Michael Sam - Changing the Culture

Source: Sports On Earth

On Sunday, Missouri defensive lineman and AP SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam came out as gay to ESPN, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated. Before outing himself, Sam was projected as a mid-round draft pick, which would make him the first gay player in the NFL to be out while on an active roster.

It's too early to understand the impact his story will have on the game. In coming days, we will learn more about his background, his character and the creditable behavior of his teammates, who knew this secret for the whole of this last season and kept it for him. What it's not too early for yet is concern trolling, handwringing and dead-end reasoning.

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Thinking like this is patently silly, and nothing confirms that quite like the conversation we should have had all along about the incidents between Dolphins linemen Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. In that case, sources with the team said that coaches encouraged Incognito to "toughen up" Martin and bring "him into the fold." The result was a campaign of bullying, hazing and harassment against Martin that led to his speaking out, leaving the team and being accused of betraying the culture of the locker room and sabotaging the organic and sacrosanct structure of "the team."

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Which makes any arguments about the NFL needing to be "ready" for Michael Sam a non-starter. Football isn't crowdsourced. You can't paint the NFL as a strictly hierarchical organization, then do a 180º and say that change must come from the consent of the players and be attenuated according to their moods. (It's this same thinking that led Truman to integrate the armed forces: This is not a discussion, it's an order.) If you did, teams wouldn't work now, even if they were 100 percent heterosexual (and they very likely aren't).

That, really, is all the NFL team that drafts Michael Sam will need. An owner tells a GM, who tells a coach, who tells a team, "I don't care who you are, when you're here, you're all brothers. Check your religion or your case of the ickies at the door when you come in here or when someone sticks a camera in your face. Now we go to work." And if that's not enough, if you think your team is going to lose because there's a gay dude on it, your team is already too fundamentally crappy for him to make a difference. Two guys holding hands and arranging adjacent deck chairs aren't going to do anything about the iceberg clawing through the hull of that ship.