"Distractions" has been a catchall term in football for years and years, and it remains both pervasive and utterly meaningless. "Those distractions are getting old for me," Chris Kluwe's special-teams coordinator, Mike "Nuke the Gays" Priefer, told reporters in 2012, referring to the punter's "Vote Ray Guy" protest. "The punter can't be a distraction," writes this guy. Anything involving a football figure that isn't strictly about football is a potential distraction. Gay NFL player coming out? "Distraction," Mike Florio worries. Rex Ryan's foot fetish? "Could snowball into a distraction," a reporter suggests. Richie Incognito? "A distraction for the Dolphins," Ed Werder says. (Miami went on to win four of its next six.) Tebow? "Distraction," everyone says.
it's a useful word, for coaches and reporters alike. It betrays no values, no bias. A distraction is just a thing you can point to in the corner of the room. (It's particularly funny when journalists talk about distractions. They're the instruments of distraction, after all. It's like a fart asking, "How will you deal with the smell?"). No one needs to address the substance of the thing doing the distracting, only the possibility that, for three or four minutes during the week, the thing might dare interfere with FOOTBALL. Football teams do not like it when players bring so-called distractions up, and they do not like it when the media dare to ask non-footbally, distraction-y questions at a press conference. ("Hey Coach, did you know Aaron Hernandez liked killin' folk?") Football must stay focused on football at all times, or else the whole world blows up or something.
All the neurotic talk about "distractions" reveals a funny thing about the locker room. It's as if the psyche of a football team is some impossibly delicate thing that cracks the second the outside world sneaks in. Football purports to be the manliest sport in the universe, and yet - on a social level - it operates like a fucking country club. We do not bring up "unpleasantries" in football. That would be rude!