Last September, right at the beginning of the 2015 college football and NFL seasons, it was announced that former Iowa Hawkeyes and New York Giants safety Tyler Sash had died of an overdose in his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa. One week ago, medical researchers found that Sash had contracted a degenerative brain disease that had progressed to a stage almost unheard of for someone who was just 27 years old, and that it had likely forced him into a downward spiral that ultimately led to his demise.

I remember watching Sash play on Saturdays when I was in high school. He was an extraordinary playmaker, one of the most exciting that I’ve watched, and his on-the-field personality made him a proper celebrity within the Hawkeye fan base.

Sash wasn’t just a show-off, however, and his hard work earned him a sixth-round selection in the 2011 NFL Draft. When his Giants went to the Super Bowl that year, he became one of the few football players in the world to earn himself a national championship ring.

If the story had ended there, it might have been a happy one. Yet just five years after the safety’s crowning moment, the five concussions that Sash had sustained during his career had already caught up to him, robbing him of most of a lifetime and making many of the moments he did experience much more of a struggle.

Tyler Sash chose to play football at every level, and to some extent, his injuries were just the result of “bad luck” in a game that everyone knows is quite physical. Not every job in the world is completely safe, and at least professional football, to some extent, compensates its players for the level of risk they take on.

Still, it’s difficult for me to know that when I thought I was just relaxing and eating seven-layer dip, I was at least, at times, watching athletes literally beat the life out of each other.

I love football as much as anyone else, and the Super Bowl has a truly exalted status among the games I watch. It’s really the only NFL game each season that I go out of my way to see, simply because it’s such a spectacle. The game’s combination of food, music, friends and entertainment appeals to everyone from the most diehard fans to the most dispassionate bystanders, creating an awesome feeling of unity in the progress.

It’s hard to imagine anything more stereotypically American than sitting around eating junk food and watching TV, and I think that’s great.

Because it so deeply reflects our culture, however, it’s important that the Super Bowl especially reflects the ethics of our society. This isn’t some revolutionary idea — Janet Jackson drew presidential scorn for her infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the halftime show, after all — but it’s worth considering whether, with football as its centerpiece, it ever can. As long as football, at least formally, is a significantly more dangerous sport than rugby, holding up the game as the chief athletic event of our society seems misguided — if not downright dangerous.

Building a Super Bowl-esque culture around another game — the NBA Championship, for example — would certainly draw the ire of football fans, but it doesn’t seem like it should be impossible. So many other aspects now accompany the game to the point where the sport that is actually played has practically become irrelevant. Only a small percentage of NFL diehards even have a team to cheer for in any given iteration of the Super Bowl, anyways, so clearly the teams involved in the competition can only have so much impact on its viewership.

Unless something can be done to radically change the nature of football injuries, creating a “different” Super Bowl is a step we must take. Having a game that better emphasizes the humanity of its players could shift the way that younger generations perceive athletics, funneling them into safer sports that give them a better chance at a long, happy life. The American Dream, after all, isn’t about any one game; it’s about finding success and retiring content.

Tyler Sash never got to achieve these goals. Hopefully, players of the next generation will.

 

Send Andrew Mather Super Bowl snack suggestions at amather ‘at’ stanford.edu.