Football Needs a Lesson in Sportsmanship

This weekend saw a couple of football games which were of great interest to our part of the country. The Detroit Lions lost to the San Francisco 49ers, and the Michigan Wolverines lost to the Michigan State Spartans. In both games, incidents stand out which give us a light on the state of football in our minds. They also illuminate something vaguely sinister about our society.

Michigan State played a dirty game. The Spartans committed four personal fouls and two roughing the passer penalties, and that's before a non-call on a taunt by the officials on the team's last touchdown. The general reaction to the game? Something along the lines of, that's football. It happens. I don't make rules, call plays, or hand out punishment. In short, poor sportsmanship doesn't matter if I ain't a ref or rulemaker.

Lions coach Jim Schwartz and 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh got into some kind of shouting match after Sunday's game. The general reaction? Well, while it was more whiny than what was said about the UM/MSU game, seemed more based on the same kind of oh-well-it-happens-in-football as we saw with the collegians.

What both sets of reactions, or non-reactions if you will, ignore is that everyone involved in a sport ought to be concerned with being sportsmanlike. Brady Hoke, regardless of his stand as Michigan' coach, is a lamebrain to say that as a coach he is absolved of judgment on other matters relating to the game. David Molk, Michigan's center, was simply stupid to assert that it's all in the eye of the beholder. If that's the case, Mr. Molk, why have rules at all? If what constitutes roughing the passer is in the eyes of the one doing the roughing then why prohibit it in the first place? Coach Schwartz's response to his verbal joust was at least a bit more proper, yet even it lacked perspective. "It is what it is," Schwartz said Monday. "It happened. It was regrettable." Not even an I'm sorry? Please. It was regrettable...but apparently not all that much. He spoke as though he had no hand in it.

Perhaps it's all simple defense mechanisms of sort on a deep psychological plain. Perhaps they're just trying to forget. But even those attitudes beg the question of whether what happened in the games were right or wrong. Sports reflect society: when we refuse to call wrong things wrong in our recreation, especially when games like football are sold in part to teach manners and sportsmanship, we are a short step from refusing to call societal ills wrong on much the same grounds.

Football players refusing to condemn unsportsmanlike behavior is the single greatest disease within the sport these days. But then, society at large appears affected by the same malady.