The idea is to protect veteran jobs and maintain a bountiful farm system -- without remuneration for the athletes in that system.
Given the way high school students have flooded the NBA and the resultant decline in the quality of play, it makes sense for the NFL -- the most popular, profitable and parity-driven sports league in the world -- to want to protect the standard of competition in its league.
On the other hand, an argument can be made that any adult who wants to work should have that opportunity in America. Maurice Clarett isn’t asking for even a starting job on an NFL team, much less a roster spot.
What he is seeking is a chance to compete for that job. If he is not good enough, he simply won’t play.
It’s the age-old debate between the right of free association versus a company’s right to set standard terms of employment.
But there is a more disingenuous and ridiculous reason being floated about: that Clarett (and 18-20-year-olds like him) is too young and too ill-prepared for the rigors of professional football.
NFL Player’s Association chief Gene Upshaw told Associated Press columnist Jim Litke, “People can talk all they want about 18-year-olds working for software companies or playing in rock bands,” he said. “They ain’t getting hit by Ray Lewis. It’s a different deal.”
He’s right, of course. The NFL is different than say, oh, the Army or Marine Corps, where 18-20-year-olds are being killed daily in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where is the outrage about a guy two months removed from high school having his guts spilled in a cesspool like Fallujah? Or the 20-year-old National Guard MP who died in Iraq after joining the Guard with her two sisters?
Certainly nothing in the training of the National Guard or Reserves prepared those soldiers for a 25-month hot war, and the horror and uncertainty, which we cannot possibly fathom, that comes with it. The misuse of the Guard and Reserves in this war is a greater travesty than the idea that a football player only two years out of high school may play in the NF of L.
With his argument (which is the same as the league’s), Upshaw would have us believe that football is somehow more dangerous and fraught with peril than combat.
No sale.
The death Thursday of Pat Tillman, a former safety for the Arizona Cardinals who turned down a multi-million dollar contract to enlist in the Army Rangers, only serves to highlight the idiocy of Upshaw’s and the league’s bald-face lie that they want to protect the Clarett’s of the world from the trials of the gridiron, even though those same men are qualified to die in hail of bullets and mortar fire.
Paul Tagliabue and Upshaw would be well served to dump the argument that football is too intense and demanding for 20-year-olds.
Clarett stands a better chance of making it out of Giants Stadium alive than he does Tikrit, Ray Lewis or no.
allen@snyderdailynews.com