Law and Order: NFL

In the court of public opinion NFL players are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the media outlets who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.

The rash of player arrests in the NFL this season are threatening to become to pro football what steroids is to Major League Baseball. At least, that's what the media would have you think.

Ben pointed out that there have been 35 NFL player arrests this season. This statistic is often trotted out in articles written around the "Omigosh! Player arrests are out of control! The NFL is a lawless den of knaves! Stop them, Roger Goodell!" In my opinion, all the hype around player misdeeds is way overblown. Don't get me wrong, players who break the law should face the consequences, but we should take a closer look at the true gravity of the situation before we write the NFL off as a rogue's gallery.

There are 32 NFL teams, and each team is allowed 53 players during the regular season. This works out to 1,696 players. 35 arrests out of the total player universe works out to just 2% of the league. This number is actually less when you account for repeat offenders like Cincinnati's Chris Henry, who has been arrested four times in the last 13 months. If even two percent of the league sounds high, consider that this is only half the arrest rate of the overall population of the United States.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, there were an estimated 14,094,186 arrests (not including traffic offenses) in the United States in 2005. This works out to a rate of 4,761.6 arrests per 100,000 inhabitants, or 4.7% of the population. To continue the statistical onslaught, consider that nearly all NFL players are between the ages of 21 and 39. In 2005 there were 3,869,520 arrests of males in that age range, or 27% of all arrests. Keep in mind that 76.2% of all persons arrested in 2005 were male.

So what? The statistics prove what everyone knows: young males, of which NFL players are a subset, are the most oft-arrested group in America. If 2% of NFL players getting arrested in a season is considered a crisis situation by the Commissioner...there could be worse problems in life. So what am I saying- boys will be boys? Well, kind of.

This brings us back to the old saw that professional athletes in general, and football players in particular, should be held to a higher standard. The most oft-cited reason for these elevated expectations is that NFL players are paid much more than most people, and therefore ought to be held more accountable. Really? I dunno. NFL players make a lot of money, but their impact on the overall welfare of society is minimal. After all, NFL players aren't responsible for people's paychecks or retirement security. They don't send Americans off to war or perform open-heart surgery. There are wrongdoers in this world who make a great deal of money and pay a heavy price (see Skilling, Jeffrey) but the severity of society's scorn is based on the devastating effect of their acts on society itself. So the money is largely irrelevant outside of the larger concept of societal importance.

This brings us to the second argument for higher standards of conduct for NFL players. Pro athletes are not critical to society's survival but they are an important component of our collective self-esteem and the human hunger for myth. The Greeks had Zeus; we have Peyton Manning. It's all the same: society needs larger-than-life figures to inspire us and distract us from our troubles. NFL players are elevated to Olympus by a 24-hour media machine of NFL Network, ESPN, Madden NFL 2007, Fantasy Football, etc. Many of them have had their egoes stoked from the time they were teenagers by overzealous parents, scouts and the big-money College Football juggernaut. They're told that they're stars and given a staggering sum of money...is it any wonder that they sometimes think they're invincible?

It's a bit simplistic to regard the arrests in this year's NFL as some sort of shocking development. These are young men doing what many of their peers are doing...making mistakes and doing boneheaded things sometimes. The difference is that NFL players get fined and suspended while other young men end up on COPS for our entertainment. Society has the right to expect citizens to follow the rule of law and he justice system has the obligation to hold wrongdoers accountable. Zeus may have been beyond reproach, but NFL players are not. After all, they are only human.

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