That guy is a beast. That guy is a monster.
As he scores his first touchdown of the day, lowering his head and smashing his body like a weapon through other men, a few million people love him. I blush a little because god, I do too. I give a little fist pump and in my head do a bit of quick math, and I feel a tiny, embarrassing dopamine spritz as I anticipate the 10.5 points soon to top off my weekly fantasy total.
At one point, decades ago, maybe this player’s dad took off his own shirt in the delivery room to embrace his fresh new child, skin to skin. His mom saw the little toddler-sized Jordans in a Foot Locker window and gasped and had to have them. And neither, in those tender moments, imagined that one day, their baby would be 215 pounds of human steel that men in suits on TV call “fast-twitch” and “explosive” and “aggressor” and “drunk driver.”
Everyone is someone’s baby.
It’s tempting to feel smart for drafting a guy other people felt gross about—hell, that I felt gross about. I know ball. I’m doing arbitrage. Off-the-field issues don’t change the fantasy point exchange rate. But, uh, yeah. I also feel like shit about it.
I don’t pretend to have any kind of moral math figured out with the NFL, except that my god, these guys are so good, and such athletic freaks, and the moments where they do that thing nobody’s ever seen before have their way of getting their hooks into you, waiting for the next one. The on-field dangers are just so apparent that nobody involved, player or fan, can pretend they don’t know what they’ve signed up for. The big, scary hit over the middle doesn’t make you stop watching. You just cover your mouth, go “Ohhhh” like the rest of the stadium, and then hope for the thumbs up from the cart—assurance that Everything Is Fine. You’ll get some retweets if you send out “Prayers up.”
I wonder about our growing appetite for this stuff. Our stomachs probably weren’t meant to digest the sight of a rippling Achilles, a hand contorting into the fencing position, a forearm bending the wrong way. We’re still dealing with the aftereffects of the Boomer ideal of football fandom who grew up admiring the carnage—who thinks football is actual war and its players are gladiators, because I saw Ronnie Lott lose a finger in a game and he kept playing, and Dick Butkus used to bite people at the bottom of the pile. And if you don’t like that, well, you’re just woke; football is for men, and Ken Stabler used to burn darts during games, and you want to ruin the game we grew up with, and I bet you don’t like black coffee either.
So, yeah, we hear a lot about “the kind of hit they’re trying to take out of the game.” But I don’t know, man. Once we’ve metabolized a player essentially dying on the field, what other kinds of violence have we given ourselves permission to abide?
I mean, of course it’s all kinds. America has made its peace with the spectacle of on-field violence in the NFL. Maybe it’s the same concession we’ve made collectively with the off-field stuff, too—the constant in the equation is The League Itself. I once asked a friend, a prominent NFL fantasy podcaster, if he’d still watch if the game were flag football, with all the same players. He would. I would too. It would feel morally less expensive. With this game, the price of admission is always whatever you can live with paying. No, I don’t believe being an NFL fan means selling your soul, or even being a hypocrite. But we should probably at least not ignore that it’s adjacent.
I’ve won lots of fantasy games off the exploits of Tyreek Hill, Jordan Addison, Kareem Hunt, Rashee Rice, Quinshon Judkins, Joe Mixon, Ray Rice, and probably dozens of others who we’ll never know about. I don’t think we have an adequate name for that intoxicating feeling of watching your guy cross the plane or make a big play, all the while knowing that he hurt someone—that he turned his military-grade musculature against a civilian woman, or against the small, soft body of a child, or mortally endangered a bunch of other people’s babies by staggering into a vehicle. I don’t think we’ve properly diagnosed or categorized that particular tension, despite millions of us feeling it simultaneously a few dozen times every week.
I think acknowledging it probably helps. Being an NFL fan is, for all but the most square-headed of its viewers, a negotiation we each manage in our own way. The best-marketed sports league in the world threads a needle between promoting its superstars and being better off with us knowing as little about their personal lives as possible. As Christopher Harris says, we’re probably best served “rooting for laundry” instead of the 20-somethings whose brains are still developing inside it.
Rashee Rice just returned to the NFL after his suspension, and fantasy players embraced him like an astronaut returning from space, not the jerk-off who pled guilty to two third-degree felonies. Two touchdowns! That guy’s a beast! Um.
In September, Hill gruesomely ruined his knee on TV against the Jets, and we all bore witness. The reductive tweeters instinctively went for the karmic retribution angle, and, yeah, I guess. But it shouldn’t be that easy, right? I didn’t feel good watching someone else in pain like that. It didn’t feel like a show where the bad guy finally gets eaten by the dogs he used to sic on people, did it?
But I can’t feign naïveté; I get the “couldn’t happen to a better guy” bit. The reflex rushed back when the Amazon Prime broadcast—for once in a sideline reporter’s goddamn life—actually dug into the charges against Hill.
That guy is a monster. Thirty isn’t too old for the kind of rehabilitation we’d prefer Hill to undergo. It probably is naïve to hope that’s coming.
We don’t need a verdict on when it’s OK to root for the downfall of these men, or what it should look like. We know the deal: this game will draw us in; its best will keep us there; its worst will dare us to stay. What happens to these guys between the lines is another negotiation—one that tests how we navigate the certainties of CTE. Rudi Johnson’s suicide hurt. Doug Martin’s death is a gut punch. Antonio Brown’s unraveling plays out in real time, slower, crueler.
Demaryius Thomas’s mom wept while touching the smiling face on her dead son’s new statue the Broncos unveiled last weekend. That was her baby.
My 6-year-old woke up early on Sunday and cuddled up with me on the couch in the dark while I watched the early London game. Watching Travis Etienne get thumped on a tackle, she whispered, astonished, “Oh, he pushed him down.”
“Yeah, baby. That’s just how they play this game.”
“Oh. Ouch.”
Follow Travis Souders on Bluesky at @travissouders.bsky.social.
