More obligatory Spirit and Loyalty and Enthusiasm:

No, I did not send my four-year old to school in Patriots gear for “Super Bowl Spirit Day” on Friday.

Earlier in the week, I’d gotten an email from the preschool that my kids — Leila, almost 5, and Mateo, almost 3 — have attended for the last couple of years. Wedged between a reminder to “bring your patience” to pick-up (bothersome snow in the parking lot) and a request for donations for cancer research was a New England Patriots logo with the following message:

“In honor of the Patriots’ Super Bowl appearance, send your child to school in his or her Patriots gear! If your child does not own Patriots gear,

In the Times, Emily Kelly tells us about her husband, a former football player who took a lot of blows to the head.

Professional football is a brutal sport, he knew that. But he loved it anyway. And he accepted the risks of bruises and broken bones. What he didn’t know was that along with a battered body can come a battered mind.

For decades, it was not well understood that football can permanently harm the brain. Otherwise, many parents would most likely not have signed their boys up to play. But this reality was obscured by the N.F.L.’s top medical experts, who for years had denied any link between the sport and long-term degenerative brain diseases like chronic

Fox News, on the other hand, considers all this fuss about concussions to be more “political correctness.” Ok…so conservatives just power through their brain damage? It’s only sissies who find CTE to be an obstacle to normal functioning?

Did you know who Ed Cunningham is? Probably not. Cunningham, a college football analyst for ESPN, was unknown to all but hardcore football fans. But by tying himself closely to a politically correct cause – in this case, resigning his position Wednesday, in a protest over concussions in football – he is guaranteed fawning media coverage.  The New York Times is leading the Cunningham canonization.

Right? I bet he drinks lattes, and thinks racism is bad. What a pussy.

With the new

It’s football season! Woo-hoo!

But one tv football commentator and former player has quit his commentator gig.

[Ed] Cunningham, 48, resigned from one of the top jobs in sports broadcasting because of his growing discomfort with the damage being inflicted on the players he was watching each week. The hits kept coming, right in front of him, until Cunningham said he could not, in good conscience, continue his supporting role in football’s multibillion-dollar apparatus.

“I take full ownership of my alignment with the sport,” he said. “I can just no longer be in that cheerleader’s spot.”

Football has seen high-profile N.F.L. players retire early, even pre-emptively, out of concern about their long-term health, with particular worry for the

This one made my eyes open wide in shock. A high school football game in Ohio between the Greenfield-McClain Tigers and the Hillsboro “Indians” (can we please retire all those names now?) – the cheerleaders for the not-“Indian” team made a banner saying

Hey Indians Get Ready for A Trail of TEARS Part 2

That’s as if the Greenfield-McClain Tigers were playing the Hillsboro “Jews” and the Tigers cheerleaders made a banner saying Hey Jews, get ready for a holocaust part 2. The Trail of Tears is what happened when Jackson kicked all the Native Americans out of desirable fertile land in the southeast and forced them to walk west until they got to a place nobody wanted. Many of … Read the rest