By Jason Avant,
Philadelphia Eagles
My wife and I have two young daughters, ages 1 and 3. Lately we’ve thought a lot about how we want to raise them and what it takes to be good parents. One thing is for sure: Once they get to a certain age, they’re going to want more freedom and more responsibility. But if they’re still under our roof, and if they haven’t shown themselves to be trustworthy, should we give them more authority and more freedom? We shouldn’t—not until they earn it.
The NFL is in that position right now. NFL players want freedom, want to do things on our own, want to be able to say: This is our locker room, we govern our own locker room. But have we proved that we’ve earned that?
The situation in Miami and other incidents around the league have compelled the NFL to enforce restrictions. Whatever the league adopts will be unpopular with a segment of players, to be sure. But I believe the NFL has no choice. Too many players have abused too many freedoms.
There were parts of the Wells report that shocked me, especially the language that was used openly among some of the guys. I’ve heard the ‘n’ word used among African Americans, and I even find that completely unacceptable. But I’ve never heard racial slurs used so openly and so freely. The joke about shooting black people was hard to digest, and I couldn’t believe the fines the Dolphins linemen handed out. Hazing, to some extent, happens everywhere. For example, with our team, rookies are in charge of buying chicken or barbeque before road trips. The total cost is something like $100.
Jason Avant. (Rich Kane/Icon SMI)
The details in the Wells report seem like an atypical locker room, and I want to stress that not all NFL players are like that, and not all players in the Miami locker room are either. The majority of us behave appropriately, and enjoy representing our teams and our communities in the right way. But leaguewide, I do think there needs to be some kind of intervention.
About a month ago I met with commissioner Roger Goodell in Philadelphia, and we talked about ideas like this. We discussed the NFL culture, why it is the way it is, why we need change, and perhaps most importantly, why that change might be so difficult.
You have to rewind to the root of the problem. It begins before players enter the league.
I began playing football my sophomore year of high school in Chicago. I got pretty good pretty quickly, and by senior year I was the top recruit in the state of Illinois. That’s when I noticed people started treating me differently. One day I was just a regular person. Now I was kind of given this position of power. Students, staff members and teachers looked at me in a different way. They kind of winked at my mistakes, instead of trying to correct me. That’s part of the problem: too much empowerment without proving we’ve earned it. A lot of players aren’t used to being held accountable.
The other part is of the problem is a lack of education about diversity and tolerance.
View Full Article