The ethical conundrum of watching football

I've been a Philadelphia Eagles fan for as long as I can remember, but over the past four or five years, as the NFL season approaches, I feel more and more ambivalent, although I always end up watching anyway.

To start with, modern NFL football is damn near unwatchable. Between injury timeouts, penalties, replay challenges, and increasingly long commercial breaks (the latter made possible by the NFL's apparently limitless popularity), any sense of flow or momentum is thoroughly stifled. Add to this the fact that football, more than any other sport, is already inherently slight on action compared to the time it takes to play the game, and you end up with a game that takes over three hours to play, with as little as 11 minutes of actual football action.

To me, though, that's just the start of the problem, because I think there's a real ethical dilemma in being a fan of the NFL. I'm aware that the players are well-compensated, and that nobody is forcing them to play football, but I have doubts about how seriously many of them take the health risks.

It's certainly true that awareness of the reality of concussions has increased over the past couple years, but I don't see anything that suggests more than a token acknowledgement of the issue. The tough-guy warrior mentality that the NFL works so hard to foster has been ingrained for decades. A player who doesn't try to play through an injury is considered soft by coaches and fans alike, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that right at this very moment, there are players with concussion symptoms who aren't reporting them for fear that it might put their jobs in jeopardy. Worse, that fear might not be irrational.

Just today, the Eagles lost their defensive centerpiece (Stewart Bradley) and their offensive centerpiece (Kevin Kolb) to concussions. When Bradley took a hit, tried to get up, and then collapsed like a sack of potatoes, I literally felt sick to my stomach. Between Kolb and Bradley today, Brian Westbrook's troubles last year, and the lingering feelings over the suicide of Andre Waters, I'm starting to wonder how much more I can take. With every incident, I feel a little more like I'm personally responsible, along with everybody else who pays lip service to concern for the health of the players and goes back to demanding faster action and bigger hits.

I'm trying not to compare this to the Roman gladiators, but... well, I'm having trouble coming up with another comparison with the appropriate gravity.