It’s halfway through the National Football League schedule, so it’s a good time to check back in on some of the big stories from the start of the NFL season. One of those stories was Michael Sam, who this past spring became the first openly gay male athlete to be drafted by a team in one of the big four professional sports leagues (football, baseball, basketball, hockey) in the United States. Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams but was cut towards the end of the pre-season. Soon after, he was signed by the Dallas Cowboys to be on their practice squad of ten players who help simulate the opponents during practice and who also would be the next men up in the case of injury to someone on the regular season roster. A few weeks ago, the Cowboys dropped him from the practice squad and Sam has not been signed since.
This past spring, when Sam was first drafted, I wrote that he made me feel “Proud, Ashamed, and Old.” When he was drafted, I was willing to believe that he had slid down teams’ draft boards because of his mediocre combine workout numbers and the stature that made him fit neither the linebacker or defensive end position in the pros. When his first team cut him, I pointed out that they had one of the best and deepest rosters at Sam’s position. I thought he would be signed quickly by another team, at least for their practice squad, and that he would break through onto an NFL roster soon. Now, I’m not so sure. It’s hard to imagine Sam playing this year, and if he doesn’t play this year, he could easily be drowned by the next wave of young players from college, and never become what we thought he would be: the first openly gay man in the NFL.
Other people are thinking the same thing. Three authors wrote about Sam recently: Phil Taylor nominated Sam for 2014 Sportsman of the Year in Sports Illustrated, Michelangelo Signorile wrote an essay for the Huffington Post questioning Sam’s treatment, and Cyd Ziegler of Outsports took a strong stance that Sam has been discriminated against.
To start with the positive, here’s Taylor writing about Sam’s admirable conduct and his impact:
Sam could have played it all so differently. He could have tried to tap into our sympathies, presented himself as a victim struggling against the homophobia of the league and of segments of the public. But he repeatedly said he wanted to be considered a football player first, and he backed that up by simply playing football. He never complained about things he had every right to complain about… By choosing not to do anything except play, Sam showed a toughness that can’t be measured by tackles or sacks. He left the social commentary to others, knowing that he would lend power to the LGBT struggle for equality just by putting on his pads.
Here is Signorile leading his readers to the conclusion that something is very fishy about the way Sam has been treated by the NFL:
Again, any of the individual actions can be explained away as a football decision. But when you add it all up and throw in the NFL’s past and current disregard for homophobia (in incidents and hiring), it’s impossible to escape the very real probability that Sam’s being gay was a factor that determined his fate.
Finally, here is Ziegler with hard-hitting facts and a definitive statement about wrongful treatment and discrimination:
To put it another way, of the 73 DPOYs (Defensive Player of the Year — an award which Michael Sam won in what is widely though of as the best defensive conference in the country, the SEC last year) in the big conferences since 2000, 95 percent were selected earlier than Michael Sam; all but two since 2000 (97 percent) – and 100 percent in the last eight years – made an active roster his rookie season … all except for Sam.
Sam is not being considered equally in that way. He is being held to a higher standard. Instead of potential to succeed, Sam must succeed now to make a roster. He must play like an All-Pro simply to crack a 53-man roster; he has to play like a starter just to make a practice squad. As he works out on his own, away from the league’s 32 teams, he’s not given that opportunity to show his stuff on the field. The bar for him has been set that much higher.
There’s still time to write a different ending to Michael Sam’s story. With each week that goes by, it seems more and more likely that for the story to end happily, a general manager of an NFL team is going to have to find one fifteenth the courage that Sam has shown. So far, we haven’t seen it.