The 'TEAM' in Professional Football:
One of the most overworked and overused word thrown around in football circles is the use of the word team. It usually is in regards to gelling as a team or being a good teammate, etc. It weighs on my mind more than others because it is one of those words invariably used by those sport commentators who thrive on dishing Terrell Owens. It is a steady drumbeat of he doesn't care about 'the team' or he is not a 'good teammate' or he is only concerned about his own performance.
These days, in football, as in many other professional sports, the word team has only a fleeting existence. Each year the composition of the team changes substantially. With all the injuries in football and the steady stream of substitutions, the word team practically exists in a different composition with just about every play. The truth is every player is forced to put their own performance on the field first. How many games the team wins has no bearing on whether a particular player is going to be around next year. Each player is evaluated entirely on his own performance. Period. The hard reality is winning depends on how each player performs at his own particular position. What is essential is that each player must run the right route, or defend properly, or tackle well, etc. If they do that well they are a good 'teammate'. How much anyone else likes the player, including the fans, is simply another ball game entirely. Sport commentators, having a good portion of their analysis about who is going to beat who turn out to be less than auspicious, find more pleasure in character assassination or character worship. But so do the rest of us.
Most players learn early on to babble about how concerned they are about their teammates, how grateful they are for teammate support and how the important thing is how the team does, not how they do. Yeah sure, if the team does well and an individual athlete does poorly he is history very shortly. The bottom line in professional football is money and individual performance. When a Giant player was asked recently about how the attitude of Burress affected him, he replied that he hardly ever has a reason to be in contact with Burress, that everyone has their own responsibilities on the team and that is what they concentrate on. Duh. I guess so---I mean obviously so.
The coaches preach to every teammate the need for each person to stay focused on their own tasks---stay focused, stay focused---along with stay in shape, stay in shape---and be tough, be tough---and be determined, be determined---and be a good citizen away from the field, be a good citizen away from the field, etc. Really? So here we have Terrell Owens, about the ultimate in staying focused, about the ultimate in staying in shape on his own, about the ultimate in being tough (in his case the word is changed to stubborn), and the ultimate good citizen off the field. Terrell's crime it seems is staying to himself, selfishly focused on being the best he can be at his position, not pretending his focus is on other teammates, and being tough about his stand on football matters that relate to his own performance. He comes to a team already packaged with all the personal traits requisite to top performance, and sport commentators fume away because he doesn't dance to their own preconceived notions of what constitutes a good teammate. He brags about himself, that is what irritates them.
Can't we just drop this fairy tale notion of how professional football players must all bond together in some kind of social fraternity for the team to win? Too many sport commentators seem to feel that unless a player dances to their own verbal and social nuance tunes, the player is a bad teammate. The only ones in a remote position to label anyone a bad teammate are past and former teammates of the player in question. Thus, I suggest, if these sport commentators want to throw the term bad teammate around, that every player on each team be asked, via secret ballot, to identify which players on their team is a good or bad teammate. Most of the time the player would say, "How the hell would I know, I hardly have any contact with him, he is on another practice unit coached by one of the 17 different position coaches".
Teams are so in a state of flux now personnel-wise that I kind of select coaches or players I admire and support the team they are on. When they move on, I move on. In the old days the Brooklyn Dodgers were pretty much the same team year after year. They may well have had considerable social bonding over time, and to the extent they were real professionals, that had little or nothing to do with their performance on the field. The importance of that was the way it made fans feel about the team. Anyone who has ever been on a sport team realizes that whether a player was a gregarious cheerleader in the locker room or rarely said anything had little bearing on their own performance on the team. If a professional player needs other players to get him focused on doing the best he can---well, that player is not a good player---he is not properly focused, he is not tough, he is not properly determined, etc. An example of a player who is all that, on his own, off by himself, obsessed with his own performance, is Terrell Owens. Now there is a valuable teammate.
