Ethical Sports Takes

We’ve all heard it before: “You never played the game, so what do you know?”

It’s one of the easiest ways to dismiss someone’s sports opinion. A fan criticizes a quarterback’s decision, questions a coach’s play call or disagrees with a former player’s take, and eventually somebody pulls out the same argument: You didn’t play professionally, so you can’t understand.

I completely disagree.

Let me make one thing clear before we go any further: playing the sport matters. Someone who has actually stood on an NFL field, played in the NBA or competed at the highest level has experienced things that those of us watching from home simply haven’t. They understand the speed, physicality, preparation, pressure and countless little details of the game in a way most fans never will. That experience deserves respect, but experience doesn’t make every opinion automatically correct, and a lack of professional playing experience doesn’t make every opinion automatically wrong.

If that were the case, we might as well shut down sports television, sports radio, podcasts, blogs and about 99.9% of sports social media. Including this website.

So let’s talk about it.

Sometimes Not Playing Can Actually Make It Easier to Be Objective

This might sound strange, but I actually think there are situations where not playing professionally can make it easier to give an honest opinion.

How many times have we watched a former athlete appear on television or a podcast and clearly struggle to criticize somebody they played with? A former teammate has an abysmal performance, but instead of simply saying he played terribly, we hear about how hard he works, what kind of teammate he is or why everyone else around him deserves some of the blame.

That’s understandable. These aren’t just names on a television screen to former players. These are people they practiced with, traveled with, competed alongside and built real relationships with. But those relationships can also make objectivity difficult.

The same thing happens when former players talk about the all-time greats they competed against. Some athletes have so much respect and admiration for the legends of their era that those players can almost do no wrong in their eyes. Their personal experience competing against someone can make it difficult to separate how intimidating that player felt from an objective comparison of players across different eras.

Meanwhile, the person sitting on the couch with a nice bowl of chips and a cold soda doesn’t have that problem. We don’t owe anybody in the locker room anything. If our favorite player plays terribly, we can say he played terribly. If a player we dislike has an incredible game, we should be able to admit that too. We don’t have friendships, rivalries or locker-room history influencing the conversation.

That doesn’t automatically make our opinion better, but it does allow us to look at the game through a completely different lens.

There Are Things Fans Simply Don’t Understand

Now let’s be fair. There are absolutely parts of professional sports that the average fan, including myself, doesn’t fully understand.

Take football. Most of us aren’t sitting on the couch identifying every defensive responsibility before the snap. We aren’t always going to know whether a defense is playing man, Cover 2, Cover 3, Cover 6 or disguising something completely different. When a receiver is standing wide open, we might blame the cornerback when another defender was actually responsible for that area of the field.

We also don’t know the exact play that was called. We don’t know whether the quarterback made the wrong read, whether the receiver ran the wrong route or whether someone missed an assignment. We certainly aren’t qualified to sit there with an NFL playbook and tell professional coaches exactly which play should be called in every situation.

That’s where former players and coaches provide tremendous value. They can see details that the average fan will completely miss because they’ve actually learned the systems and experienced the game at that level. But not understanding everything doesn’t mean you understand nothing.

You Don’t Need a Playbook to Understand What You’re Watching

I don’t need to understand every coverage Patrick Mahomes sees to know when he’s playing great football. I don’t need to know an NBA team’s entire defensive scheme to recognize when someone is repeatedly getting attacked on defense. I don’t need to understand the engineering behind a Formula 1 car to recognize when one driver is consistently outperforming his teammate in the same machinery.

There are different levels of understanding sports. A coach might understand the tactical side better than a player. A player might understand the physical side better than an analyst. An analyst might spend significantly more time studying statistics and historical comparisons than either of them. And a fan who has watched a sport closely for 20 years probably knows considerably more than someone who started watching last Tuesday.

None of those perspectives automatically invalidates the others.

You Can Learn the Game Without Playing It Professionally

There’s also something else that gets ignored whenever someone says, “You never played, so you don’t know the game.”

People literally dedicate their lives to learning sports. They go to school for sports management, analytics, coaching, exercise science and other fields connected to athletics. They spend years studying film, statistics, strategy, scouting and player development. Understanding a sport isn’t knowledge that is exclusively available to the people who were talented enough to play it professionally.

Look around professional sports. How many scouts, general managers, executives, analysts and other decision-makers are there across different leagues who never dribbled a basketball in the NBA, never took an NFL snap or never stepped onto a professional field? Yet some of these people are paid specifically because they can recognize talent and understand the game.

A great scout doesn’t need to have been an NFL quarterback to recognize one. A general manager doesn’t need to have averaged 25 points per game to understand how to construct an NBA roster. Their expertise comes from years of studying and evaluating the sport from an entirely different perspective.

That’s really the point of this entire discussion: playing gives you a different lens. It doesn’t give you the only lens.

A former player knows how difficult it was to reach that level. They remember the countless hours of practice, film study, workouts, injuries and sacrifices required just to earn a spot in the league. When they watch another professional athlete struggle, they understand better than any fan sitting at home just how difficult the job actually is. That perspective is valuable, and it’s something those of us who never played professionally can’t completely replicate.

But someone else might understand roster construction better. Someone might understand analytics better. Someone might be better at evaluating talent. And someone watching from the outside might simply be more willing to criticize what they’re seeing without personal relationships influencing their opinion.

Different experiences create different perspectives, and that’s why sports discussion is interesting in the first place.

Judge the Opinion, Not the Résumé

This is ultimately where I land: if someone makes a terrible sports argument, explain why the argument is terrible. Don’t just say, “You never played.”

Playing professionally gives someone credibility and experiences the rest of us will never have, and that perspective should absolutely be respected. But it isn’t a lifetime pass that makes every sports opinion correct. At the same time, fans need some humility. Watching football every Sunday doesn’t mean we suddenly know more about offensive schemes than an NFL coordinator. There are parts of these games that professionals understand at a level most of us never will.

Both things can be true. Former players can provide insight that fans cannot, while fans, analysts, scouts and executives can provide perspectives that former players might not have.

At the end of the day, sports would be pretty boring if the only people allowed to discuss them were the tiny percentage of people talented enough to play professionally. And sometimes the guy sitting on his couch with a bowl of chips and a cold soda might actually have a point.

Judge the argument by the quality of the argument, not whether the person making it could have survived one snap in the NFL.

What do you think? Do you need to have played a sport at a high level to have a valid opinion about it?

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