On a Slide and a Prayer
Husain Abdullah is a safety for the Kansas City Chiefs who recently scored a touchdown. It was what happened after that garnered a lot of publicity:
Early in the fourth quarter, Abdullah dropped deep in a zone coverage, read Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s eyes and broke hard, intercepting his pass.
Abdullah then dashed 39 yards to the end zone, slid on his knees and bowed in prayer.
His celebration drew a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, but the NFL said Tuesday that Abdullah should not have been penalized.
This provided the opportunity for various heralds of multiculturalism and religious freedom to blow their horns. Such as:
This is manifestly unfair. Abdullah, like Tebow, is known for his devotion to his faith. Abdullah missed the entire 2012 NFL season so that he could undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca, and he fasts during Ramadan, which means he cannot eat food or drink water during daylight hours for a month, despite his grueling NFL training schedule. And yet Tebow’s prayer during games earned him respect, but Abdullah’s earned him punishment.
The NFL has admitted that the referee was wrong to penalize Abdullah. NFL spokesman Michael Signora wrote in an email to USA Today that, although there is a rule against players engaging in celebration while on the ground, “the officiating mechanic in this situation is not to flag a player who goes to the ground as part of religious expression, and as a result, there should have been no penalty on the play.”
And yet there was. Abdullah’s team was given a penalty.
It didn’t matter towards the game. The NFL realized that their ref screwed up. There really isn’t much of a story here, except – at worst – a ref not recognizing a Muslim prayer (or the difference between a Muslim prayer and a banned celebration). From a player that rarely scores touchdowns. This was not anti-Islamic bigotry. at worst, it was split-second ignorance. Which the NFL recognized. We can say “But what if the game had been on the line?” Well, then a blown ref call would have cost a team a game. It wouldn’t be the first time. But it didn’t, and it wasn’t, and all that can really be said is that we all learned something.
This all overlooks the possibility of the flag being for the slide rather than a prayer. A slide, not being a prayer, would be an infraction. But the NFL said they screwed up, and we should pretty much take them at their word.
video here]. And if you think you found another picture of him doing so, the fact that his helmet is off is a pretty good indicator that he didn’t just score a touchdown.
The conversation actually gets derailed a bit by Tim Tebow. The thing is that even though Tebow is known for his devotion and prayer, he does not generally do so in the manner that Abdullah was penalized, comments that Tebow does this “all the time” notwithstanding. In fact, I can’t find a single incident of him doing so. He prays before games and after games. The most cited case shows him after the 2012 AFC Wild-Card game between the Broncos and the Steelers. If you see a picture of him praying in an endzone, that’s probably it. Except that was after the game [However, the Tebow distraction aside, there are numerous documented cases of penalty-free prayer. I find other attempts to draw a distinction (one knee down versus two) unconvincing. So the point stands. If it wasn’t for the slide, it was a bad call. Like the NFL says.
racist or racialist, and if you single out white players doing it you’re just doing so to cover the racism. Personally, I think they do go too far. I don’t mind saying “no spiking the ball” or “no throwing the ball” or “no taunting” (celebrations directed, explicitly or implicitly, at the opposition). But kneeling in any context? While I think people that make it to the endzone should act like they aren’t surprised to be there, some exuberance is pretty understandable. The rules are also pretty vague (there isn’t even an explicit exception for prayer), which is also something that maybe should be addressed.
There are some broader issues at work here. Like whether there should be any religious exemption at all. Some argue that the penalties against excessive celebration are themselves excessive. Some argue that it’sThe original narrative, though, that the NFL thinks that Muslims should be penalized for doing what Tim Tebow is celebrated for, just doesn’t fit. In the end, it was a bad call by someone who thought one thing was happening when another thing was happening. There are enough actual instances of anti-Muslim bigotry to focus on to spend more time on this.
I’d like to think that all of us, even the atheists, were thanking God-as-we-understand-Him for The Handsomest Man In The NFL getting benched.Report
Thanks for writing on this, Will. I don’t know anything about Vox. What is its intended audience? I ask because I’m curious how “representative” we can consider their take.
This is the sort of thing that might qualify as a micro aggression. On it’s face, it is relatively minor and unlikely to contain any hostility or intent to cause harm. As you said, it is most likely borne out of ignorance. However, micro aggressions can take a cumulative toll over time and, usually, the camel’s back eventually breaks. I don’t think this is that as I haven’t seen anyone making too big an issue out of it save for the linked Vox article, but just because this wasn’t an explicit and conscious act of “Islamaphobia” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attend to the underlying cause(s) and seek to address it.Report
Vox is Ezra Klein’s and Matt Yglesias’s outfit.Report
See also: The Emperor’s Outfit.Report
@jaybird
I liked that. Though we probably dislike Yglesias for different reasons.Report
“However, micro aggressions can take a cumulative toll over time and, usually, the camel’s back eventually breaks.”
isn’t a reference to a camel in the context of muslims itself a microaggression?Report
He didn’t mean it like that. No haram, no foul.Report
No, a micro aggression would be mentioning pork or bacon. We certainly don’t want to hurt their feelings.Report
the endzone celebrations of the nfl’s first rastafarian star are going to be noteworthy.
(the first scientologist player will just throw 20s at a picture of le ron or maybe not call his mom)Report
the best thing about your username is that it makes a tired family circus joke funny again.
“who’s kinda racist far too often?”Report
@dhex
Tired? Family Circus?
How dare you, sir?Report
i’m filled with all sortsa controversial opinions.
beige is boring!
good weather is better than bad weather!
seriously though i do have a soft spot for this classic
http://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/Report
dhex:
Thanks for proving once again how humorless liberals are.Report
It’s just hard for me to see how this could/should be addressed, above and beyond what has already been done. CAIR responded by saying that the NFL needed to clarify its prayer rules and acknowledge their error. Which the NFL did. This shouldn’t have happened, but ultimately it’s probably a positive thing that this happened when it didn’t make a difference, and by virtue of it happening it’s less likely to happen when it does.
During the interval in between the mistake and the NFL’s acknowledgment & clarification, this was indeed a story. CAIR was right and the NFL needed to respond. I don’t begrudge any commentary up to that point. After that point, though, I think the story needs a graver error to say “An acknowledgment of error is not enough.”Report
I would say that educating the referees to avoid future such occurrences would sufficiently address the issue (though I’m not particularly qualified to speak on the matter).Report
Ideally, they’re thinking broader and looking and Sikh traditions and whatnot, wondering if they have anything to be concerned about.Report
Kazzy:
You say the refs should be educated. How should the refs be educated? Maybe the NFL could issue a guide with every players religion in it so the refs could consult it when a player scores?Report
If the rule is you can’t get on the ground to celebrate a touchdown, unless it’s in prayer, then it’s not exactly unreasonable to be educated what may constitute a prayer.
Or you can nix the prayer exception.
Or you can just say “Only Christian prayers count.”Report
Well, I don’t think you can say “only Christian prayers count.” Although they are well-paid and have individual employment contracts and a collective bargaining agreement, NFL players are, ultimately, employees of someone else. And as employees, they enjoy the statutory right to not suffer adverse employment actions taken against them on the basis of their religion. If you allow one kind of prayer, you have to allow them all. Or you can prohibit them altogether, or ask that they happen off the field or at times that the game is not in progress or some other sort of reasonable rule. “Only Christian prayers” isn’t a reasonable rule.Report
Will:
You make it sound so simple but what exactly constitutes a “prayer.” If I score a touchdown and then fall on the ground and writhe like I’m having an epileptic fit, who is to say that isn’t a prayer?Report
If you’re not willing to try to make that determination, then don’t have an exemption.
If you are going to have that exemption, then find out how different people from different cultures pray.Report
I think people that make it to the endzone should act like they aren’t surprised to be there,
Some years back, a freshman at Purdue got flagged for celebration after scoring a touchdown. His coach told him he should act like he’d been there before, and he responded, “But, coach, I haven’t been there before!”Report
I thought about quoting the “been there before” line, but then remembered the player in question hadn’t been there before.Report
I think the quote is affirmatively meant to apply whether you’ve been there before or not. Even especially if you haven’t. Not that I affirm the quote: celebrate away afaiac.Report
This reminds me of the inaugural Pinstripe Bowl
In the game, Kansas State scored a touchdown with 1:13 remaining to pull within 2 of Syracuse, extra point pending. However, when the Kansas State player scored, he saluted the military members in the stands. The officials took this to be taunting and penalized the Wildcats for unsportsmanlike conduct. This means they had to try the extra point from the 18 rather than the 3. They missed it.Report
Yes, that was dumb.Report
Wow, we’ve known each other a long time.Report
comments that Tebow does this “all the time” notwithstanding. In fact, I can’t find a single incident of him doing so.
Huh. Before this post, I would have sworn he did this as part of TD celebrations. But I can’t find any images or video either.Report
Well, at least we’re no longer comparing Tebow to Adrian Peterson or Ray Rice.Report
I’d only heard about this and hadn’t actually seen what he was flagged for until just now. I have to say, I’m flabbergasted that a flag was thrown for that at all, no matter what the rule says, especially if the rule is no different than it was for Tebow’s demonstrations.
The subsection of the rule that spurred the flag is, “Players are prohibited from engaging in any celebrations or demonstrations while on the ground” (where there is presumably a more general statement of what the excessive celebration rule is preceding this particular, along with other particulars alongside it).
What counts as “on the ground,” though? A person standing on the ground can very reasonably be said to be “on the ground.” You can stand on the ground, kneel on the ground (I think that description is the best one for both Abdullah’s and Tebow’s postures), sit on the ground, or lay on the ground. So it’s not like this provision does much to eliminate ambiguity bout the aim of the larger rule.
The religious exemption is fine, and I’d want to keep it if there is going to be a celebration rule at all, but I actually wonder whether the problem here is really that the conduct that is the target of the rule here is actually too well defined, so that it produces false positives. Clearly, the problem is not “going to the ground” in all instances. It’s some subset thereof, combined with subsets of other action categories of various descriptions. So maybe describing the particular actions is not the right way to go about this. Perhaps the right way would be to describe the general character of the celebrations you’re seeking to single out, perhaps in example form rather than abstract description form, and then say that the rule is simply that refs are to use their judgement in deciding when a celebration crosses some undefined line that’s at most vaguely suggested by the description of the disapproved conduct. The refs are human; as long as you stipulate ahead of time that it’s how the rule works, I’m guessing players can figure out how avoid getting called for excessive celebration if the rule in effect is, “Look, just don’t force the ref to call you for making an idiot of yourself or the League or delaying the game too much” – at least, if they want to.
Whether we’re talking about NFL referees or justices of the United States Supreme Court, as Sandra Sotomayor reminded us at her confirmation hearing, in laying out either the crafting of laws and rules or approaches to the application thereof, sometimes it might be to our advantage to recognize that the agents we will be using to apply our laws and rules are very likely in the medium term at least to be human beings not computers, and to think about ways we can actually use that fact to our advantage in getting out of our rules and laws what we want out of them.Report
Not sure what or which you mean here. As far as I can tell, Tebow never did his prayer thing in touchdown celebrations during a game. See Tebow paragraph in the OP. (If you missed that, no problem, just fill in RG3’s name and you’re set.)Report
You know, I’d always assumed that was a touchdown prayer. Now I’m going to have to take back
some of the bad things I said about Tebownothing I ever said about Tebow because I never really had a problem with him praying in the first place. It was his accuracy and questionable judgment every time the other team could put together a pass rush, much less a blitz. And it was sort of odd how the fans created a quarterback controversy and then won, because it didn’t seem to me that Kyle Orton was particularly the problem with Denver that year and what the hell, they made the playoffs despite downgrading their passing game to Dayton Triangle-like levels.Abdullah’s prayer doesn’t bug me either; his prayer is a bit different-looking than a Christian prayer but that’s in large part because he’s not a Christian, he’s Muslim. Me, I sort of like secular touchdown celebrations and I wish they’d bring back the Ickey Shuffle.Report
I had the same assumption, then someone said that he prayed before and after games and I noticed that all of the pictures I’d seen had him with his helmet off, which is rare for a touchdown celebration and probably a celebration penalty whether for prayer or not. The other examples in the link had helmets on.Report
I did miss that wrt Tebow. Ironically (though only due to my lazy reading), perhaps Vikram binging up Tebow only to say that people bringing up Tebow has only served to derail conversations on this, itself (kind of inevitably) ended up derailing the conversation (though only a bit) about this, especially since, as Vikram says, there are enough examples of other prayer that has not been flagged.
I remain flabbergasted that the refs called this at all, and as I don’t think that NFL refs are likely strongly driven by anti-non-Christian bigotry in their calls, I remain of the view that the likely problem here is that the rule is actually too specific and yet not specific enough at the same time. Ultimately, what is required here, no matter how you write the rule, is for refs to show judgement in picking out the conduct the League wants to target. I think the language in the rule right now might be getting in the way of that more than helping them do so. The religious exemption is fine, but if the description of the behavior that’s to be flagged is both too specific and basically not even accurate to what’s they’re trying to target, then you’re probably putting too much strain on the refs to filter out what is prayer from what is formally implicated by the rule, even though some of that they probably don;t even really care to see called.
(I.e., can’t we imagine some element of celebration that involves the ground that we don’t really have a problem with that’s not prayer? Hell, how is spiking the football not “going to the ground”? I realize that’s not the language of the rule, but that’s the exact gloss on it that the League itself used in its statement explaining that the ref failed to apply the religious exemption, if I’m not mistaken. Part of me thinks the whole rule should really be folded into delay-of-game, as I think that’s basically what the concern is, combined with a prohibition on specifically threatening or taunting gestures. …Anyway, yadda yadda yada yadda yadda, yeesh. All these words. Maybe they should just scrap the whole thing, come to think of it. And by “the whole thing,” no, I don’t exactly mean “football” …yet.)Report
This is America. He should be praying to an American God.Report