal versus state authority.

The State of Oklahoma has already considered anti-regulatory legislation prohibiting an athletic association or conference from enforcing a contract term, standard or rule that prohibits an institution from participating in intercollegiate sports. Texas appears ready to enact similar legislation.

Rev John J. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, and Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame’s athletic director disagree with the athletes-as-employees approach. “Professionalizing teams,” they write in The New York Times, “treating athletes more as employees than as students and weakening the vital connection with the educational mission of their colleges will rob college athletics of its special character.

“Gradually, “they warn, “it will be seen as merely a version of the professional minor leagues.”

There is no easy fix for what has become an increasingly politically and financially loaded situation.

. In a March 2023 Congressional hearing, Representatives debated the prospect of federal regulation as opposed to turning the existing problems over to experienced people within college sports. Jason Stahl, founder of the newly formed College Football Players Association, said the NCAA wants to have it both ways: to have third parties, the collectives, effectively pay their labor while also controlling what those third parties are going to do. If they aggressively try to police the collectives, says Stahl, they are in danger of violating antitrust law; yet a hands-off attitude leaves players at the mercy of collectives or agents skimming unreasonable fees. While hoping for some sort of regulatory process where agents and attorneys are screened like the NFL’s Player Association, Stahl feels the congressmen and women haven’t the time or the interest to acquire an understanding of what is an increasingly complex situation.

The spring transfer portal is limited to a two-week period, Aprl15 to April 30. This coincides with the conclusion of college spring practice and the annual NFL draft, and is preceded by the most intense recruiting and bidding period in football. This is when the young players, sometimes accompanied by parents or coaches, are touring the interested campuses. Some of them are now represented by agencies, among them one devoted exclusively to quarterbacks.

According to Pete Nakos of On3, signing with an agency has become a growing trend in high school and college football. “Finding representation to monetize publicity rights and build out brands is now a must.”

Combined with the increasing scale of buy-outs of coaches’ contracts at elite football schools, this produces a kind of football spring feeding frenzy as intense in its way as the season itself, with teams, coaches, and players prospects examined and touted in the football business and among its fans. The leading online publication On3.com ranks the top forty-five college football recruits on a daily basis. The players, all with at least a four-star ranking, are listed by position, height, weight, current college commitment status, and potential NIL value. It’s as detailed as any report on the commodities futures market. An unrelenting daily appraisal.

In the first agreed- upon portal window which ran from early December 2022 to mid-January of 2023, more than 1,300 players from Football Bowl Subdivision schools-the top level of collegiate football competition-entered the transfer portal, an average of about ten players per FBS team.

Thanking all for the support.

-John van der Zee and Robert Carson

The 57^th Super Bowl, played on February 5, 2023, was, as anticipated, the most-watched television program of the year with a worldwide audience estimated at nearly 100 million.

The game, matching the two top-seeded teams, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, promised to be spectacular, and was. The lead changed hands several times, a halftime lead was reversed, and the final score came down to the last seconds. It also confirmed and dramatized football’s focus on a special kind of athlete: the multi-talented, nimble quarterback. Both teams featured quarterbacks who could throw short, throw long, pitch out, run inside or out, break tackles or break away. Both quarterbacks were, not incidentally, Black. Who they were and how they played epitomized a transformation in the game.

Because of the increased strength of defenses, attributable to the mounting size, strength and agility of players, it had become increasingly hard to score touchdowns. Long drives, stalled near the goal line, ended more and more often with field goals, often from record distances. Games were usually close, but overall scores declined. The arrival of the new quarterbacks, multi-talented, agile, overwhelmingly Black, and their style, changed that. Now, when a team got near the goal line, they were increasingly unpredictable: the quarterback could pass, pitch out, sweep or dive his way into the end zone. With such a range of choices, why settle for a field goal? It opened up the game to touchdowns again.

The two starting Super Bowl quarterbacks personified the transformation in the style and the finances of professional football. Both Patrick Mahomes of the Chiefs and Jalen Hurts of the Eagles had been born in Texas, where they had been multi-sport athletic prodigies. Mahomes, whose father was a major-league veteran pitcher, threw a no-hitter with sixteen strikeouts in his high school baseball senior year, while in football passing for fifty touchdowns and rushing for nearly a thousand yards. He was named the Maxpreps Male Athlete of the Year. At Texas Tech, he pursued both sports until his junior year, when he decided to concentrate on football and achieved his breakout season, leading the nation in yards per game, passing yards, total offense, and total touchdowns. In a loss to Oklahoma, Mahomes broke the NCAA record for total offense. This, it appeared, was the kind of player that pro football’s currently stifled offenses needed. Already targeted by pro teams, Mahomes decided to skip his senior year and enter the NFL draft, where the Chiefs claimed him in the first-round, trading up to get him.

Drafted by Kansas City in 2017, Mahomes became the Chiefs’ starting quarterback in 2018, when they traded Alex Smith. He quickly demonstrated what a multi-skilled quarterback could do for an offense, leading the Chiefs to the AFC Championship. The following season he took them to the Super Bowl, where the Chiefs found themselves down to the Forty-Niners, 20-10 with fewer than nine minutes remaining. In an epic comeback, Mahomes simply took over the game, passing long, passing short, running inside running outside, leading his team to three touchdowns to give the Chiefs their first Super Bowl win in fifty years. Mahomes was named the game’s most valuable player, the youngest quarterback to earn the award.

In 2020 Mahomes signed a contract extension covering ten years for $477 million, with potential bonuses raising the total to $503 million, the largest player contract in American sports history.

Jalen Hurts, also from Texas, the son of a football coach, was a power weightlifter as well as a star quarterback who in his high school career passed for 25 touchdowns and ran for 26. Rated a four-star prospect, Hurts was heavily recruited by several colleges but chose to enroll at Alabama, a consistent national championship contender. By his second game, as a freshman, Hurts became Alabama’s starting quarterback. For the season, in which Alabama won the SEC championship, Hurts set new school records for scoring and rushing by a quarterback. His team went 12-0 for the regular season but lost to Clemson in the National College Playoff.

Alabama had an exacting football program under Nick Saban, a driven coach, always highly rated, usually top-seeded at the start of each season. It is probably the only school where an 11-1 record during Hurts’ sophomore season could be considered something of a disappointment. But the one loss had been to Auburn, Alabama’s traditional home-state rival, and it stung.

Then, in the National College Championship game against Georgia, Alabama fell behind. 13-0 at halftime. Jalen Hurts found himself benched, replaced by another new, promising, multi-talented freshman quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa. The half-life of phenomenal quarterbacks at Alabama appeared to be both radiant and brief.

The following season, Hurts became Tagovailoa’s backup, leading Alabama to a comeback win against Georgia and a place in the National Playoff. He could compete for the starting job next year, but Tagovailoa was comparably talented as well as a year younger. In a preview of what would become the transfer portal, Hurts decided to transfer to Oklahoma, which he quarterbacked to a Big12 title and a spot in the Championship Playoff.

This was shortly before Oklahoma left the Big12 to join Alabama and Georgia in the more lucrative SEC.

Like Pat Mahomes, Jalen Hurts had become emblematic of his football time. He was drafted in the second round by the Philadelphia Eagles, where in his second season, following a change in head coaches, he was named the starting quarterback. Capitalizing on his mixed pass-run style, Hurts led the Eagles to the wild-card round of the playoffs. The next year, with Hurts at quarterback, Philadelphia went 13-1 in the regular season and met Kansas City in the Super Bowl.

Along with Mahomes, he was at the pinnacle of where football was now.

It could be said that if there is a counterpart to the achievement through valor of football it would be the combined pain and exultation of pregnancy and childbirth. There are the months of anticipation and preparation, physical transformation and sustained commitment, intensifying hope and dread leading to profound exertion and endurance, producing an exultation and resolution so intense that it eliminates memory of the pain of the process. A woman becomes willing to do it again. And just as there is a bond of experience among women who have borne children, there is one among men who have played football, at any level, a foundation for building understanding. A shared sense that life has been lived for a time, with utmost intensity.

In recent years, the transfer portal, especially for college quarterbacks, has become something of a turnstile. With the rise of the donor collectives and the increase of name-image-license endorsements, transfers of top-100-rated recruits have become common. According to a study by The Athletic, of the fifty top quarterbacks enrolled in NCAA Division I Subdivision Football programs between 2017 and 2020, seventy percent transferred schools during their time in college. And the traffic through the door is accelerating. Of 200 more recent prospects, among the 168 who had continued paying quarterback, 126, or seventy-five percent, had transferred.

Some of them had changed schools more than once. One scholarship quarterback had transferred three times following his original enrollment. Some players had become targets of a bidding war among the collectives. Others had lost starting jobs to younger players and decided to try their luck elsewhere. Still others had left because their coach had left. Whatever the reason, a top-50 quarterback who remained at his first-choice school for his entire college career was now an exception.

It is conceded that college football is, at some level, a business. The truth is that it is now an industry

Jake Haener, quarterback for Fresno State, was considering transferring back to the University of Washington, the school he had transferred from two years before. He’d been a backup there, and he’d wanted, needed to be a starter. Fresno had allowed him to become a good one, the team had been successful, and now his coach was moving on, to Washington. There were also family ties: his mother, a leading Bay Area television personality, was a Washington graduate who still had family there. After his previous transfer, under the old rules, Jake had to sit out a year before he could play at Fresno. Now he could play, and probably start, his first year back at Washington. Haener entered the transfer portal. Then there was another abrupt coaching change.

Jeff Tedford, who had developed NFL quarterbacks at Fresno State and Berkeley, was coming back to coach at Fresno State. He was the reason Haener had decided to transfer to Fresno in the first place. In one of the accelerating free-agent developments that are determining the course of college football, Haener called his departing Fresno coach and told him he would be staying.

Haener went on to have an outstanding season at Fresno State, which won the Mountain West Conference title and scored a landmark win over UCLA. He was chosen to play in the Senior Bowl, a post-season showcase for elite college players, and was named the game’s Most Valuable player.

Multiple transfers, especially among quarterbacks, were becoming more common. A top Texas University prospect transferred to Oklahoma to capitalize on his name, image and likeness opportunities; then, after just four months, he transferred back to Texas where the following season, he became the starting quarterback.

The circumstances of the game were changing faster than people could play and coach it.

Jaden Rashada had been targeted as a college quarterback prospect since he was a high school freshman. Playing at Liberty High in Brentwood in Northern California (There is another Brentwood in Los Angeles), and later at Pittsburg High, he had checked all the scouting boxes, arm strength, mobility, attitude, genetics (his father had played Division I football). With the dawn of the NIL and the transfer portal, Jaden became actively courted. Accompanied by his father, he began visiting potentially interested colleges: Arkansas, Florida, LSU, Miami, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas A&M. There were scholarship offers, then Jaden and his father retained a lawyer who specialized in NIL endorsement deals. They began fielding bids from donor collectives.

It’s possible for a school to be supported by more than one group of donors, and there is an inevitable degree of competition among some collectives. Also, the collectives are legally 501© 3 non-profit organizations, which makes donations tax-deductible. Together, these factors tend to push supporter donations up.

Jaden committed to a reported $9.5 million deal with Miami, after turning down a supposedly larger offer from Florida. At a gathering of Miami recruits, he was grilled and ragged on about the details of his deal. Jaden, having second thoughts after Miami’s football team got off to a poor start, decided to switch to Florida. He signed a contract with a donor collective that promised to pay him regular six-figure payments, providing he met certain obligations, among them regular Twitter and Instagram posts, fan engagement appearances, and autographing merchandise. The collective retained the right to terminate the agreement without penalty or obligation.

Amid rumors that donors had balked at paying the large amount specified in Jaden Rashada’s contract, Florida’s Gator Collective failed to make the first payment. Two days later the collective cancelled the contract.

Rashada had not yet enrolled at Florida. He returned to California. In a matter of months, he had been made and unmade a millionaire. Twice. He was nineteen years old.

For elite-level coaches, the combination of donor collectives, NIL endorsements, and the transfer portal have made their jobs much more lucrative - and more difficult, because coaches must now be constantly recruiting. “You’re in the middle of recruiting like you always were,” says Lane Kiffin of Ole Miss “and then you’re recruiting your kids once they go in the portal.

“The way they set it up, it’s pay for play, and how much money do kids get to go places. And, if I transfer and go there, how much am I gonna get versus how much if I stay?”

Under the new relaxed rules, coaches began changing schools almost as easily as players. Assistants and coordinators associated with successful programs moved up, moved on, moved out. Key players often followed them. Online services rated and evaluated individual coaches. Donor collectives offered them substantial salaries. It was not uncommon for celebrated head coaches to be paid more than the presidents of their universities. There was less of a stigma attached to changing jobs; in fact, some schools pointed with pride to their success in developing coaches, just as they had with players. It began to seem possible to transform a school’s football program within weeks.

The college football situation was changing so rapidly some people wondered how long it would last. A certain consolidation was beginning among the donor collectives; with less competition, the bidding war for key players and coaches would likely subside. There was also the prospect of some renewed form of regulation, either by the NCAA or state or federal bodies.

“I think it’s just gotten really complicated.” Lane Kiffin concluded. “It might be easier sometimes if you just don’t look at analytics and try to figure it all out and say, okay, that guy’s a good player. We’ll take him.”

20.

Among the casualties of the consolidation of college football is the Rose Bowl the oldest of the postseason games and the most storied, the place where Knute Rockne coached against Pop Warner, and where the best of the west coast teams squared off against the best of the Big Ten.

The Rose; like the other traditional bowls, has been incorporated into the college playoff system, where teams, mostly from the Southeastern Conference play in games most of whose naming rights have been sold to corporations. The regional pride beginning with family and team and extending outward to school and state, has been diluted.

In December of 2022 following a game against the Green Bay Packers in which he’d experienced reduced effectiveness after a hit, Tua Tagovailoa was placed in concussion protocol after reporting symptoms himself. Following his team’s string of eight straight wins, the Dolphins had lost four games in a row; in the fourth quarter of the game against the Packers, Tagovailoa had thrown interceptions on three straight possessions. Both medical and competitive concerns were subject to reappraisal The decision, barring some clearly disabling injury, was his. Should he keep playing this season? Should he keep playing at all?

It was what used to be called an existential decision. Physical risk is inherent in football: it is part of why we watch, young men risking impairment. even life for a chance at money, fame, shared achievement, a meaningful life. Football can be fatal, as is life. Is it the fact of that being played out before us, the tragic drama, the sense of memento mori, that so reaches out to us?

There are, in addition to the qualities of exultation and resolution no longer available from war, the more ordinary emotions increasingly denied men in daily life: aggression, competitiveness, a certain passion for experience still to be found in football. These can be shared both by the men who play the game and those who watch it. There is the anxiety before the opening kickoff, part fear, part ambition, that vanishes at the first hit, given or received; the discovery of a quality or skill in a teammate you didn’t really know or maybe even disliked; the permission to shout your feelings or weep. or employ them in the movement of your body; the strange, rare merging of individual and group fulfillment so contrary to the prevailing ethos of society. What other sport offers men the release of these emotions with such intensity?

On January 2. 2023, Damar Hamlin, a twenty-four-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, got up after making what seemed a routine tackle of a Cincinnati Bengals pass receiver, took two steps, then toppled backwards and lay motionless on the Bengals Stadium turf. Bills’ players immediately gathered around him and took a knee; as teammates waved for help, the Bills’ bench cleared and the entire squad joined them, kneeling and removing their helmets. As the Bills’ medical staff rushed onto the field, some of the Cincinnati players gathered with the Bills, forming a sheltering wall between Hamlin and the witnessing stadium crowd and a national television audience. This was Monday Night Football, the most-watched television program of the week, a game matching two rising teams, each with a shot at the league playoffs, which were to begin in a week and a half.

As an ambulance was driven onto the field, the players stood or knelt silent and traumatized. Some were weeping. Within the sheltering circle of players, Hamlin was being given CPR; his breathing was assisted with oxygen; a defibrillator was applied to his chest A young man, like them, an athlete in the late-season peak of condition was in a life-or-death situation. Emergency medical people placed him on a stretcher, loaded him into the ambulance, and he was driven off the field

On a sideline, the referees and opposing head coaches discussed how or whether to proceed. It was agreed that both teams would withdraw to their dressing rooms to discuss whether the game, of which less than five minutes had been played, should continue. Meanwhile, the crowd, the television audience, and football life, paused.

Hamlin was taken to University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where he was diagnosed as having suffered cardiac arrest. He was then placed in critical care at a cardiac unit. His breathing and heartbeat were reported as stabilized. With the paused game now postponed, his Bills teammates prepared to fly home, though a few chose to remain nearby in support. The shock of the injury and the frozen game magnified the continuing concerns about football: its violence, its impact on the present and future lives of players, its effect on the national character and psyche. Tua Tagliavoa’s case history was revisited. “We use these cliches,” Ryan Clark, a former player and current commentator, said on ESPN, “Going to war” “willing to die” “That’s all talk. It’s a game. A game! You never suit up and think you’re not going to make it home.” Parents, former players among them, vow to discourage their sons from playing football, yet NFL rosters are dotted with the sons of former players. Take, for example, the Mannings: grandpa Archie, Mississippi and New Orleans Saints, sons Peyton Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts and Eli, New York Giants, grandson-and current prime prospect Arch—all quarterbacks. Football’s promise of achievement through valor retains its hold upon us. Its audience is huge and growing. Its veterans age and remain bonded by their shared experience like the veterans of our wars. It’s the sport that, in many ways, defines us. At the end of 2022, eighty-two of the hundred most-watched programs on television were NFL games.

The public nature of Hamlin’s injury brought with it an expanded cultural consciousness. A Pittsburgh childcare support organization to which he contributed received donations mounting into the millions. And some fringe outlets tried to link Hamlin’s heart attack with the fact that he had received anti-COVID vaccinations. Football, at this level of attention, wasn’t just news; it made news.

On the same Monday of Hamlin’s injury, the Rose Bowl was played before a significantly diminished national audience. Though the game matched winners of Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences, Penn State and Utah, it lacked the impact of a national championship or the glamour of name-brand teams like USC, UCLA, Michigan and Ohio State. The national TV audience was down nearly forty percent from the previous year. Traditionally the biggest of the bowls, and usually the climax of the New Year’s Day schedule, the game was played on a Monday because New Years Day occurred on Sunday. While the viewership was less than half what the Rose Bowl had averaged over the previous ten years and had to compete with Monday Night Football, there was concern that this represented an overall change in demographics. And perhaps a foretaste of the future. College football’s most-watched game no longer dominated the national attention.

While Daran Hamlin fought to breathe without a tube, and gradually began to speak again, other NFL players began to prepare for another week of football, while facing the realities of their chosen line of work. In a series of interviews, The Athletic asked a number of them to describe their feelings.

“I’m sure every significant other player has said, ‘That could have been me,’ Harrison Philips, a former teammate of Hamlin’s, said.

“This time of year, it’s hard to walk,” Keith McGary of the Atlanta Falcons admitted. “No amount of ice can take away the toll that 18 weeks of absolute brutal constant physical pounding will take on your body.”

“Do I want to continue playing?” Kelvin Beachum of the Cardinals asked himself. “I want to continue playing but it’s Do you want to continue compartmentalizing everything that comes along with the game as well?”

The game and the pain, the attention and the money rumbled on.

The following Sunday, when the National Football League resumed its schedule, there had been a change. In the stadiums, which as usual were packed, the scoreboards honored Damar Hamlin: LOVE FOR 3 {his number}, a statement repeated on the dark jersey worn by each of the coaches. There was a pregame period of silence but when play began there was a more profound change. These were crucial end-of-season games where at least one team in almost every game had a playoff position at stake, and with it a chance, however long, at the NFL championship. The play was as intense as ever, but the tone of it had changed. There were, or at least there seemed to be fewer personal foul calls. No penalties for late hits on the quarterback or ball carriers heading out of bounds, no calls for unsportsmanlike conduct; no taunting or exaggerated demonstrations, no in-game beefs or exaggerated arguing over calls. The games were cleaner, not because of any announced league or team policy, but because of the individual shared sense of That could be me.

On Hamlin’s own team, the Buffalo Bills, players wore a patch, a circle with a 3 inside it, on the left side of their jerseys, over the heart. At the opening kickoff, there was the usual mix of fear and anxiety, ready to be transformed into adrenalin at the first hit. A Bills running back took the kickoff back 96 yards for a touchdown. It was Game On again.

In one of the greatest Cinderella stories of modern college football, Texas Christian had advanced to the College Football Championship Game by going in one season from a 5 and 7 mediocrity to a 13 and l juggernaut. TCU’s first-year coach, Sonny Dykes, was named the AP’s Coach of The Year.

The transformation had taken only fourteen months. Gary Patterson, the previous Texas Christian coach and something of a TCU institution had resigned the previous November after being told he was going to be let go at the end of the season. Dykes, a veteran coach with an up and down career (He had once gone 1 and 11 at UC Berkeley) had been hired away from TCU’s traditional rival, Southern Methodist.

Dykes built on Patterson’s strong recruiting by installing his version of the up-tempo Air Raid offense as well as, in a sign of the times, using the portal to recruit thirteen transfer players, among them more than half of his defense. Winning a number of close and come-from-behind games, TCU beat powerhouse teams like Texas and Oklahoma, and ended the regular season with a last-minute upset of Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl.

Unranked at the start of the season, TCU finished as Number 2, and was matched for the National Championship against Georgia, winner of the SEC title and last year’s defending national champions.

This time the Cinderella magic didn’t hold. Georgia, built mostly on player development, won in a lopsided blowout. Maybe it wasn’t that simple to create an overnight national champion with name-image-license prospects and open portal transfers.

Nine days after his on-field cardiac arrest, Damar Hamlin was released from the Buffalo hospital to which he had been transferred. He had become a national figure in a game which it was doubtful he could ever again play. A twenty-four-year-old man of good character, married with a family, there were certain opportunities open to him. He could become a coach, though there would be little or no money at the start; he could become a spokesman for the heart-care industry, advising us about prevention and care. He had lived through a shared national experience of a heart attack; would he now be tempted to live the rest of his life off of it?

There was no NFL protocol for treatment of his injury as there was for concussions. He had been diagnosed as having received a blow to the chest from making a tackle, a kind of freak accident. He could conceivably play again. His team was in the playoffs, a serious contender for a conference and Super Bowl championship, a title the Bills had not reached in decades. Most football careers were short; would this opportunity ever come again?

The team the Bills would face in the first round of the playoffs was to be the Miami Dolphins, quarterbacked, possibly, by Tua Tagovailoa.

Tagovailoa, on the league’s concussion protocol, did not play in the Dolphins’ last two games, one of which they lost, and one which they won without scoring a touchdown. “I think eight of our wins were as a result of him playing quarterback,” said Dolphins’ coach Mike McDaniel. “He himself is learning that he needs to listen to the advice of doctors and medical professionals.”

On January 15, 2023. the Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills met in the first or wild-card round of the NFL playoffs. Both teams were inspired-and haunted-by injured players. For the Bills, there was the absence of Damar Hamlin, rehabilitating at home after his release from the hospital a few days before but present in the Bills’ home stadium, in the form of jerseys, hats and signs with the message WE LOVE 3. For the Dolphins, there was the knowledge that they would be playing not only without their star quarterback, Tagovailoa, but without his backup, who had suffered an injury of his own. They were starting instead Skylar Thompson, a first- year pro who had been the second-to-last quarterback chosen in the previous draft.

The Bills, who entered the playoffs as the second-seed in their conference, were strongly favored. The Dolphins had squeaked in after losing two of their last three games. The teams had met twice during the regular season, with Miami winning, with Tagovailoa, the first game and losing the second, without him, on a last-minute field goal. The sun was out and the field was dry; the weather was cold but seemed mild following Buffalo’s recent near-disabling blizzard.

The Dolphins started the game inauspiciously, when three of Thompson’s first four passes were dropped by experienced receivers who were having problems adjusting to his moves, feints and velocity.

The Bills began by playing according to form. Josh Allen, a quarterback inclined to favor the big play, completed a 54-yard pass to the Miami 5-yard line, then hit for a touchdown on the next play. After the Bills intercepted a pass deep in Dolphins’ territory, Allen ran the ball in for a second touchdown. The Bills were not only good, they were lucky: a deflected Allen pass was still caught for a large gain. Buffalo was up 14-0 in what looked to be the start of a blowout. A field goal made it 17-0.

It had been six years since the Dolphins had made the playoffs, and a certain absence of sure-handedness was beginning to show. A lack of the poise of experience.

Then, gradually, things began to change. The Dolphin defense began assert itself by not giving up long or lucky Allen passes. And the Dolphins’ veteran receivers began holding onto their quarterback’s throws. Miami began forcing punts. And though the offense didn’t score touchdowns, they rang up three field goals to make it 17-9. Then, with 46 seconds left in the first half, Thompson connected with a pass to the Buffalo 11-yard line, then completed a short pass for a touchdown. Then, after the touchdown, the Dolphins chose to go for two extra points. Another Thompson pass tied the score, making it 17-17. It was a different game.

Seconds before halftime, the Bills’ Allen hit with a 33-yd pass to the Dolphins’ 45, then connected with another pass to the 20. With the clock running out, the Bills settled for a field goal to make the score 20-17. Seventeen points had been scored in the final fifteen seconds of the first half.

The playoffs are football minus pageantry, and are the better for it. Games are more player-centered. Win and you get to keep playing, like schoolyard basketball; lose and you go home, like being cut or getting injured. For one team in every game, the season ends. The play is focused, concentrated, rapt.

The Bills and Dolphins came back for the second half, aware of each other, the game, the shortness of seasons and most careers.

A few minutes into the second half, the Bills’ Allen, back to pass, is sacked, the ball comes out and the Dolphins run it in for a touchdown. They are ahead again 24-20. The Dolphins have a surprisingly strong defense. But the Bills, even without their safety, Damar Hamlin, have a more seasoned one. At the start of the fourth quarter, the Dolphins Thompson has a pass intercepted at the Dolphins’ own 35. The Bills’ Allen rushes the ball inside the 10-yard line, then tosses a short pass for a touchdown. The Bills regain the lead, 27-24.

A couple of series later, the Bills recover a fumble in Dolphins territory. Allen completes a pass to the 29, then another for a touchdown. It’s 34-24, Buffalo.

Near the end of the game, the Dolphins score again, on a one-yard run. Then, as time runs out, they miss on a long-shot field goal. The Bills win 34-31, and move on. The Dolphins go home.

The game was closer than most people expected. With a healthy Tagovailoa, it might have been different. Or, with a healthy Hamlin, more decisive. The teams will meet again, twice, next season, a football lifetime away. But meanwhile, for now, there is a resolution.

In the second round of the NFL playoffs, Cincinnati and Buffalo, the two teams whose game had been suspended due to Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, met to decide their division’s championship. The game was played in Buffalo, in a snowfall so thick the yard lines had to be repeatedly swept in order for them to be visible. The game was one-sided: Cincinnati took a two-touchdown lead early and held it throughout the game. Buffalo couldn’t come back, despite the presence of Damar Hamlin, seen through the snowfall in the press box, waving his arms in support of his teammates.

If war had ever stopped, wrote William James in The Moral Equivalent of War, “Where then would be the steeps of life? We should, in their [the militarists] view, have to re-invent it.” James, the philosopher who exulted in the impact of the 1906 earthquake, would have respected, and maybe even enjoyed the Dolphins versus the Bills.

19.

The proposed departure of UCLA for the Big Ten touched off a storm among members of the conference the school was leaving. The Pac-12 management and its member schools had been taken completely by surprise. The news blackout had included the Board of Regents, overseers of the University of California system, as well as the presidents of the other member universities, among them UCLA’s northern counterpart UC-Berkeley and California governor Gavin Newsom. Since the regents had ultimate authority over UCLA, a public university, they could conceivably veto the move, against which significant opposition had quickly arisen. A regents’ meeting called in response to the announcement, postponed a decision to allow for further study.

For weeks, the arguments volleyed back and forth. UCLA needed the money: its athletic programs were largely operating on funds borrowed from the university at large, funds the Big Ten contract could presumably cover. But what would this mean for UC Berkeley, which would lose not only a key traditional rival, but also access to the lucrative Los Angeles market? There was also the question of repeat cross-country travel and its effect on players’ academic performance. UCLA supporters, including former players, donors, and season ticket holders, did not seem particularly happy about the proposed move.

During the pandemic, when some colleges were cancelling their fall football seasons, others were continuing theirs, and some schools were doing both, cancelling then re-scheduling games. In 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association eliminated the one-year ineligibility requirement which had applied for decades to transferring college athletes. This transfer portal, as it became known, unlocked the gates for scores of college athletes to change schools without having to sit out for a year. Among them was Caleb Williams, starting quarterback at Oklahoma, who followed his coach to USC where he won the 2022 Heisman Trophy as the nation’s outstanding college football player. Combined with the name-image-likeness endorsement opening, this gave standout college players what amounts to free agency, the right to play wherever they choose without even the minimal service period standard in professional player contracts. It also had the effect of furthering the consolidation of college football, by concentrating even more top players among the few high-profile and therefore richer teams. Even when smaller schools had developed outstanding players, how could they afford to keep them?

In December of 2022, in what was clearly a financial decision, the University of California Board of Regents voted to allow UCLA to leave the Pac-12 conference and join the Big Ten. According to The New York Times the Big Ten television contract will bring UCLA $60 million to $70 million a year, almost double the amount paid under its existing Pac-12 contract. As a condition of the deal, UCLA will be required to contribute $2 million to $10 million annually to its sister school, UC Berkeley.

The decision was not universally welcomed. California State Senator Nancy Skinner, who had helped pass the NIL legislation allowing college athletes to gain endorsements, criticized the agreement. “The student part of student-athlete is the afterthought, “she told The San Francisco Chronicle, “This is basically just a very big business, where the students are the producer of the product,”

Along with other critics of the deal, she emphasized the demands on players of repeat road trips to eastern game sites as distant as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

UCLA will be required to spend as much as $12.2 million on additional counseling, nutritional and academic support as well as charter flights to ferry its athletes across the country more frequently.

It’s suggested that to balance these added demands of extended hours, longer travel, and prolonged absences, players will need to organize, retain representatives, learn life lessons of another sort. What this means to the continuing demands of school—study, concentration, extended intellectual effort—might end up shrinking the education the player was originally recruited for.

These are very big choices for young men and women in many cases not of voting age. And the sanctioning of Name Image Likeness deals is already expanding downward.

In December of 2022 Oregon became the nineteenth state to allow high school students to accept NIL license deals. There was, so far, no transfer portal associated with this decision, and certain restrictions were set in place: students can’t use school facilities or mention their school’s mascot; and they can’t promote alcohol, tobacco or nicotine products or political parties. Still, as a local training coach points out, when you’re adding business on top of family and team, “they’re playing for a whole different thing.” There is no provision limiting students from posting their endorsements on the internet.

Because of the established link between concussions and brain damage, including lawsuits and settlements on behalf of former players, rule changes and sideline protocols have been developed to address the prospect of damage at least during pro and college games. New rules and penalties were imposed on late or excessive hits, especially on quarterbacks. Injured players can now receive scans of various kinds in tents along the sidelines at pro and some college games. There are also explorations of equipment changes designed to cushion blows at the point of impact. One of these is a helmet with a kind of protective baffle, like a waffle, on the top, which would protect quarterbacks at least during practice, from full-force blows. Rubber helmets of some kind are another possibility. The most unusual is the Q-collar, developed by a neurosurgeon, a sort of scaled-down cervical collar worn about the neck that reduces blood flow, on the theory that blood retained in the cranium protects the brain from damage during a hit. Q-collars, approved for test use, are now being worn by some players during games. Whether these devices and techniques produce a significant reduction in CTEs remains to be seen. There is still the axiom attributed to Vince Lombardi, patron saint of hard-nosed coaches:

“Football is not a contact sport. Dancing is a contact sport; football is a collision sport.”

If a college football player can transfer schools without a penalty, what is to prevent him from transferring again if his situation with his new team doesn’t work out? He expected to start but finds himself a backup; he’s had a falling-out with the coach, or the coach himself has moved on; or maybe another school offers better endorsement prospects. What if an enterprising potential or star player, understanding that a career in football is most likely a limited one, chooses to become in essence a football nomad? And what does this mean to the value of completing a college education?

In a recent article in The Athletic, top football prospects from the nation’s high schools were gathered at a media camp, where they could meet with and discuss their plans with coaches from various universities. The possibilities from endorsements were a large, if background, presence. “The school introduces you to the people who are going to pay you,” one of the high school seniors said, explaining the role of the collectives. The sums suggested were in six, and sometimes seven figures though “if you’re not playing well, you don’t make any money.” Some elite players, The Athletic concluded, said they passed on big paydays to sign with the program that could develop them best. At least one player who had already committed to a school, was keeping one of the courting institutions in mind as a possible transfer fallback.

The combination of NIL endorsements and the open transfer portal reached a climax of a kind in September of 2022 when the University of Oregon Ducks, anticipating a breakout season, were blown out in their opening game by a clearly more talented Georgia team. Oregon’s first-year coach, recently arrived from Georgia, decided to upgrade his team’s prospects immediately, by flipping players who had already committed to other schools. Backed by the enthusiastic support of Oregon’s alumni, among them the management of Nike sportswear, representatives of Oregon’s collective approached and landed high school players who had previously committed to USC, Ohio State, LSU and Notre Dame. The prospective arrival of elite players so improved Oregon’s immediate performance that the Ducks won their next eight games and achieved national ranking. And the possibility of a championship game with the number-one ranked team, Georgia.

Despite all this, despite the brain-impaired former players, despite the revolving door of the transfer portal and the rampant greed of the NIL endorsements and bloated television contracts and the arbitrary and confusing game times that go with them, the game has not lost in overall popularity. In fact, it is gaining.

Surely it can be no mere coincidence that the burgeoning popularity of football, now the most-watched American form of entertainment, has occurred during a series of unpopular, inconclusive and overall unsatisfactory wars. Exultation and resolution, two vanished appeals of war, are still alive in football. Is it any wonder that despite the money, the injuries, the naked avarice of team and player relocations and endorsements, that we still watch?

On November 8, 2022, California voters overwhelmingly defeated proposition 27 which would have legalized online sports betting. Proposition 26, which would have expanded casino gambling to include sport betting, also lost. The initial margin for each proposition, was more than three million votes. The defeat of open-access sports gambling was decisive and, at the same time, temporary.

According to Joe Mathews, California editor of Zocalo Public Square, gambling interests spent more than $440 million in support of these two measures, more than double the previous record for spending on ballot campaigns. The bank for this money, Nevada’s legal gambling establishment and California’s Indian casinos, is essentially undiminished, replenished as it is by the losses of existing gamblers.

California’s initial measure permitting casinos on Indian tribal land did not prohibit individual tribes from acquiring additional land and opening a casino on it; nor did it prevent individual Indian groups from seeking tribal status in order to open a casino, with the result that the number of Indian casinos in the state is now more than eighty, most of which would have an interest in expanding their operation to include sports betting.

What this means for football and the men and teams that play it is easily imagined: the access to betting and gamblers previously enjoyed by owners would be equally available to players. It’s conceivable that a player with a mobile phone could make a bet on a game while he was playing in it.

The financial pressure to allow unrestricted sport betting has been defeated, for now. The desire to legalize it remains.

There is money pressure of another kind coming from endorsements, where millions have already been paid by corporate advertisers to athletes who are still in college including more than $1 million to an enterprising and presentable woman gymnast. About half of the reported $500 million in overall compensation has gone to college football players. What this can mean in terms of team values, particularly the separation of elite from ordinary players is also easily imagined. The player you are blocking for, at no financial gain, may be in the process of becoming a millionaire. The financial gap between elite teams and ordinary teams can be extended to within individual teams themselves. The incentive to play for oneself instead of for one’s team will be for some irresistible.

The possibilities here are also expandable online, through social media. Particularly outstanding or attractive athletes can make multiple endorsements, and some have even incorporated. The gap between sports and big-money capitalism grows ever smaller.

What this means for the individual player is a life lesson of another sort. For most players, it’s learning about the limits of your abilities, as affected by size, strength, speed, and energy. But that itself is knowledge one can draw upon for a lifetime.

For the star performer, there is the attention and vulnerability of early success. To be celebrated especially through social media for something that, with few exceptions you can do for only a limited time of your life. And to be targeted by people who see what you can do as a possible instrument of their own financial success. And to live off, or live with, what you’ve done as an athlete for the rest of your life.

Traditionally, donors to college sports programs sent their money to the schools’ athletic departments, which distributed money donated mostly in support of football and basketball, to include less popular sports from swimming to field hockey. Under the new system, supporters seeking more impact for their donated funds have formed collectives, groups tied to individual schools who pool their money to donate to individual players, bypassing the school athletic departments. This opened what is essentially a bidding war for top college football prospects, while cutting off funds for smaller, less popular and usually unprofitable sports. School athletic departments, cut off from their customary donor sources, have considered taking legal action against the collectives, but in the light of recent court decisions, have concluded that their cases would not hold up in court. “I think,” concludes one star player who has benefited substantially from this new reality, “that college football is going to turn into a mess.”

This all works to transform football, with its subordination of self and full acceptance of others, into the world that kids first come out for football to escape.

That escape route is itself, in some cases, closing. High schools across the country, especially public high schools, are finding it increasingly difficult to field football teams. Between 2008 and 2018, according to the National Sports and Society Survey, participation in tackle football among 6-to-12-year-olds fell by twenty per cent. Health concerns are part of this, but there are also schools which have had to reduce or abandon programs for kids who are willing to play, simply because of lack of money.

To help the struggling high school programs, a system of tax breaks offered to the recipients of windfall contracts and endorsements with money directed to the neediest programs could be a lifeline for beginning players and coaches. It would also help introduce the suddenly affluent players to some of the realities of handling money. Some affluent players surely are doing something like this on an individual basis, but a regular system would make giving back both regular and dependable, an extension of the benefits of team play. And give young players a chance for an experience that will last a lifetime.

But the endorsement and transfer gold rush has not been without its drawbacks. USC, which attracted more transfers and the possibility of more endorsements than other major universities, overloading with star players, who were overwhelmingly skill players, backs and ends, while skimping on the less well-known players that make a defense work. The result was that while USC had a team that could score on anybody, and by midseason had achieved a number four national ranking, they had a defense that couldn’t stop the elite teams the Trojans were now scheduling. Outscored in key games by top opponents, the Trojans dropped out of national contention and lost the title game of the league they were leaving, the Pac 12.

You couldn’t just cast a great team; you had to build it

When Tua Tagovailoa returned as the Miami Dolphins quarterback, the Dolphins started winning and continued to win week after week. Much of this turnaround was attributed to the influence of a new young and unusually understanding coach, Mike McDaniel. The non-authoritarian McDaniel made it his practice to improve his players rather than belittle them, studying game tape to find a player’s best plays, then coaching him up to play at that level consistently. That was the approach he used with Tagovailoa, who after his return became the NFL’s most efficient quarterback. By emphasizing the things his quarterback did well rather than dwelling on mistakes McDaniel helped Tagovailoa move on from what had started to be a bad season, and at the same time from his injuries. “Just reinforcing the good,” said Darrel Bevel, a McDaniel assistant, “and then, when things are not good, “we don’t need to beat ourselves up about it, but what can we learn from the situation to get better at it.”

By the tenth week of the season, after a game in which Tagovailoa led the Dolphins back by passing for four late touchdowns, the Dolphins were in first place in the East division of the American Football Conference.

As to his future, and the long-term risk of damage from CTE no one can know for sure. Tagovailoa is young, there may be breakthrough treatment, equipment or rule changes in the future that offer surer protection. Meanwhile balancing the danger against the promise of rewards, should he choose otherwise? The nation tried banning football, but it returned stronger than ever: no acceptable substitute could be found. Once again, there is William James: “So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, so long do we fail to recognize the full inwardness of the situation.”

Should we squander or compromise the moral equivalent we have?

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Also, UCLA and USC’s joining the Big Ten’s billion-dollar television contract may not be the unmixed annual financial windfall that was anticipated. UCLA plays its home football games in the Rose Bowl, for which it must pay a stiff annual fee and has difficulty selling out. Even with a winning team, ticket giveaways consistently number in the tens of thousands, and season ticket sales are reportedly declining. The projected loss of games with regional rivals, many of whose graduates settle in the Los Angeles area, could contribute to this: the presence of large numbers of opposing fans at games is a fact of life at most LA. sports events, and helps build a consistent draw, year by year, a kind of Pacific Coast émigré reunion. Even USC, which is private and located near the LA Coliseum and like UCLA is having a winning season, had been suffering from declining attendance before the school replaced its head coach. The Big Ten also has its glamour teams like Michigan and Ohio State, along with other teams whose allure and local fan base will be considerably smaller. The appeal of making a trip to see a team from your home state play USC or UCLA at least once each season is more realistic for natives of Oregon, Washington or Arizona than for most people from the Midwest.

Although Ron Calcagno is not a Silicon Valley icon on the order of Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin, there are some interesting parallels. Beginning in1972 as head coach of what was essentially a startup, the merged St. Francis and Holy Cross high schools, he had his team in the Central Coast Championship playoffs within two years, where they remained contenders for the next twenty-two seasons. Though there was no Initial Public Offering there were eleven championships and, in place of a yacht a stadium named after him.

The differences are just as telling. Instead of retiring to a mansion or a foreign enclave, Ron Calcagno took a job with a baseball team scheduling public events and distributing free tickets to schoolchildren. He continued to attend football games in the stadium named for him, for which there was no formal ceremony, where he sat in the end zone seats and, as he says, “tried to keep my mouth shut.” If legacies are measured at all in terms of the breadth and depth of individual lives influenced, Ron Calcagno has to rank among the enduring Valley legends. What he built even helped put Silicon Valley money to an enduring purpose: the life-lesson education of young men. The blue-collar values abide.

The four tall, burly men stand in a cluster as the larger crowd circulates around them. There is an air of satisfaction about them, as if they’ve already found the people they came to this Reunion Party to see. Other men approach them, exchange greetings, move on; they remain sufficient unto themselves.

It has always been this way for these still-large men, the sons of other large men: longshoremen, warehousemen firemen, cops, since the days in Eureka Valley, and at Most Holy Redeemer School. Life was hard and it took sustained hard work to meet it. Not meeting it, you let yourself down; just as important, you let the men around you down, these men especially, the ones who knew you most.

Coach Tringali understood this. He had been a lineman himself, in the thick face to face and side by side of football, up against it every down, your work crucial and unknown except to the guy across from you and the ones next to you. Unrecognized until you screwed up, got caught for a penalty or called out before everybody watching game film. Then it was take down the big guy time, and any little guy or guy who just had a little guy problem could take a shot at you and for a moment get even. It was said in an old joke of the trade, that a man who was a fugitive from justice could hide away in an offensive line and not be found ever.

Tringali knew this, had gone unmentioned as players around him on USF’s unbeaten team, had been drafted by the pros, become all-pros some of them, city kids like him who had become national football figures. While he was what? A backup, a cutup, an occasional clown? Who knew the serious man he was inside? He knew, and he saw that the kids around him knew it too.

He began as an assistant, trading on his USF credentials, specializing in the line, taking the canters. guards and tackles aside while the backs and ends practiced handoffs and ran pass patterns.

This is where it all begins, he told his guys, as if confiding a secret, this is what it all comes down to, you and the guy across from you and the guy beside you. You win or lose right here. And you win by giving it all you have on every play in every drill at every practice.

Anything less and you’re letting everybody down, yourself included. Don’t do that. Don’t sell yourself short, don’t sell the guys around you short. They’ll be the first to know if you do.

The other guys, the ones who carried or threw or caught the ball, were lesser souls, boys while they were men, who had to prove it man to man on every play. The world might not know that, but they did. That was their inside knowledge and it made them stronger.

This was what he did as an assistant first to other coaches at other schools, and then as an assistant here at St. Ignatius. Some of them had first played for him then as freshmen or JV’s. What he told them had worked. Their teams had won but never dominated. The varsity had reached the championship game and lost it twice. The athletic director, a competitive man, had felt Tringali’s fire, and decided it was what was needed.

Tringali brought his core guys with him and demanded more of them than anyone. Yelled at them as they labored to budge the blocking sled on which he stood. All you’ve got on every drill, no holding back, anything less and when you need it, it won’t be there.

They were big young men. As he coached them they seemed even bigger. To opposing players, they seemed huge. And their backups offered no let-up, which produced the lopsided scores. A good school team had become a juggernaut.

As he understood then, they understood him, his hunger for recognition, and desire to be the ur-Lombardi. Let other people criticize or ridicule him, they were the ones who kept faith, who contributed money to the scholarships in his name and lobbied for him to be admitted to the prep Hall of Fame, which eventually he was. Part of him was in them now, brought back to St. Ignatius to watch them play St. Francis. Being here together fed those feelings. They criticized the present SI line, were Tringali-convinced that they could do better, at least for a play or two. These kids had things they’d never had: their own stadium, night games, lights. At a school whose present-day tuition their own parents couldn’t conceivably afford. Yet they were the ones who had built this. The ones who had been there, in the thick face to face and side by side where as he had told them, it all started.

Tua Tagovailoa stayed out of football for four weeks, during which the Miami Dolphins played three games and lost all three. He passed the new, ataxia-focused concussion protocols. The independent neurologist hired by the players union who had evaluated him previously had been dismissed. In his first game back, the Dolphins won as Tagovailoa threw for 26l yards and a touchdown. Football’s risks and football’s rewards remained in tension.

Doc Erskine had not only established a program at Riordan High School, but he had also put his stamp on it. From his first season, when he had upset Bellarmine to win the 1966 WCAL championship, he had put Riordan football in a new category. Instead of an apprentice team from a recently opened school, Riordan had arrived as contenders, someone other schools had to seriously prepare for, a school talented youngsters ought to consider. In this work, he was not alone.

He had hired as an assistant coach, Gil Haskell, who had played under Pat Malley at St. Ignatius when Doc first appeared on the scene, then for Vic Rowen in what was then a successful program at San Francisco State. (Bill Walsh once said that it was Rowen who created the vaunted West Coast offense). Haskell would later coach St. Ignatius, then go on to the college level, where he went to the Rose Bowl with USC. Eventually he moved to the NFL, where as a coordinator for the Packers and the Seahawks, he earned three Super Bowl rings.

Doc was always good at spotting talent.

The strange thing was that, for a cerebral coach, Doc promoted a visceral style of football. Robert Horace Erskine was what later would be called a nerdy kid in horn-rimmed glasses. Unathletic himself, he became a student of the game, all games. Born in Illinois, he gravitated to the South, where his first sports job was as a team trainer, hence the nickname “Doc’. Applying his gift for close observation, his sense of nuance, he became good at developing players first at the high school and then the college level. He coached, sometimes simultaneously, basketball, football and track. At Loyola University in New Orleans, he was named head basketball coach while he was still a student. There are people who are called students of certain games. Doc was a scholar, and not of just one game. At Jesuit High School in New Orleans, Erskine’s teams won four prep championships in football, plus five in basketball and four in track.

Loyola University hired him to coach football. After two seasons he moved to Oklahoma as an assistant coach where he became known as “the longest-traveling scout in the nation.” Neither a backslapper nor a networker, without wife or family, he became a kind of coaching itinerant, moving with the jobs and sometimes with the seasons. He worked as an assistant at Marquette, then served in Army Air Corps Intelligence during the war, after which he returned to Marquette.

When he turned up in San Francisco in the late fifties, he considered himself retired and was at first living in a motel. Hoping to get active in sports again, he looked around at local schools: Jesuit, all-boys St Ignatius was like home.

As a kind of football intellectual, Doc might have been expected to experiment with the new formations then entering the game---I-formation, split lines, run-and-shoot. Instead, he went the other way: put your best athletes on defense; run the ball, then run it again. Fundamentals beat flash. Exhaustively repeated drills limited mistakes—turnovers, penalties—and kept the ball out of opponents’ hands. It wasn’t spectacular football, but team achievement in what was after all, the ultimate team sport. Its reward the shared satisfaction of becoming good at something that is difficult to do well.

His personal style was understated, respectful. He was not a yeller. He never negated a player; at St. Ignatius, Tringali did that.

When something went wrong, a play or formation that simply wouldn’t work, Tringali’s solution was simple: “Let Doc fix it.”

He knew and could teach key players—centers, linebackers, cornerbacks, safeties-people who handled the ball- the crucial silent language of football: the hand signals and body language that signaled a change in blocking assignments or pass coverage, a hard count coming or a quick kick. He understood the importance of nuance in a game that can seem at first merely brutal.

He didn’t call plays; rather he trained quarterbacks to call their own. Then all his shrewd observational skills were combined in scouting opponents, sizing up weaknesses, preparing a game plan. When teams Doc coached played, they were ready.

He was not Pat Malley; he didn’t recruit promising athletes from among the student body. And he didn’t, like Vince Tringali, draft or browbeat boys into turning out. Instead, Doc worked with the young men at hand, studying individual players to see what they needed, then instructing them in the technique that made them more effective.
As a coach he was more of a teacher than a charismatic tribal chieftain.

He got results. In four seasons in the very competitive WCAL, Doc’s Riordan teams went 26-9.

But Doc, neither physically strong or athletic, was now old in a young man’s game. He had already retired once and lived alone with no family to look after him, He was diabetic. In 1970 he retired, this time for good.

“When I got the USC job,” Gil Haskell recalls, “I went to tell Doc. He was in the hospital.

He never came out.”

Doc Erskine died, at 74, in l978

The nomad coach had found a home. The field at Riordan High was named in his honor. As was a trophy awarded annually to the winner of the Riordan-St. Ignatius game.

—-

In August 2022, word arrived that the two most famous teams in West Coast college football were leaving the Pac-12 conference to join the Midwest-based Big Ten. In a move reflecting the increasing consolidation at the top of American economic life, USC and UCLA were joining a league that sprawled from Nebraska to New Jersey in order to become part of a reported 7.5-billion-dollar television broadcast package involving a consortium of three different networks expected to earn each school $100 million annually. Beginning in 2024, the two California schools would no longer be regularly competing against institutions from their own part of the country. The Pac-12, a 107-year-old conference of Pacific Cost teams had, in effect, been decapitated.

The two Los Angeles universities were dreamscape teams for high school players, the teams that formed part of your own ambition, the teams that top players from your own league went on to play for, that embodied the promise of athletic recognition. Of the 1962 St Ignatius National Number One team, no fewer than seven players were recruited by USC. Now The Trojans were just another part of a collection of distant powerhouses. Teams you could never realistically hope to see, much less play for. It got harder to imagine yourself playing big-time college football.

The absorption of the famous Southern California schools into a nationwide conference had been a countermove to match the growing wealth and power of the SEC, a collection of Southern tams like Alabama, Georgia and Florida that had recently added the universities of Oklahoma and Texas. The SEC had negotiated a television contract many times the size and reach of rival conferences, and teams in other parts of the country, including USC and UCLA felt they had to keep pace.

Unmentioned in this was the change in rules, known as the NIL, that allow college athletes to be paid for the use of their name, image or likeness in advertising or media promotion. USC and UCLA, both located in the national heart of film and television, including commercial production, offered a significant added attraction for both the Big Ten as well as for potential star players: at least one outstanding player, a recent USC transfer, has already contracted to appear in uniform, in an airline commercial.

At the start of the 2022 football season, according to Scott Ostler of The San Francisco Chronicle, the USC roster included thirty-three players who had transferred from other schools, including five of the eleven starters on offense, plus the quarterback, and the head coach. Some rival schools, according to The New York Times, view USC, “as some NIL Bogeyman, tempting their best players with sweet offers.”

This also raises the question of whether Traveler, the large white horse traditionally galloped around stadiums by a rider in a Trojan-warrior costume following a USC touchdown, will soon be pounding over the turf of Nebraska, Michigan and New Jersey.

The lure also applies to coaches. With the enormous payout for broadcast rights from the major television networks, schools in the prominent conferences like the Big Ten and the SEC can afford to hire away top coaches from less lucrative programs, offering enough money to offset even the appeal of building, at one school or university, a lifetime legacy.

It appears that one approach for college football teams to compete with the pros is to become them.

This growing inequality of football wealth and power ultimately threatens the future of the game itself. If football’s still growing popularity depends solely on the play of name-brand college teams and the pros, who was going to care about hometown high schools and community colleges that furnished the players and coaches?

With more wealth and attention going to star players and star coaches, what will happen to the simple sustaining pride of making the team? And football’s core promise of team play itself?

No wonder that at a time when football’s popularity and generation of income are at an all-time high, there are areas of the country where the high school game, which is its source, is on life support. A study by an association of state high schools concludes that interest in the sport at the high school level has declined throughout the United States. Coaches report that, outside of football-happy areas like the South, it’s harder getting kids to turn out. Some schools have had to discontinue football because of the lack of enough players.

With this, some significant life lessons are going unlearned. Maybe Ron
Calcagno’s observation that nobody ever went into coaching for the money no longer holds true.

The quarterback went down backwards with the ball still in his hands; he landed hard and didn’t get up, Players from both teams began dropping to one knee around him as referees tried to shoo them out of camera range. The crowd fell silent: this was Tua Tagovailoa’s second potentially concussive hit in less than a week. Four days earlier, in a game against the Buffalo Bills, the Miami Dolphins quarterback was led off the field following a hit, after he staggered and collapsed to his knees while trying to return to the huddle. He spent the rest of the first half in the locker room, but returned to play in the second half. Now the stadium crowd and a national Thursday Night Football audience watched for nearly ten shocked minutes before he was carried off on a gurney

The emotional power of the moment and its aftermath spread throughout the media, the team and league management and the players union. “Tua should probably never have been playing,” said Fox analyst and former linebacker Emmanuel Acho. “He displayed neurological trauma last week; we disregarded it, labeled it a ‘back injury’ and let him back in the game.”

Just days before, the NFL players union had begun an investigation into Tagovailoa’s previous hit, which led to an amendment in the league’s concussion protocols. Previously a player with “gross motor instability”, difficulty getting up or walking, could return to play if doctors decided there was an orthopedic reason for his unsteadiness. The amended protocol which took effect the following Sunday, prohibits a player returning to play if he shows ataxia “a term describing impaired balance or coordination caused by damage to the brain or nerves.”

Tua Tagovailoa did not travel with his team to the following Sunday’s game.

“This is not part of the deal that anyone signs up for,” said Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel “even though you know it’s a possibility.”

The conflict between what football demands of players and what it gives to them in return remains within the game itself. It is probably inextricable from it. Beyond the rule and equipment changes and the amended protocols, there is the risk and dare nature of football which is part of why we watch it. An appeal that is as old and visceral as the Iliad. As William James said of war “The horror makes the fascination…It is life in extremis.”

Is it then simply blood lust that has us watching football, that prevents us, despite the danger, from looking away? Or is it something more? Fuller? The knowledge that these young men, no matter how strong or fast or agile at this moment, will one day decline and die, and that it could begin at any moment, and that this is the stone truth that makes what we are watching so compelling? So fascinating to our glance at and absorbing of our attention? Is this not the tragic dark against which the physical light shines brightest?

In September of 2004, the De La Salle Spartans did something the team had not done in thirteen years: they lost a football game. The Spartans had gone north to Seattle to begin the season against another regional powerhouse, Bellevue, the defending three-time Washington State Champions. Using strong line play and a run-oriented attack, which in many ways emulated De La Salle’s, Bellevue dominated the clock and the game to win 39-20. The longest winning streak in high school football history---151 games---had come to an end. The De La Salle coach, Bob Ladouceur, who had had a heart attack during the streak, told his players that in some ways, the end of the streak had almost been a relief, as it would no longer hang over their heads. The streak’s ending was to be addressed like a lost game: you picked yourself up and went on to the next one.

The loss was national news. De La Salle’s sustained success had been sports’ longest-running suspense story, and it had transformed Northern California into something of a football hotspot. Scouts and coaches from schools as far away as Michigan and Alabama studied De La Salle game films and came to interview individual players. Players from team-first programs like Maurice Jones-Drew of De La Salle and Antioch’s Najay Harris became courted prospects, young men on the brink of transformed lives. Their options and choices were news and transformed their own and their families’ lives.

Ron Calcagno found himself still counseling young men, former and current St. Francis players, about college choices, being asked for letters of recommendation, how and where to make up grades or transfer, still coaching. He remained close to St. Francis, where he went to games in the stadium named after him.

“I sit in the end zone and try to keep my mouth shut.”

One of the former players he still counseled occasionally was his son Greg, his one-time scouting companion, and then quarterback at St. Francis and later at Santa Clara. Ron had discouraged Greg from coaching and partly due to Ron’s influence, he had graduated from Santa Clara then earned an MBA at San Jose State. He had entered the electronic payments processing business, where he had headed a startup, and become a V.P. at Payment One, a San Jose based payment services provider. But he remained interested in football.

He now had five children, and his current job required him to fly to New Jersey on an average of once a month. When the opportunity arose to make a career change that would allow him to return to St. Francis, he seized it. He became the school’s director of alumni relations, an essential part of which was raising money for help with financial aid for students and capital campaigns. He was also now the Lancers’ junior-varsity football coach.

The entry of another Calcagno into coaching is enough to make you wonder: if there is a football gene in the family DNA. If so, it’s some kind of mutation. Ron Calcagno, the original quarterback turned coach, had come to St. Ignatius to play basketball and been persuaded to try football by Pat Malley, while Ray Calcagno remembers his father attending just two of his nineteen high-school games, and those because they were championships, played on Thanksgiving morning, when George Calcagno didn’t have to work. It’s the work ethic that’s the true inheritance.

It’s a kind of bargain certain people make with themselves. to do a job better than it needs to be done. To own it, by being diligent, punctual, capable, reliable, by your own choice. Pride in craft is part of it, and teamwork, and respect for others starting with yourself. It’s a blue-collar ethic, and when applied to football, its riches can be internal and enduring.

It was a tough thing to teach, more effective through demonstration, in the way you conducted yourself.

It’s what got George Calcagno off to the produce market at 3:30 in the dark morning; what got

Ron across San Francisco on two and sometimes three buses to school and practice; what saw Ray through a two-county commute for a dozen years. It was the thing that people searched for in others and treasured once they found it. And tried to emulate.

For Greg Calcagno, it was dealing with St. Francis alumni, listening to them and understanding them in a way that would apply to team parents, a part of the job that had worn on his father Ron but came more easily to him, that combined with his football intelligence to continue what Ron Calcagno had built.

In 2013, when Greg Calcagno was offered the St. Francis head coaching job, his work as alumni director was a contributing factor: he would have instant parental support as well as continuing the school’s greatest sports legacy. Plus, he had been quarterback and captain on St. Francis first unbeaten team in 1982.

The family connections were profound and continuing. Greg’s wife Ann was a St. Francis alum. Even before Greg became the school’s alumni director, they had sent all five of their children to St. Francis. One son, just graduating, would be an assistant coach, another would be in charge of video; a Calcagno daughter would eventually oversee the Twitter feed. They were young shoots of their era, but with family and football roots.

After Ron Calcagno retired, St. Francis football had tailed off a bit. They won two Central Coast Section titles in the next three years, but over the next dozen years they had claimed only two division crowns, one of them a co-championship. The days of dominance had passed. When Nick Navarro, then head coach. left to move to Florida, Greg, as the JV coach and Alumni Director was both an obvious and appropriate successor.

Though there was no proclamation of an immediate return to the powerhouse teams of his father’s tenure, Greg Calcagno had intense, if quiet, goals of his own. And he had inherited some promising players, including a number of Samoan Americans, players he had already coached as JVs. The St. Francis Lancers scored their first win over Mitty in eight seasons, went 9-4 on the season and lost in the CCS Division II championship game. The Lancers were on their way back, but there was still one great challenge from the Ron Calcagno era that remained unmet.

Though De La Salle’s national unbeaten record had ended, another record in sone ways more impressive remained. The Spartans had not lost a regular season game to any Northern California team in thirty seasons. The last time St. Francis had beaten them was in 1982 under Ron. In September 2022, at the start of a pandemic-threatened season, St. Francis and De La Salle were scheduled to meet again, at Ron Calcagno Stadium. Expectations and emotions ran high, and the quality of the game disappointed no one. Villiami Teu, St, Francis’ breakout Samoan-American running back rushed for 187 yards. The lead changed hands several times. Then, with 16.7 seconds left on the clock, Nicholas Andreghetto, whose three brothers had also played for St. Francis, hauled in a sixteen-yard pass for the winning touchdown. St. Francis had beaten De La Salle, 31-27, whose 318-game regional winning streak had come to an end.

If Ron Calcagno was watching from the end zone, he wouldn’t have had to keep his mouth shut at all.

“It was a great day to be a Lancer,” Greg Calcagno observed. Or a Lancers coach.

Villiami Teu would, later that season rush for a school record 344 yards as St. Francis beat Serra for the WCAL title. He had, the previous season, been named Northern California Offensive Player of the Year,

. In a transformed atmosphere at St. Ignatius, Ray Calcagno was a link with an established tradition: a former star quarterback with the school’s most famous team, now a coach who returned to essences by teaching fundamental football. Kids came to SI wanting to play football again; it wasn’t all basketball and baseball once more. Eligibility was no longer a problem issue at SI now. Yet the improvement in operations came at a cost: the grueling commute between San Francisco and Mountain View, and the fact that Ray’s commitment to the kids who played under him came at the expense of time with his own three children. It became increasingly difficult to apply the focus that he believed was required by football.

At St. Francis, Ray’s older brother Ron Calcagno was also experiencing a downside, produced in part by the expanding affluence of the school’s supporting communities. As gratifying as it was to have a talent pool including more families who could easily afford private-school tuition, there were some new diplomatic niceties required along with it.

When the mother of one of Ron’s players told the coach that she had it on good authority that her son should be playing more, he asked her why she thought that. She told him that his personal trainer said so.

“Your son has a personal trainer?”

“Yes.” Ron asked her how much they paid him.

“Five hundred dollars a month.”

“You pay me five hundred dollar a month,” Ron couldn’t resist saying, “And I’ll tell your son he’s great too.”

He told the woman her son had two choices. “He can stay, or he can go.”

It was a sign in the changing nature of the Valley or of football, that Ron was not absolutely sure he wanted to continue to be part of.

The institution Ron had built at St. Francis was in better shape than ever. From 1991 to 1995, St. Francis won five straight CCS titles and established a second winning streak of fifteen straight playoff games. Steve DeMaestri, who had come to the school as Ron’s defensive coordinator, was now the school’s athletic director. And Mike Mitchell, a longtime assistant coach who shared Ron’s St. Ignatius history, was more than qualified to take over as head coach. In 1996, Ron announced his retirement. He was leaving football.

And he was re-entering baseball.

He had served twenty-four years in a remarkably high-stress profession and had produced twenty-three winning seasons.

“A friend of mine, Steve Schott, had bought the Oakland A’s, and he asked me to come and help him out. So, I did.”

Ron became the A’s director of community relations. “I worked with schools and kids, community programs. Knothole gang, got buses, food, drivers. I’d arrange players’ trips to hospitals, that kind of thing.

“They wanted tickets, and we gave tickets to the schools. Every time we caught a scalper, it seemed like he was trying to sell some of these donated tickets.”

At St. Francis, the stadium was named in honor of the man who’d built its football tradition. If there was a formal dedication, Ron doesn’t remember it. “I just went there for a game, and there was my name on it.”

For Ray Calcagno, his older brother’s leaving St. Francis was a watershed moment, a time to examine his own life and career. He had been making the two-county commute for twelve years. His oldest child was entering high school. And though the St. Francis coaching job had been filled by Mike Mitchell, Ron’s former defensive coordinator who’d put in his time and was a good coach, there was a head coaching job open at Mountain View High. Ray applied for it and got it.

“It was my first time not in a Catholic-school situation. I got a couple of former SI kids to come help coach for me. Plus, a former Mountain View coach who’d retired. We put together a first-year combination of players, helped establish a program, played hard.”

His teamster-like daily long haul was over.

In September 2021, football, in the form of the National Football League, did something the sport had never done before. It announced a partnership with professional gambling. DraftKings, a Boston-based operator of fantasy sports leagues and digital betting platforms, along with Ceasars Entertainment, Fan Duel and four other gambling ventures, would be allowed to advertise betting options on televised NFL games as well as on phones and in stadiums.

The television spots featured retired NFL stars as pitchmen. Odds were offered, bets could be made online or by phone. People could make bets during games, from their living rooms and bedrooms. Regulation of this $275 million estimated annual enterprise would be left up to the states. The League, Bloomberg News reported “had erased the line between sports and gambling.”

The relationship between pro football and gambling is long, deep and familial. Professional gamblers were among the NFL’s founding fathers. Art Rooney, whose family still owns the Pittsburgh Steelers, was famous for once winning $300,000 in two days at the racetrack, while Tim Mara, a bookmaker, paid $500 to buy the New York Giants. “They bought into teams for a song,” John Mara, Tim’s grandson, told The New York Times, “And came close to going broke week after week.” These were men who understood gambling and the potential influence it had on the conduct of sports. There had to be rules to protect the legitimacy of the games, though in practice there was one set of rules for the owners and another for the players.

In 1946, Merle Hapes, a fullback for the New York Giants, notified authorities that he and Frank Filchock, the Giants quarterback, had been offered $3,500 apiece to fix the title game with the Chicago Bears. Because he admitted he had been offered the bribe, Hapes was banned from the game while Filchock, who denied the offer, was permitted to play. The next year Hapes was banned from pro football indefinitely and never played in the NFL again.

Then, in 1963, the NFL suspended two of its star players, Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions for a year, after an investigation had revealed they had been betting on games, though mostly not games they played in. Both men returned to the game, had long careers and after an extended delay in both cases were admitted to the NFL Hall of Fame.

In 1999 Eddie De Bartolo Jr. owner of the San Francisco Forty-Niners was barred from active control of the team for a year after pleading guilty of failing to report a felony extortion attempt by a former Louisiana governor over the granting of a casino license. De Bartolo, who was later pardoned of the crime by Donald Trump, ceded control of the team to his sister who, along with her side of the family, controls it to this day.

Despite these and other instances, a certain distance had been maintained between the promotion of gambling and the playing of the games themselves. Outside odds makers offered tips, and player injuries were reported in advance of games, but with the League now partnering with professional gambling, what was to prevent players from crossing a line that the owners and the League had eradicated?

It soon became impossible to watch a pro football game without being presented with a gambling pitch. Along with the continuing incident of CTEs—brain injuries- both Hornung and Karras, were among players who filed lawsuits claiming brain damage-partnership with gambling represented the greatest risk to the nation’s most popular sport since its introduction,

It also compounded another serious national problem: addiction.

If pro football is addictive, it is a relatively mild form, a habit of rising in some instances to an obsession. Gambling is in another category.

“Old drunks and old dopers always find some woman to put up with them, “observed Kevin Mullen, a former San Francisco Deputy Chief of Police, “but old gamblers die alone.”

The hooked gambler is capable of letting it all go—the rent money, the milk money, the insurance and health care payments-- in service of his addiction. And now the temptation is presented in the midst of what was a consoling distraction-pro football. And it can be indulged online, without leaving your bedroom.

There are countering voices. In California, the issue of online gambling was put on the November ballot. Though the measure outlawing it was opposed by the moneybags of the online gambling industry, it was also opposed by a competing gambling power: the casinos operated by the state’s Native American tribes, who started running persuasive commercials supporting online banning as early as the state’s primary election. The tribes’ commercials accepted that there will always be gambling, but at least it might be kept from contaminating sports, while serving the purpose of supporting Native American health and education.

What this will mean in other states, and for football, remains to be seen. One thing everybody learns about gambling, however: individuals may win once in a while, but it’s the house that collects long-term.

The Santa Clara Valley and science share a history. In 1914, Father Jerome Ricard, a Jesuit priest and trained scientist teaching at what was then Santa Clara College, began formulating a theory based on his observations of coincidences between the appearance and position of sunspots and climatic conditions on the Pacific Coast.

Working with his telescope in an old garden at Mission Santa Clara, Father Ricard observed that sunspots, when they are directly opposite the earth, on the sun’s central meridian, affect climate conditions. Spots on the northern hemisphere of the sun cause storms or areas of low barometer. Spots on the sun’s southern hemisphere cause areas of high barometer. Since rain always follows in the wake of a low and precedes the advent of a high, Father Ricard could predict rain, which was crucial for the fruit growers of the Santa Clara Valley.

The theory applied at first only to the Pacific Coast. But Father Ricard’s predictions of weather were in advance of and more reliable than those of a barometer, and the Valley growers came to depend on them. He became known as the Padre of The Rains.

Fruit-growing became the Valley’s first dominant industry with its factories the long, half-open sheds used for cutting and drying apricots and plums. Steve Jobs, as a child in Mountain View, recalled the remnant of a plum orchard on a corner of his suburban neighborhood. As a young man, Jobs tried for a while to live on a fruit-based diet. He later located the headquarters of the company he founded, Apple, in Cupertino.

More than half a century later, following two great surrounding transformations, first into a constellation of suburban communities and then into the center of the worldwide digital revolution, Santa Clara, the oldest university in California, descended from one of the original Spanish missions, describes itself as The Jesuit School in Silicon Valley.

The Valley’s industries now included the home offices of some of the most influential companies on earth: Apple, Google, Cisco, Intel, and attracted employees from across the country and from distant continents. In a nod to the work’s required educational qualifications, these headquarters were usually referred to as “campuses”. You weren’t just going off to work; you were heading back to school, still learning.

The nature of the work, in many ways a continuation of graduate school, drew educated people from other cultures and other continents, looking for ways to find and connect with their new communities. And one of these ways was football.

As with science, there was football history in the Valley. L.T. “Buck” Shaw, a legendary coach at Santa Clara, became the head coach of the San Francisco Forty-Niners at the team’s founding. The team established a training facility in the town of Santa Clara, and in time moved its headquarters there. Eventually, unable to build a new stadium in San Francisco, the Forty-Niners built their own facility in the city of Santa Clara, which has proven to be a continuing cause of contention to some in the community

Part of this legacy, of San Francisco and Santa Clara, St. Ignatius and St. Francis, fruit and electronic and athletic cultivation, are the Calcagnos as both beneficiaries and contributors, offering through football, a form of community for the Valley’s increasingly diverse and influential output.

With the growing influx of a young, educated, aspirational population and their acculturating families, St. Francis drew an increasing number of large, intelligent football players, the well-nourished sons of engineers, venture capitalists, lawyers and entrepreneurs who knew the value of varsity football on a college entrance application. “We used to consider ourselves fortunate to have a two-hundred-pound lineman,” Ron Calcagno recalls. “Now two-twenty and up is common.”

In its sustained success, St. Francis football had, like other schools and college programs, mostly in the West, received a major assist from a steady and continuing influx of Samoan American players.

It’s a tradition dating back to the early 20^th century when a Hawaiian-based sugar company began employing Samoan men in its factory on the northern shore of Oahu. The Mormon church, which had been doing missionary work in American Samoa for decades and eventually built a temple serving its Pacific Island members near the Oahu town of Ti’ae, decided that its growing congregation of large, strong young men could use the bonding experience of athletic competition. To fill this need, following World War I, they introduced American football. The game flourished among the men, their sons and cousins, producing the kind of players who made powerful, agile linemen and came to form the backbone of Hawaiian high school teams. Some of these young players went on the play on mainland college teams, and at least one played for the Washington Redskins.
A number of them later returned to Oahu and to American Samoa, to coach. Football had become part of the family-oriented Samoan way of life.

The Samoan and later Tongan presence on mainland teams continued to grow, especially among colleges and universities in the Western states and among pro teams, eventually producing stars like Junior Seau of the Chargers and Jesse Sapolu of the Forty-Niners. Sapolu, owner of four Super Bowl rings, started a program, Men in The Trenches, a training camp dedicated to developing linemen among players as young as the junior high level. Players of Samoan ancestry came to be represented in American football beyond their proportion in the overall population, and the schools where they played, particularly Hawaiian and California high schools became college recruiting hotspots. One of these schools was St. Francis, which regularly sent outstanding players to the Polynesian Bowl, an annual all-star game held in Honolulu. Each season, the Lancers’ roster seemed to include more Samoan names, linemen at first, then receivers and running backs.

There are currently over 70 players in the NFL of Polynesian descent, and more than 200 play Division I NCAA football. The Samoan presence in football would advance to the point where in a 2021 NFL game, both starting quarterbacks, Marcus Mariota of the Raiders and the Miami Dolphins’ Tue Tagovailoa, were Samoans from Hawaii.

St. Francis’ strong history with Samoan players gave it a recruiting advantage among Samoan families, and the Lancers’ Samoan players were often relatives of former Lancers.

Asked who he would forecast to win an upcoming WCAL championship, a former St Ignatius player and coach said “St. Francis. They’ve got the Samoans.”

Working with this kind of material, in a run-and-defense driven system, Ron Calcagno’s St. Francis Lancers continued to produce remarkable seasons. In 1985, the Lancers came into their opening game carrying a 28-game winning streak and were shut out by Oak Grove in San Jose. Then they lost their next game. Ron made his corrections, and the Lancers won eleven of the next twelve games, and another CCS title.

In 1991, the Lancers won only two of their first seven games and then recovered to win yet another CCS title.

And from 1991 through 1995, St. Francis won five CCS championships in a row.

Impressive as this was, they were still upstaged, as two counties to the north, the De La Salle juggernaut rumbled on. The Spartans were in the process of compiling twelve straight undefeated seasons, won the nation’s first nationally televised high school game, and were the subject of an ESPN documentary. They had become something of a national team, playing games in distant cities, other states. They played in and won regional and national showdowns.

De La Salle had the advantage of certain disadvantages. They were an all-boys school, so there were no thinned down freshman classes but also fewer distractions. They were not surrounded by Silicon Valley’s sudden and enormous differences in wealth, but instead drew from a variety of communities, some of them troubled and occasionally desperate. And they didn’t have to play St. Francis or Bellarmine, who could work you over even if you beat them every year. Even the Streak had become in part a burden, a temptation to rely on reputation combined with the fear of being the team that broke a legacy. This all contributed to a certain single-mindedness when it came to football.

This meant, for St. Francis, despite its remarkable and sustained success, a certain lack of attention. Whatever notice the Lancers received could be qualified by the thought of yes, but what about De La Salle.? Look at what they are doing. How can what you’ve achieved compare with that? It was a limit, and a lingering challenge.

There were also, within the game itself, pressures of a more serious kind.

11.

The two baseball players stood in their opposing uniforms in the stiffened body language of argument as batting practice played out around them.

Then one player slapped the other.

There was a brief overall halt, the kind of pause that in baseball can signal a bench-clearing confrontation, and sometimes a brawl. Then one of the players, the one who’d been slapped, turned away. The moment passed but it was noticed. Later that day one of the players, the slapper, was suspended for several games.

The episode made national news; there were press conferences and public apologies. And it wasn’t even about baseball. It was a beef between two baseball players in the midst of baseball season about football.

Fantasy football rose out of a game developed by a few fans and supporters of the Oakland Raiders. Based on the performance of actual NFL players, it allowed fans to draft, trade, activate or bench players, assemble teams and compete in leagues often of friends or colleagues (the two quarreling baseball players were in a league whose commissioner was an outfielder for the Los Angeles Angels).

Starting in the early sixties, the idea spread slowly throughout the country, at schools and workplaces, achieving liftoff with the arrival of the internet. It was football without the hits or the sweat that you could play even at school or at work, where you were your own coach, scout, general manager, and owner.

With statistics available online, the number of fantasy players grew into the millions, with different types of leagues, overall rules, information sites sponsored by advertising, various competitions and gambling. You prospered or despaired, emotionally or sometimes financially, based on the fortunes of individual players. It fed and complemented the growing interest in football, especially the professional variety.

Though there was some interest in fantasy college football, the weight of attention and the statistical information on which the game was based, was with the pros. Some people felt that it harmed the game, by focusing attention on individual players instead of teams. And that it was another inducement to stay home instead of joining the local gathering at a high school game.

One thing was certain: it was another example of football’s powerful grip on the national imagination,

The yearning for football endured and grew, if sometimes in mutating forms.

Though Ron Calcagno’s St Francis teams continued to pile up winning seasons and

Central Coast Section championships, they were nevertheless overshadowed by the North Coast Section De La Salle Spartans, who were becoming a regional, statewide and eventual national phenomenon, compiling a winning streak that extended not only over multiple seasons, but decades. In the process, the Spartans took on, and defeated, nationally known powerhouses such as Southern California’s Mater Dei and Long Beach Poly, and in Honolulu, St. Louis High. When De La Salle approached the national record for consecutive wins at seventy-two, the Spartans received overage in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, CNN and ESPN.

Though the two teams didn’t meet every year, some Ron Calcagno Lancers teams were included in the Spartans’ streak, but the games were usually close and rarely blow-outs.

There was also a kindred relationship. Bob Ladouceur, De La Salle’s now legendary coach, had based his offense on the Veer, as Ron Calcagno had years earlier. There was also a similar emphasis on defense, running the ball, preparation and conditioning. “There were similarities between our system and De La Salle’s,” Ron recalls. “We knew what they were going to do. That doesn’t mean you could stop them.”

Both schools had become the kind of programs parents would drive their kids miles to, or occasionally even move homes to enter.

Though Ladouceur’s teams occasionally travelled to Southern California or Hawaii to play nationally ranked teams, long trips to distant locales were something Ron Calcagno preferred to avoid. He felt it put too much pressure on the kids.

As with Ladouceur’s Spartans, there was some resentment at St. Francis’ drawing talented players from the towns whose public schools they played, and usually beat, suspicions of recruiting, even secret scholarships, all of which were vehemently denied and never substantiated. If anything, it was pointed out in response, the public schools had an advantage in school busing, while St. Francis’ parents had to supply rides or carpool. Even kids’ access to cars was pretty much limited to licensed upper-division students.

St Francis players could be derided as privileged, coming from wealthy families or surrounded by state-of-the art training facilities, but all that disappeared, once the game started and players took or delivered their first hit.

“Teenagers’ lives are fraught with the pressures of adulthood and few of the corresponding freedoms,” Carolyn, the Silicon Valley teacher observes. “They are expected to succeed academically, balance their studies with often demanding extracurricular activities, know themselves well enough to make decisions that bear far-reaching consequences, prepare for their futures, and in many ways sustain work and contribute both money and labor to their households. At the same time, nearly every aspect of their lives is out of their control, among other things, whether or not their parents are together, the level of dysfunction in their households, where they will live, how much freedom they have to socialize. They must often depend on unreliable adults to get to school on time, eat properly and meet the demands of a world that is dictated by schedules, application deadlines, finicky systems and unexpected financial costs. Teenagers must live in a prolonged state of uncertainty that can be extremely unsettling.

Ron Calcagno understood this. “He put an emphasis on his players both in and out of season,” Ray Calcagno says, “in the classroom, what they did after school, and what they did later in their lives.” He saw them, recognized his players as individual people. “He tried to get every player on the team in for at least one play in every game.”

With the kind of scores the Lancers were piling up, this last was not difficult to do. St. Francis teams began compiling winning streaks not only during the regular season, but also in the playoffs. Ron Calcagno’s Lancer teams would make twenty-one Central Coast Section appearances in twenty-four years, including nineteen in a row.

They played in sixteen championship games and won eleven CCS titles. Their overall playoff record of fifty-three and ten included a win streak of fifteen in a row. Twice.

They also won twelve titles in the tough West Catholic Athletic League and finished second ten times. Winning grew into a habit, but it never became routine. The motivation was internal, generated within the person and by extension in the team,

“As we got onto the bus, “Eric Byrnes recalls, “assistant coach/bus driver Coach Adams would say ‘Silent bus ride gentlemen, think about your assignments, think about execution.’ Sure, my mind would drift but ultimately it would come back to the game, the play book and visualization of the different formations we would face throughout the game.

“It was a huge recharge opportunity.”

The growth of St. Francis into a football power meant, among other things, that there were now two perennial powers in the West Catholic Athletic League. Bellarmine remained so reliably potent year after year that it sometimes seemed the two strong, powerful prep schools were simply exchanging championships. This meant competition was extremely tough for other would-be contending teams like St. Ignatius. Although SI made the Section playoffs in one season, they had not won a WCAL football title since the school’s first year in the league.

At. St. Ignatius, the intensity Ray Calcagno brought to his style of coaching on top of the increasingly difficult commute, was wearing on him. He had been commuting for seven years. The traffic on the Peninsula between San Francisco and Mountain View grew heavier each year. It seemed there were more delays for wrecks, stalls or road repairs. The WCAL played mostly Friday night games and the logistics of getting to and from them could be horrendous. He and his wife Sharon now had two more kids he was leaving behind at home, a crucial part of their lives he was missing.

“I felt I couldn’t go on at that pace,” he admits. So, in 1986 he took a break from head-coaching at SI to concentrate on his family and Mountain View. If he missed the game, there was always Ron and St. Francis nearby.

The gray or balding men stand clustered on the terrace overlooking forest copses, vineyard rows, distant mountains. They meet here most years for a picnic to honor a man who was anything but a picnic, calling up yet again the stories: the woman yelling at the fence, the hulking man/boy lineman, the shadowy Doc. The coach they loved and hated, the man whose words they had summoned up when, as lawyers, coaches, teachers, vintners, a smattering of doctors-they needed them most. Words they used to scold themselves Drive. drive, drive. Push yourself. Nobody’s watching. Nobody cares, Take a drink of Tiger’s milk and get back in.

Bob Sarlatte, a former SI player, later a standup comic with more than twenty appearances on the Tonight Show, does a full-tilt impression of the coach he calls The Goon. The man whose voice they can still feel in aching knees, replaced hips and faltering brains. The Goon going full-goon on them. The long memories emerging as the short ones vanish. Whose name they honor in four St. Ignatius Vince Tringali scholarships.

James Dickey, Pulitzer poet, novelist and long-ago college running back, eulogized the other Vince, the Lombardi their Vince had modeled himself after, and nailed it.

I never played for you. You’d have thrown me off the team on my best day. No guts. Maybe not enough speed.

Yet running in my mind, I made it here with the others.

I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the lessons of football.

Yes, coach, it is true, love/ hate is stronger than love or hate.

In 1989 St. Ignatius initiated the most profound change in the school’s 134-year history by admitting women students, the first Jesuit high school in the California province to do so. The new program, which was phased in, starting with a freshman class including l75 girls, was the culmination of years of deliberation and negotiations. The phasing in of young women at SI would mean the inevitable phasing out of almost all of the city’s traditional Catholic girls’ high schools. It reflected the changing nature of the city, whose married population was increasingly moving to the suburbs. SI football teams now only rarely played local public high schools. Their oldest rival, Sacred Heart, had earlier gone co-ed, and played in the WCAL, as did Riordan. There were concerns about enrollment and transportation, much of which had to be met with car-pooling and charter bus service from San Mateo and Marin counties

In another significant change, St. Ignatius brought back Ray Calcagno for a second stint as head football coach. The Calcagno children were school-age now, away from home during the day. And he was not commuting alone: Joe Vollert, who had played under Ray and was now assisting him, and engaging him in commute conversations not confined to football. And St. Ignatius had won only one league game in the three years Ray was gone.

“Ray was tough to assistants,” Joe Vollert recalls, “demanding. But I learned from him about integrity. Keeping your word. Guys who played or coached for him all knew that. I wouldn’t trade anything for the stuff I learned from Ray. “In 1992-93, the first co-ed class were juniors and seniors. We were terrible, but great kids. Ray was serious, cerebral. We ran through a lot of assistant coaches.

“We were on the practice field when the earthquake hit in 1989. There had been a speaker at the school the day before, talking about Vietnam. I thought that, after that, on our commute, that Ray would open up about it. He never did.”

Now that SI was co-ed, the male classes were thinner. “There was a smaller number of males,” Ray recalls, “but we made it work.”

The change was inevitable, he says, reminding you that he has a daughter.