Internationalizing the game

In a quote that has been attributed to both famed Clemson coach Frank Howard and the legendary Bear Bryant -- and I believe under Alabama law that everything can be attributed to Bryant -- the sport of rowing can be dismissed “because no one in the south would want to play a sport where you got ahead by sitting down and going backwards.” But today, that’s exactly what I’m doing. No, not rowing, but sitting down and going backward on a Eurostar train from Paris to London, traveling faster than Deion Sanders ever did in full speed on a punt return. You may know Eurostar, if you haven’t traveled abroad, as the train on which Tom Cruise wreaks havoc on in the first “Mission Impossible” movie. I looked and didn’t see Tom anywhere near the station, but I heard Lindsay Lohan was in Paris, so it’s lucky that city is still standing -- she can do more damage than an unblocked safety blitz. I’m still standing after nearly three weeks in Europe, but I’m looking forward to getting back to the States. I wrote last week about how to institutionalize NFL games by playing abroad to help spread the game around the globe. Today, I have problems the game faces at home and abroad on my mind.

No Football in Europe and Not Enough in America

One of the most striking things about my train journeys through Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland and France is how ubiquitous soccer fields are and how, every Saturday or Sunday, games were taking place. It made me think back to my youth 25 or 30 years ago when a visitor to the U.S. might see the same number of football fields at local high schools or in small communities, used by Pop Warner or local semi-pro teams and any number of youth or school games. We don’t see those same numbers of fields and goal posts any more today. Insurance costs, smaller families, parental concerns about injury and suburbanization have all taken a toll on participation in football. It’s nearly tragic that we’re allowing a game that has shaped so much of our national character to be slowly melted down.

I’ve written many times that this is a problem the NFL must confront. The NCAA should be included as well because it also makes money from the sport of football. But unless young people are playing the game in large enough numbers, there will eventually be problems for the colleges and then the pros.

It’s time for the NFL to put some money toward keeping the game, fields, quality coaching and equipment available for young people. So far, the drop in the number of people playing (and in high schools offering) football has not become a crisis, but if the trend continues, it could be. It’s a case in which we’re going backward in numbers and resources, and the lords of football can’t wake up one day and wonder why a significant ethnic or regional group isn’t playing, the way Major League Baseball woke up and discovered that young African-American kids weren’t playing baseball. The best way to avoid a crisis is to prevent it early.

Actually there was Some Football

So while I didn’t see an American football game in Europe, the Czech clubs playing the game had just wrapped up their championship in Slavia Stadium in Prague, as nice a 21,000-seat facility as I have seen anywhere in the world. In Lausanne, Switzerland, where the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee are located, they proudly proclaim their own American football club among the sports offered in this beautiful city on the Lake Geneva shoreline. So the game is alive here, if not particularly hale or hearty.

How Do We Integrate Foreign Players into the NFL or College Programs?

But what do we, as Americans, do about these foreign players? How do we develop them and perhaps tap into this foreign talent pool for more talent or greater reach for the game? Teams have been asking about this for years, and answers have proven hard to find. But I represented one of the first NFL international practice squad players and one of the very first to make the full-pay roster of an NFL team. That program was discontinued, along with NFL Europe, and the league is left without any plan to bring players into the game from other countries.

My client, Michael Quarshie, a DT from Finland via Columbia University, had enough talent to credibly be on an NFL roster. But he was the exception rather than the rule, and it remains one of the great deficiencies of the NFL that it has never figured out how to integrate football talent from other countries. But Quarshie’s own example is illustrative on how this problem can be easily fixed. Michael came over as a 20-year-old freshman, already a star Finnish club player, fresh from his mandatory national military service. He had four years playing in an American college program, getting solid coaching and playing against well-coached players, even if it was at the old Division I-AA level. The notion of plopping a 24- or 25-year-old athlete in the NFL has been an abject failure. Absent some serious preparation in technique and experience, foreign players can’t hope to succeed.

So rather than supporting foreign programs and looking to poach that one rare foreign player, here is an area where the NFL and NCAA should combine to help national teams in Europe and other countries where the game is being played. The NFL should assist NCAA coaches in getting to young players and perhaps even go so far as to develop an international player-developmental scholarship access program. It’s ridiculous for NFL teams to try to find talent playing on the club level in Europe, but it makes all the sense in the world to help interested college-age players get to the U.S. to get an education, learn the game and develop over four years in college. Our universities remain the very best in the world, and they attract students from all over the globe. Why shouldn’t a few of them be football players?

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