Michael A. Chihak: UA should condemn teaching violence

Football success at the University of Arizona this year is manifest in the team’s invitation to play in the Holiday Bowl on Friday. Many factors contributed to the 9-3 record.

Troublingly, one of them is that the team was coached to play violently.

Football is de facto violent, of course. At the UA, it went from de facto to official this season, when coaches said they were “choosing violence” for the team.

That quotation, attributed to “several coaches” in the Star on Aug. 31, could be dismissed as an offhand comment if said once. As the season progressed, mentions of violence continued, revealing a problematic motif.

“How violent we play” was assistant coach Danny Gonzales’ description for the team in the Oct. 3 Star. For how he coached, Gonzales got a 50% raise earlier this month.

Head coach Brett Brennan said in the Oct. 6 Star that his team “looks violent,” and he praised assistant coaches for teaching players, “This is the violence you’re going to attach to that job description.”

Coaches are teaching players to be violent, and university administrators tolerate it. Have they all been infected with the insecure, phony machismo that the U.S. president, other politicians and many men are modeling?

Violence denotes intent to harm. Coaches will say they don’t mean that, yet Brennan was clear in describing how players are trained. Ask victims of violence how they feel upon hearing or reading such comments.

Campus leaders must unequivocally condemn football violence and consider disciplining coaches for teaching the team to play that way. If Provost Patricia A. Prelock means “to put students first,” as she wrote in an Oct. 6 Star commentary, she will act on coaches hyping violence.

Remember, this campus has suffered violence — three fatal shootings in the last five years and four at the College of Nursing in 2002.

Sadly, administrators and coaches are part of a society that often relishes violence. In football, fans roar approval of jarring hits, until someone is carted off; then they applaud in faux sympathy before wanting more. In society, many express unbridled support for the Second Amendment, ignoring the violence it creates; that’s a topic for another time.

Teaching football players violence is the antithesis of widespread academic work underway on campus to counteract the problem in society.

The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences conducts violence prevention research and study in the School of Sociology and the Consortium on Gender-Based Violence. The College of Science’s Department of Psychology studies community violence prevention.

In the College of Public Health, programs address campus sexual assault prevention and screen for attacks on pregnant women. The College of Education studies preventing school violence, and the College of Law runs a Domestic Violence Law Clinic offering free services to victims.

Speaking of which, research shows domestic violence and football are connected.

“...domestic violence incidents rise by about 10% on days when NFL games are played ... most of the time affecting women,” says a report on police data by PubMed Central, a National Institutes of Health website. Other studies say college football rivalries often beget fan violence.

Tragically, violence in football and elsewhere will continue. We can neither admire nor ignore it. Rather, we must condemn it unconditionally, whenever and wherever it occurs, including in football.

UA President Suresh Garimella, Provost Prelock and other administrators surely know the effects of violence and the extensive campus work at prevention. Thus, they must demand that coaches stop training football players to be violent.

Otherwise, they are complicit.