Football

You won’t see LeBron James’ sons scoring touchdowns anytime soon. The Cleveland Cavaliers all-star said in a new interview that he neither lets them play football, nor hockey.

“We don’t want them to play in our household right now until they understand how physical and how demanding the game is. Then they can have their choice in high school, we’ll talk over it,” James reasoned to ESPN. “But right now there’s no need for it. There’s enough sports they can play. They play basketball, they play soccer, they play everything else but football and hockey.”

James explained that health concerns led to the ban. “It’s a safety thing,” he said. “As a parent you protect your kids as much as possible.” Football aside, both of his sons still play several sports: LeBron Jr., 10, concentrates mainly on basketball while Bryce Maximus, 7, favors soccer.

MORE: Parents Deeply Concerned About Injuries in Youth Sports, Survey Finds

He’s far from the first big name to speak out against youth football. President Barack Obama said last January that if he had a son, “I’d have to think long and hard” before letting him play. And Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg took an even firmer stand in a TIME op-ed this fall, saying he had forbidden his son from playing. But New Yorker columnist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell holds perhaps the most controversial position of all — that all college football should be banned.

James’ stance may come as a surprise to some fans. The two-time NBA champion has called football “his first love.” Along with being one of the most sought-after high school basketball recruits ever, he was also an all-state wide receiver at his high school in Ohio. But he dropped football in his junior year after breaking a wrist during the offseason.

Organizers have disqualified the country in response to its refusal

Morocco will not be hosting the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations after being removed by organizers due to the country’s Ebola fears.

Morocco had a deadline of Nov. 8 to confirm whether it would host the soccer tournament, and instead, the country asked for the tournament to be postponed. The Confederation of African Football (CAF), which organizes the event, refused Morocco’s request on Tuesday, and has insisted that the tournament will start on schedule, kicking off Jan. 17.

“Following the refusal of the Moroccan party, the Executive Committee has decided that the national team of Morocco is automatically disqualified and will not take part in the 30th edition of the Orange Africa Cup of Nations in 2015,” CAF wrote in a statement. A new host has not been identified, but CAF says it’s received “some applications” from other countries wanting to host the competition.

The move comes amid growing fear and stigma of the Ebola outbreak which is affecting Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Sierra Leone’s soccer team was hailed with chants of “Ebola, Ebola” while playing in games in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, and the team has been forced to stay in hotels with no other guests, the New York Times reports.

Ebola is only spread through direct contact with bodily fluids of an affected person, and individuals are not contagious until they start showing symptoms.

Nation had requested postponement over Ebola fears

The Confederation of African Football confirmed Tuesday that the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations tournament would not be held in Morocco, which refused to do so over Ebola fears, and that Morocco’s team would be disqualified.

Morocco had asked the confederation to consider postponing the game until health workers had managed to contain the spread of the virus across West Africa, which the World Health Organization reports has killed some 5,000 people so far. The request was denied, the BBC reports, which gave Morocco until Saturday to reconsider.

The confederation also announced that Morocco’s squad would be automatically barred from the games and that its executive committee had already been convened in Cairo to consider alternative sites for the games, scheduled to begin on Jan. 17 and end on Feb. 8.

Advocates look to NFL to address racial disparity in coaching ranks

It’s not often that England’s football clubs look across the Atlantic for answers, but a new report suggests doing just that. Ethnic Minorities and Coaching in Elite-Level Football in England: A Call to Action, launched on Nov. 10, highlights a glaring whiteness in the upper echelons of management at England’s 92 professional football clubs. There are just two black or mixed race managers in English football, Chris Powell at Huddersfield and Keith Curle at Carlisle, and although as many as 30% of players come from minority ethnic backgrounds, only 3.4% of top coaches—13 of the 552 individuals employed running first teams, developing young talent and in other, similarly key roles—are non-white. The report holds up the National Football League’s Rooney Rule as a possible way to redress than imbalance.

The procedure—nothing to do with Manchester United and England player Wayne Rooney, but named after Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers who helped to formulate the rule and get the NFL to adopt it—requires all NFL teams to interview at least one black or minority ethnic candidate for any head coach and general manager vacancy. In 2003 when the rule came into force, only 6% of NFL head coaches were of black or minority ethnic heritage. Within three years, the proportion had risen to 22%. This has not been the only bonus, says Piara Powar, executive director of Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), co-publisher of the report. “The research from the U.S. tells us that if you implement the Rooney Rule, which is in essence about putting capable and qualified people in front of the people doing the recruiting, that opens up the system even to capable white coaches who might be excluded.”

English football recruitment lacks transparency. Positions are rarely openly advertised and often work through existing contacts. Jason Roberts, a former elite footballer and founder of the Sports People’s Think Tank, joint publisher of the report with FARE, told the British Sunday newspaper, the Observer, that he believes this system allows racist assumptions to go unchallenged. “It starts when black players are characterized by their athletic ability. You will not hear a black player referred to in the same sentence as the words ‘intelligent’, or ‘technique’. It’s always power and pace. This narrative goes right the way through. We’ve seen it in the past – ‘black players are not good in the cold’, ‘not good at certain positions.’ You can see how the decision-makers look at it and say: ‘Well, he’s just not the type.’”

Other prominent non-white figures in English football have expressed skepticism that a Rooney Rule would work in the English context. The former England striker Les Ferdinand doubted that clubs would open up their interviewing process sufficiently. Carlisle’s Curle fears black candidates might be called in “just to tick a box.” Researchers, who spoke to Rooney and many other key figures in the NFL in compiling the report, did encounter similar worries in the U.S., says Powar, but overall the feedback was positive. “There are always suspicions that some people are being interviewed for the sake of it, that some franchises could do more, but in the end this one mechanism has led to a very clear change of the type we want to see here.”

FARE will be publishing more research later this year that surveys the situation across Europe. France and the Netherlands both do better than the U.K., says Powar, who has already seen some of the data. He argues that this represents “a bigger failure” by the English game because “English football is the wealthiest in the world; we have the biggest TV deals here; we have the most international league; the brands are bigger and they’re more well known across the rest of the world.”

Richard Bates of the anti-racism organization Kick It Out sees another problem in English football’s monotone appearance. There has been significant progress in combating racism on the playing field and in the stands, and in that respect “English football is certainly further ahead than a lot of countries on the Continent”. But, he says, the delay in mirroring the diversity of players and fans in football’s board rooms and back rooms risks undermining those advances. “The more diverse the game becomes off the pitch, the more aware people will become in terms of those who watch the game of the need to be fully inclusive.”

Bates argues that not only the football clubs but the governing bodies in English football, in particular the Football Association (FA), the Premier League and the Football League, need to spearhead the drive for better diversity. If so, these bodies should make a start by looking at themselves. Research undertaken for the report shows that a mere 1% of administrators in English football are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. In October 2013, Heather Rabbatts, simultaneously the only black and only female board member of the FA, made public a letter criticising her own organization after a commission it set up to look at ways of improving the performance of the England team in a spectacular own goal failed to include any black or female members.

England last lifted the World Cup in 1966. Rabbatts pointed out that Andros Townsend, a black player, had just helped England towards qualifying for the 2014 World Cup tournament in Brazil. “It is therefore particularly ironic that a commission to look at the national team has been formed with absolutely no representation from the black and ethnic minority communities, many of whom play such an important role at every level of our game.”

The Minnesota Vikings player pled no contest to charges of reckless assault Tuesday

Mark Edmundson teaches at the University of Virginia and is the author of Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game.

The peace and forgiveness taught in church are not values reflected on the field—but football shows the division of our ethical consciousness

When I played high school football, we knelt down before every contest. The coach asked God and the Lord Jesus Christ to help us play a fair game, not do significant bodily harm to the opposition and not to sustain serious injury ourselves. The coach asked that we might win the game if we were deserving. Then we said a prayer: usually it was the “Our Father.” Football, it seemed, was a Christian game.

Things haven’t changed all that much, at least from what I can tell. Pro and college teams still pray before games; coaches still invoke Jesus and God. When certain players hit the end zone, they hold a finger up in the air: I owe it all to you, Lord. When a man goes down and stays down, players from both squads get on their knees and pray for him. When I visited the University of Virginia football team this fall, matters were little different than they were forty years ago in my high school locker-room: the head coach invoked God’s blessing and led the team in prayer.

We’ve come to take this fusion of football and religion pretty much for granted. So too do we take the fusion of military values and football values as a matter of course. We’re not surprised when representatives from all four service branches bring the colors out before the game or when Navy jets stream over at half time. Nor are we much surprised when coaches talk about God and the Savior and when we see footage of players praying before games. It’s no surprise that Notre Dame, a school dedicated to religion, is also dedicated to football. No one seems perplexed that a mural depicting the savior with his arms raised is visible behind the stadium: Touchdown Jesus, he’s called.

Football is a game beloved by conservatives. Conservatives love football; conservatives love faith. What more is there to say?

Well, maybe there’s something. You don’t have to read the Gospels with exquisite care to see that the values espoused there are not quite football values. Jesus is many things to many people. But it would take a great deal of ingenuity to deny that he is a prophet of forgiveness—forgiveness and non-violence. When someone strikes you, what are you to do? On this Jesus is unequivocal. You must turn the other cheek. When someone sins against you, do you take revenge? No, not at all. Jesus tells us to forgive trespassers time after time. On the cross he looks out at his tormentors and speaks a simple and memorable sentence: Father forgive them, they know not what they do.

Jesus can get angry at times. When he sees the money changers operating in the temple, he picks up a whip and brandishes it at them. He picks up the whip. But he doesn’t hit anyone with it. And when he sees a fig tree that will not bear fruit, he blasts it. Why does he blast it? No one really knows. He blasts it because he does. But the temple whip flourishing and the fig tree blast are about the most violent things we see Jesus do. Mostly he is the advocate or peace, love and forgiveness.

It’s odd then, isn’t it, that football and faith, and the Christian faith in particular, should be so resolutely aligned in American culture? It never occurred to me when I was a young Medford Mustang, on my knees asking Jesus for a clean game and a victory, that Jesus might not have fully approved of the violence that was about to unfold on the field. For football is not about forgiving someone seven times seven; football is not about turning the other cheek. Football is about deploying violence: in football you blast your adversary with all the might you can muster.

And it’s odd then, isn’t it, that in America devout believers go off to church on Sunday to hear the gospel of the mild and forgiving savior, and then go home, turn on their TVs and watch young men try to bust one another’s spleens? What kind of country are we—what kind of culture are we—that can put together the Savior and the bone-crushing power sweep and not notice that there may be some contradictions involved?

But if you think a little more about it, you begin to see that football isn’t just a touch contradictory in itself: it reveals a rift in American faith. Because the majority of Americans are not just Christians per se: they are Judeo-Christians. That is, they belief that the Gospels are the word of God, but they believe that the Hebrew Bible is God’s word as well. And the Hebrew God, God the Father, whatever else you may say about him, is not a pacifist. He does not tell his followers to turn the other cheek. When Sodom and Gomorrah displease him, he destroys the cities nearly to the last. When the Amalekites infuriate him, he demands that Saul destroy them: man, woman and child. (And when Saul doesn’t, the Lord is enraged with him.) When pharaoh won’t let the chosen people go, the Lord kills the first born of every house and then drowns pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea.

The Lord God of hosts can be a loving god as well. He creates man and installs him in paradise. He preserves his people in the desert. He guides them in their times of tribulations. But pacifist, mild, readily forgiving? Yahweh is none of those things.

What football shows us Americans is how dramatically our ethical consciousness is divided. We can go to church and listen to the gospel of peace and forgiveness and then go home and watch the carnage on the field for a simple reason: that’s a tension we live with all the time. The religion that most of us follow allows us to be forgiving (when we wish to be) and retributive (when we wish to be). It really is up to us which way to go at any given moment. For we have sacred sanction for both paths. The Buddhists for instance do not worship any god who deploys violence: they follow the example of Gautama, the Buddha, who claimed to be nothing more than a mortal man. (Or they try.) When a Buddhist behaves violently (and plenty have and will) he has no religious sanction for it. For the Christian—or rather the Judeo-Christian—this is not the case.

There is a great deal to say about the ramifications of living in a country and a culture that allows so much leeway for ethical behavior. But for now, one might simply say that the game of football—which has become our national game, the mirror of our national identities—matters for a lot of reasons. One of them is the way it reveals some of the unspoken and unacknowledged dimensions of our lives to us, in compressed form. Though when that happens, we may of course not much like what it is we see.

It's unknown if Peterson will face further discipline from the Vikings or the NFL now that his case has been resolved

Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson pled no contest to one count of misdemeanor reckless assault on Tuesday, thus resolving his alleged child abuse case.

Per terms of the agreement between Peterson and the prosecution, the plea makes no reference to family violence or violence against a minor. Peterson must pay a $4,000 fine, will be placed on probation and will be ordered to perform 80 hours of community service.

Peterson does not have to serve jail time.

ProFootballTalk.com initially reported Tuesday morning that Peterson would agree to the deal the same day. It was reported Sunday that Peterson and his representatives were having discussions about a potential plea agreement and that one could be completed as soon as Tuesday.

Peterson was indicted by a grand jury in Texas in September on felony charges of reckless or negligent injury to a child after authorities said he hit his 4-year-old son with a switch. He faced up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted of the charges. A tentative trial date of Dec. 1 had been set, but the plea deal ends the legal process before any trial.

In the period following Peterson’s indictment, a newspaper report referenced alleged improprieties with his charity and other claims of illicit behavior, and prosecutors attempted to have Peterson arrested again after he admitted to smoking marijuana. Late last month, prosecutors attempted to have Judge Kelly Case recused from the case after alleging he was biased against them, though the request was denied.

While expressing remorse for his actions, Peterson maintained that he was merely disciplining his child and committed no crime. After his indictment, the Vikings deactivated Peterson for their Week 2 game against the New England Patriots before reinstating him the following week.

Pressure from the public, media and team and league sponsors, including Nike and Anheuser-Busch, led to Peterson being placed on the Commissioner’s Exempt list until his legal case was resolved, effectively placing him on paid leave.

Only NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has the authority to remove Peterson from the list. It’s unknown if Peterson will face further discipline from the Vikings or the NFL now that his case has been resolved. It was reported last month that Peterson could be suspended by the league even if found not guilty of the charges against him.

News of Peterson’s alleged child abuse came in the midst of controversy surrounding the NFL and the issue of domestic violence, initiated by the Ray Rice case. Earlier in the week in which Peterson was indicted, video showing Rice striking his then-fiancée was released, leading to Rice’s release from the Baltimore Ravens and his indefinite suspension from the NFL.

The incident led to renewed attention on the domestic violence case of Carolina Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy, who was also then placed on the Commissioner’s Exempt list, and on the NFL’s domestic violence policy in general.

This article originally appeared on SI.com

The dance moves aren't a touchdown, but his humility is

Headgear worn by kick returner Chris Davis

The helmet that Auburn kick returner Chris Davis wore during last year’s Iron Bowl sold on Sunday for more than $47,000.

The headgear, which was signed by Davis and earned $47,190 as part of an auction, went to an Auburn alum, ESPN reports.

Davis had returned a missed 57-yard field goal by the rival Alabama Crimson Tide for 109 yards, winning the game and sending the Tigers on to the championship.

[ESPN]