NFL

Christian McCaffrey is the only white running back I can think of. He's an inspiration to white aspiring running backs everywhere, proving they can take the last remaining thing black people could feel like was theirs: the running back position.

I'd like to write my thoughts on the conflict between "let them play" and how injuries threaten the joy of football.

Do they threaten the joy of football because they're just a downer? No, it's because franchise players vanish too quickly, meaning a team's fortune turns too quickly. While surprises and pivots are necessary facts of life, the NFL has a choice how much to let them creep in. There's a basic level you'll never avoid, but there are further levels you can prohibit if you change the rules and change the culture. It would be hard, but I would imagine it's possible.

You'd be removing the grisly nature of the sport. That nature probably can't coexist with rigorous injury prevention. So which fans should we accommodate: the fans who love the old-school brutality, or the fans who get invested in players? I dislike the obsession with players nowadays, partly because they come and go so fast, by injury or trade or culture cancellation. Yet a single player can change the fortune of a team, so intelligently rooting for the Packers means hoping for star draft picks, trying to get the ball to your playmakers, and monitoring player development from season to season. Obsession with individual players is a natural outgrowth of team fandom in a sport where one player can make a difference. Basketball is such a sport. I kind of wish football wasn't. So is that the solution? Find some way to devalue the player relative to the team? Then losing a player to injury, in a brutal sport, wouldn't shatter every hope for the team. Football would be more like old-fashioned war, where fate is determined by strategy and spirit (assuming equal numbers on either side) and by the average skill of each man, not by the presence of one or two ubermenschen. I reckon lots of war fiction is unrealistic in that way -- the Iliad is seen as a battle between Achilles and Hector, determined by their relative skill... Aragorn wielding the sword can single-handedly turn a battle... same with Jaime Lannister. In reality, I bet armies live and die by the average skill of a constituent, by their strategy, and by their spirit. The more I think about this, the more I wish football worked that way. Football is nothing like war anymore (if it ever was). It's far too glamorous for the individual ego. If there was a way to make football less dependent on individual players, I wouldn't care so much about individual players, meaning injuries, trades, retirement, and controversy wouldn't be so damned depressing and jarring. It would be a drop in the bucket, the bucket being a team guided by coaching and culture. The coach and staff would elevate in this paradigm; the star player would dim. I think that'd be great.