Once players join a team, they find themselves at the mercy of coaches who often care more about the players’ short-term capacity to help the team win than the long-term impact that playing injured might have on their health. As the Boston Globe’s Jackie MacMullan explained in a 2007 profile of former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, “Pressure to perform in a sport where there are no guaranteed contracts and where being ‘soft’ is the worst moniker that can be thrust upon you creates a culture in which players feel they must play through almost anything.” Johnson—like Jenkins—tells of being pressured by coaches to play through concussions. By the time MacMullan interviewed him, Johnson had endured so much brain trauma that he was spending whole days lying mute in a dark room. The NFL is now supposedly taking head injuries more seriously. That just leaves the rest of the body.

The thread connecting the sexual abuse that Sandusky allegedly inflicted in the Penn State showers and the abuse that coaches like him inflict on the playing field is this: In big-time football, morality is measured in wins and losses. Oh sure, coaches can get in trouble for violating league rules. But for the most part, nobody cares unless those violations keep the team from winning games.

The mentality that led Penn State students to riot after Joe Paterno was fired is no different from the mentality that leads New England Patriot fans like me to cheer Bill Belichick even though he was as indifferent to Ted Johnson’s physical and mental survival as Paterno was to the physical and mental survival of the boys Jerry Sandusky allegedly raped. To be a fan of a brutal sport like football is to put your moral faculties on hold. It is to hero-worship players while considering them disposable as human beings.