I read the Dolmage and McRuer excerpts shortly after I watched a rowdy game of Monday Night Football, between the San Francisco 49’s and the Green Bay Packers. For the spectator, the corporeality of a professional football game takes a central position, it practically stiff arms the viewer in the face. Bodies and skulls slam into other bodies and skulls, players pull a piece of leather from the air as it flies at speeds that would probably break my fingers, drunk fans lean and heave their mass towards the field whenever an important play occurs. However, over and above the physicality of any particular football game, for the NFL to remain successful, it must consume human (particularly black and female) bodies and also push a precise line of exclusion and acceptance.

The bodily exploitation of football players isn’t a new topic for many people. The discussion around concussions and CTE, along with the league’s ambivalent response to diagnoses, proliferated into the public so much that Will Smith starred in a movie that centered on this topic. There are additional ways in which the NFL (alternatively white team owners) consumes or excludes the bodies of its players and people more generally. The average career length of a running back is around three years (the league claims six years). Players have to be in the league for four years to qualify for health insurance upon retirement, and then only for five years after they retire. There’s a relationship between years played and pension earned as well that I don’t quite remember. Running backs arguably have the most damaging position in the sport for a player’s body, combined with the lowest level of job security. Players are often explicitly silenced by officials, owners and fans (yesterday John Mara the owner of the New York Giants said of an outspoken player Odell Beckham Jr. “I think he needs to do a little more playing and a little less talking”). They are considered players, not people who can speak about experience, political issues or anything that has to do with football. The emphasis is on the wins that they can produce, win now, give us the desired outcome.

Women in football are literally pushed to the sidelines. A consistent trope a viewer sees is the position two male game announcers sitting together in a box, owning the vast majority of the commentary, set against the solo female analyst, down on the sidelines of the field, often outside (sometimes in freezing temperatures), giving her speaking time away to the male players and coaches. Domestic violence against women, on the part of players is often covered up or treated lightly by the league, I read an article once that cited an uptick in domestic violence calls in Wisconsin within 1-2 hours of a Green Bay Packers loss. Thank goodness they won last night I guess.

The more I think about the NFL, the more I think about parallels to university treatment of student bodies. McRuer asserts throughout the essay that oftentimes conventional composition courses emphasize an outcome, and often a sort of corporatized outcome. That students are able to produce ‘x’ amount of pages, they use a specific sort of grammar, and can produce work that fits along the lines of a specific ideology. Students are selectively included or excluded into university, their health often suffers due to the demands and parameters placed upon them, their financial security is usurped by tuition, interest that accumulates on their loans, or in the case of faculty, by their low wage and part time status. Universities we have seen will work to scrub away or ignore reports of domestic violence against women in order to keep their images untarnished. The parallels between the NFL and university consideration of its players and students aren’t too hard to spot, but the NFL, widely considered to be a gross, conservative and exploitative institution (which it is) seems to be progressing at least a little bit in its treatment of players.

This has been a long winded lead in to how I think about my students, but I think that it’s helpful to think about these large institutional parallels for a couple of reasons. One, because it gives me something to work in opposition to. I don’t want to think of my students as just students, as just producers. I want to habituate myself into considering them as people who comes to my class to share and communicate their experiences. I don’t want to set invisible (or overt) standards of inclusion and exclusion, I don’t want to mitigate women’s voices or any voices that don’t ascribe to heteronormative standards.

I also don’t typically think of myself as a mouth piece or representative of the institution, but this is an irresponsible habit. I use university standards and resources to assist students who are struggling with a work overload or sexual violence. I’ve used university language, specifically ‘accommodations’ (which has the word normal lurking behind it) in my syllabus. I can perpetuate disparities in power in my classroom, or I can reduce them.  I can either facilitate the violence against individuals and their bodies, or I can find a way to help my students smash against each other and each other’s ideas safely, I can create a communal space where our we can become the subjects of our own experience, and where no one is told to speak less and play/write/produce more often.