How much do you have to give up to play football? Way more than you think. Way more than they tell you.
Football has more analysts and talk shows now than ever before. Very few of them talk about what the game costs the men who play it.
Congress is about to decide how much the college game owes the men who play it. Before it does, I want you to look at something most fans rarely notice, if ever.
The average fan sees game day. They see the highlights and the headlines. They don’t see the grind or the time it takes. They don’t see the injuries that follow a player home.
The next time you watch a game and a player goes down with an injury, listen to the words. “He’s shaken up on the play.” “Slow to get up.” “Comes up a little gimpy.” “Not moving well.”
Then the camera cuts away. “We’ll step aside for a moment.” Next comes an upbeat commercial, sometimes a funny one. Sometimes it’s an insurance ad.
When the broadcast returns, occasionally we see the player walking off the field with assistance to a perfunctory handclap from the crowd. Then he’s forgotten by the next time the other team has the ball. Only his loved ones are still thinking about him. He’s been replaced.
The whole thing gets less than two minutes of coverage. The recovery can take months. Some players never recover.
If a starter gets hurt, we might hear a brief update later in the game. A backup or special teams player usually gets nothing, unless it’s a catastrophic injury.
If the player has to be carted off, they’ll show the replay a few times. Then his teammates gather around their fellow gladiator as the cart rolls toward the tunnel, with a close-up of his face on the way out. Then it’s back to the game. An update or two comes later.
In December 2024, Detroit Lions defensive back Khalil Dorsey collided with a teammate against the Buffalo Bills. His ankle bent in a way an ankle should never bend. He broke his tibia and fibula and needed emergency surgery. His coach and teammates left the sideline to be with him.
Those moments make the highlight shows. What happens to those men years later does not.
Injuries are an unavoidable part of this game. The networks and the leagues have determined that this part of the game gets limited coverage. Injuries are a footnote.
That choice makes sense for the people selling the product. Pain doesn’t sell beer or trucks. Fans tune in to forget about real life for three hours. An injured player reminds them that real life is on the field too. A quick cut to commercial keeps viewers comfortable and keeps the game moving.
But that choice has a cost. Viewers seem to believe an injury ends when they stop thinking about it. For the player, that’s just the start of his journey to healing, or to a full recovery he may never achieve.
I’m not asking for pity. I’m asking you to see what the broadcast won’t show you.
“Shaken up.” Nah. Hurt.
These injuries linger. Some last a lifetime. Nobody on the broadcast talks about the limp a player may carry for life. Nobody mentions that he may never run a charity 5K or even muster a light jog to stay in shape later, when he really needs to. Nobody talks about joints that stay weak long after his last game.
When we’re young, we don’t realize it either. We don’t know that hip will never be the same. We don’t know that knee will pop and turn arthritic early. We don’t know that shoulder will slip out of socket every now and then. It never healed right. The trainers told us we couldn’t make it any worse by playing on it. We believed them. Then came the pain medication and injections, and we played through it.
Not much has changed. Jalen Hurts is a Super Bowl MVP with an NFL medical staff around him. On a Saturday in London, doctors found a blood clot in his calf. On Sunday, he played all 62 snaps. Eight days later, they found clots in both of his lungs. His season is over. He’ll be on blood thinners for months. Jalen could have died. That’s the pro level, with a players’ union and a collective bargaining agreement behind him. College football is the NFL’s unofficial minor league, and the training room culture is the same. Now picture that room with a nineteen-year-old you’ve never heard of, and no union.
I know that room.
I sprained my ankle against Penn State in the 1991 Kickoff Classic at Giants Stadium. It was the first game of the season after we won the national championship, and I was off to a great start. I don’t remember how it happened. I remember feeling it and knowing it was bad. I remember jogging off the field in pain because I refused to be helped off. And I remember being furious that the Penn State players clapped for me as I headed to the sideline. I remember the trainers wrapping my ankle with what seemed like a whole roll of tape, and I still couldn’t go. It was the first time in my life I’d been too hurt to play. I missed the next two games and played the rest of the season and my college career on it. That ankle still gives me trouble to this day.
These injuries are so common in our sport that we don’t see them as physical trauma. We just call it football.
We play through the pain because we love the game. That’s what it takes to play. We don’t want anyone to see that we’re hurt. We want to be warriors. We want to sacrifice our bodies for the team, because that’s what we’ve always been taught to do. And we think we’ll eventually get better when we stop playing. But it only gets worse.
Kyle Efford knows. I wrote about him in my last piece, when the Georgia Tech captain medically retired at 22. What I didn’t write about was the shoulder. He played through the injury in 2024 and had surgery in the offseason. He hurt the same shoulder again earlier this season, missed two games, and came back to help beat Duke. Then he stopped. His statement said, “I reached a point where I have to start thinking about the life ahead of me.” Nobody carted him off. There was no replay. His body told him at 22 what mine has been telling me for 35 years.
The game is so brutal that players wear equipment resembling armor. We wear braces on our knees, shoulders, and elbows. All of it is there to prevent major injury. We still get hurt. And the damage lasts.
The damage isn’t only physical. Injuries are one of the most common paths into depression for athletes. We lose the sport, and that’s a loss of identity. Then we lose the body and the abilities that built the identity. The knee that can’t run anymore, the shoulder that can’t lift. Some of us try to hold on by staying in shape, and the body won’t let us. Then the anxiety and the depression set in. And for some, the CTE that can’t be diagnosed until after we die. It follows us into our marriages, our friendships, and our work. Our whole quality of life is shaped by injuries we got playing college football.
Plenty of fans check the injury report every week. Are they checking so they can send flowers and well wishes? Nope. They’re checking the betting line, the odds, their bets, and their fantasy football lineups. That’s the difference between caring about a player and caring about what he does for you.
Most fans aren’t that cold. Most feel something when a player goes down. As a counselor, I’d call what they feel sympathy, and I’d tell them it isn’t enough. Sympathy means feeling sorry for someone from your own point of view. Empathy means understanding his feelings as if they were your own. Sympathy often comes with unsolicited advice and judgment. Empathy sits with the pain and offers comfort.
The perfunctory handclap is what sympathy looks like. “Hope he’s okay” is what it sounds like. Both let you get back to the game.
When injuries get less than two minutes of coverage, sympathy is all most fans can offer. They never see enough to feel what the player feels. That gap has consequences, and they reach far beyond the stadium.
Look at the Protect College Sports Act. It’s a bill that would create one national rulebook for college sports. It lets players keep their NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals. It guarantees scholarships for ten years after a player’s eligibility ends. It requires Division I schools to cover medical costs for sports injuries while a player competes, and for five years after his last game. And it makes the cap on what schools can pay players permanent. The Senate passed it 77–22 in September. It now heads to the House.
Supporters point to the medical coverage as proof that the bill is about what’s good for the athlete. While it is more than I had, five years is not enough. I sprained my ankle 35 years ago, and it still bothers me. That hip, that knee, and that shoulder will be with a player for the rest of his life.
Then there’s the cap. The AFL-CIO and ten professional players’ unions say the bill sets it without any negotiation with the athletes themselves. Athletes.org and the NAACP oppose the bill too. So the people whose bodies carry the cost of the game would have the least say over what they’re paid for it.
The NCAA fought paying players in court for years, and it lost. Now it tells Congress that college sports are in chaos and need saving. In my opinion, that alleged chaos is a false narrative, and the narrative is an excuse. I’ve written about it before, so I’ll keep it short here. The cap is the point.
That’s what a lack of empathy looks like in policy. It feels generous to people who stopped thinking about the injury when the commercial ended. It feels very different to the man still living with it.
Fans matter in all of this. They buy the tickets and the merchandise. They watch the games. In the NFL, they make team ownership profitable. In college, they fill the stadiums and drive the TV deals that fund entire athletic departments.
If fans believed players deserved to be paid their worth, organizations would feel less inclined to play financial hardball with them. If fans felt what players feel, I believe a bill like this would be far less popular. Instead, players are framed as greedy and ungrateful.
These young men are putting their bodies in harm’s way, and we call it entertainment, so I’m happy college football and men’s basketball players are earning a living these days. They deserve it, and they’re obviously worth it. I hope they save most of it, because they’re going to need it.
You and I both know they wouldn’t pay these players if they didn’t have to. For decades they didn’t pay because they found a way not to. They could have figured this out long ago.
I’m mad at anybody upset about young men earning an honest living with their physical talents, hard work, and honed skills. For real. And if I’m really honest, what I feel is hurt and betrayal. I used to believe the fans actually cared about my teammates and me. I thought they wanted us to win. Apparently, only if our win is good for them. What happens to our bodies and our bank accounts after the game is our problem.
So here is my request. The next time a player goes down and the broadcast cuts to commercial, stay with him for a minute. Think about where he’ll be in five years. Then think about where he’ll be in 35.
