There was a time when football was a game played by kids and young men. As a kid, my coach was a former college all-star. He never equated football with war. He taught that football was a competition. He expected us to have fun, work on technique, listen to him and try not to be afraid to make a block or a tackle. He insisted on one ethic: that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing as well you could.

He commanded respect because he knew the game and told us the truth. I only said one thing disrespectful to him. I regret it to this day. If I saw him today I would tell him I was sorry for being a punk to him, even though it was a long time ago. He probably would not even remember it. He respected the game, but more so he respected kids’ needs and their parents.

When coaches start teaching that football is a battle— a war— and you have to play angry, boys and young men are compelled to believe those things if they want to get playing time.

The fall from grace of the grand puba of football, Penn State’s legendary coach Joe Paterno, brought home to me that football had become anything but a game.

It was an eye-opener for the whole country when football’s patron saint got exposed for what he had always been— a loser, hypocrite, a heinous criminal of the worst kind.

When we read that Jesus said, “Woe to those who hurt little ones, they would be better off if they tied a millstone around their necks and jumped into the ocean,” that should have gotten our attention. Paterno believed that football and its fame and fortune took precedence over the lives of boys and young men, even though a man of his intelligence and education knew that simple morality is what separates us from all other primates— let alone scorpions and snakes.

Football is a violent game. For that reason, it must be carefully policed so that it does not become something other than sport. We did nothing to combat its degeneration into a barbaric combat fought for our viewing pleasure. How can we correct it now?

Very few of us are like my non-shrinking-violet Irish wife, the mother of my five kids. Her name for it was F-Ball during all the years I covered it as a sports writer. I guess I had taken too many hits to the head to see that her concern was legitimate. The first time I got her to watch a game was in our oldest son’s senior year in high school. Wouldn’t you know it; he came off the field with a cut on his forehead, blood streaming down his face. He looked at mom, smiling. Mom looked at me. She was not.

All too often football is taught to kids age 5-18 as if it were a gladiatorial battle to the death. In Rome gladiators played out their sport in front of cheering spectators in great stadiums and coliseums. Like the NFL does. It was owned and operated by heinous men who used the athletes so they could become filthy rich. Like the NFL has.

The avarice and greed of the owners destroyed the gladiators who made them money, and it sullied the souls of the people who came to cheer on the debased competitions.The modern gladiators called the Bears, the Buccaneers, the Lions, the Titans, the Bengals, the Vikings risk having their brains beat in for glory and money. One of the exalted heroes up for the hall of fame this year, Junior Seau, shot himself in the chest and died in order to save himself from hurting his children and their mother because of brain injured anger. He wanted his brain to be intact so he could leave it to science.

“Hail Caesar! We who are about to die, Salute you!”

With Paterno and his legion of coaches (in a place of higher education for our elite intellectual youth) it was not murder and mayhem, gunplay, wife-beating, violent and psychological spousal and child abuse like in the NFL; it was raping young boys. In the NFL it has been drug abuse, assorted lying, cheating and stealing, name calling, racism on each side and every assorted misdemeanor conceivable— the usual litany of crimes we have become accustomed to by NFL owners, players, coaches, personnel, and now even its commissioner. The training as youths and the concussions suffered contribute to the degeneracy of the athletes. But we remain in a state of denial as fans.

I don’t recall exactly what that stoic philosopher who oversaw the gladiatorial legions, Marcus Aurelius— that emperor who was lionized by Richard Harris in the movie ‘Gladiator’— wrote about the gladiatorial extravaganzas. But contemporary historians reported that his son (and eventual emperor) Commodus liked to drug opponents, hand them weapons of lead so heavy they could not wield them and then toy with them before brutally slaying them in front of adoring crowds in the Colosseum. What if, when all is said and done, we discover that these heroes of football— the ones that are wife beaters, murderers, drug traffickers, abusers of children— are the victims of schemers and swindlers and traffickers of athletes, exploiters of young boys and operators of a modern version of the old ‘Bread and Circus’ institution? What if we parents and fans were lumped in with them as fans, found to be culpable because we allowed the exploitation of young athletes turned into gladiators?

To paraphrase a thought from Jesus: ‘One knows what something actually is by its fruits, by what it actually does and is.’

Mostly all football programs from youth on up are preparing boys as if they were preparing them for the business of football— not the game of football— like education prepares one for business, boot camps for military, or bible school and seminary for the clergy. Football at all levels is preparing players for violent combat without properly distinguishing its nature and divorcing it from civilian life.

The football we watch and participate in is no longer a game— it is a war, it is business, it is dog eat dog, it is one gladiator against another. It produces excitement and entertainment, and in the end, we get the catharsis of violent theatre— thumbs up or thumbs down— while we swallow hot dogs and drink beer and eat nachos on a couch and tell ourselves it’s only make believe violence like a movie. Someone tell it to the father of the pregnant lady that just got knocked out in an elevator. Someone tell it to the children that just got abused. Someone tell it to the wives and children that have lost their husbands and fathers to brain damage.