Last fall, as the National Football League’s public relations woes were fully emerging into the public eye, Forbes released a Buzzfeed-esque list entitled “4 Ways Leaders Can Avoid Crises Of NFL Proportions.” Oh, but if only the league had actually taken the time to read that article themselves.
In the year since the story, those public relations disasters have continued – somehow managing to worsen – and that trend did not change this past weekend.
ESPN The Magazine’s outstanding profile on Chris Borland, a recently retired San Francisco 49er with a keen awareness of mental health issues, uncovered a disturbing fact about the league’s rookie symposium training.
Borland, while not naming any names, said that a former player advised that the rookies in the Class of 2014 “get (themselves) a fall guy” so that the players wouldn’t take the blame or go to jail if they ran into legal trouble. The article says that the former linebacker was appalled.
It didn’t take long, however, for someone to dig up the footage of that very symposium, uncovering that it was Hall of Fame wide receiver Cris Carter who gave the advice. The video also features Hall of Famer Warren Sapp who sat behind his colleague with a grin on his face during Carter’s passionate “fall guy” segment.
The best – worst? – part of all of this is that the 22-minute video – entitled “Rookies learn life lessons from Sapp and Carter” – was actually posted on the NFL’s official website. The league only took it down around 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon as the online uproar began.
I was halfway through these so-called “life-lessons” when the league rudely cut my access off, but I didn’t need any extra time to understand just what this video revealed.
The league is just as complicit as the grinning Sapp.
Instead of teaching rookies to be upstanding citizens, Carter, Sapp and the NFL made sure to encourage the very misbehavior that has gotten so many players in legal trouble.
“Y’all not gonna all do the right stuff so I gotta teach you how to get around all this stuff, too,” Carter said. “If you gonna have a crew, one of them fools gotta know he’s going to jail. We’ll get him out.”
Isn’t that a nice message?
Accountability? Never heard of it.
The difference with this recent NFL scandal compared to the plethora of others, however, is that it actually speaks to the culture that fosters the other crises.
The NFL has dealt with a large number of players who are in legal trouble recently, most damningly in the high profile domestic and child abuse cases. In addition, there have been at least 755 arrests and criminal charges against players since 2000.
When Hall of Famers teach rookies that they need to strategically avoid the law, that’s the exact mindset that impressionable players will latch onto and carry with them through their career. If the NFL is fine uploading this footage for the world to see, there’s clearly a cultural problem that the league best address sooner than later.
The league released a statement Sunday evening, saying that Carter’s comment was “unfortunate and inappropriate.” So why was the video ever posted? Why did Sapp and much of the rookie class just laugh and move on? These are questions that will never be answered by media postulation but likely speak to the deeply rooted cultural attitudes of the NFL.
Let’s quickly rewind to the first minutes of the now-deleted video. Sapp poetically lectured the rookies on the “brotherhood of men” that they were joining, explaining that they would get out exactly what they put in. He may have been talking about their football results, but I would argue that character follows the same logic.
It’s hard to take Sapp’s comments seriously when, moments later, he’s complicit in telling these players that they should do whatever it takes to put themselves above the law without taking any responsibility for their actions.
Carter, like the NFL, has already issued an apology, but this is more than just an isolated incident. He may regret what he said, but he certainly felt it to be true in 2014 and many, many years prior. That’s the NFL culture. That mindset is dangerous and – clearly – powerful and convincing.
Honestly, I feel some sympathy for the members of the NFL’s PR department – their jobs have been anything but easy in recent months; however, with the most recent crisis this weekend, it is painfully clear that the league need only look within itself to see that its legal troubles stem from an institutionalized lack of accountability.
