Why Are We Dehumanize Football?

Football is a sport that is ingrained into American society. Across the United States, football is more than just a game, it is a representation of its followers’ values. In recent years, football has become increasingly criticized. A majority of this criticism arises from the high risk of head injuries while playing football. However, there is another sect of the population that criticizes football at its foundation. They claim that the game creates a barbaric and dehumanizing spectacle of violence. Supporters of football, on the other hand, argue that, without football, the values that America holds dear will cease to exist. This conflict is prominent in the landscape of the sporting world in modern America. Regardless of one’s position in the argument, there are serious

America wondered if its favorite game had become too aggressive. A study at Duke University analyzed the number of arrests for violent offenses in the NFL versus an extrapolation of the American population. This source titled Criminal Violence of NFL Players Compared to the General Population, will be used as background information. Alfred Blumstein and Jeff Benedict collected information on 509 NFL players as a sample population. The researchers then separated the population into the two most prominent racial groups, whites and blacks. This is because the rates of arrests for each race vary significantly. Using the FBI’s data resources, Benedict and Blumstein compared the ratios of NFL player arrests in each racial group to the number of arrests per racial group in the entire United States. According to the study, “NFL rates [of violent crime] are less than half of the general population rates for both whites and blacks” (Blumstein and Benedict 14). Another background source, entitled “Does Playing Football Make You Violent? Examining The Evidence”, also concluded that “It’s a myth that NFL players in general are prone to criminality; their overall arrest rates are actually much