How Real were the Cougars? Crime and Deviance in the National Football League
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2003 ESPN premiered a new series titled Playmakers which provided a fi ctional account of life on and off the fi eld of professional football. Despite the high viewership ratings and television awards it received, the show was cancelled during the first season. Playmakers told the story of a fictional professional football team, the Cougars, from an unidentified American city. The show depicted various acts of crime and deviance in American football such as: injurious violence on the field, steroid use, painkiller use, illicit drug use, night club violence, domestic violence, homosexuality, and eating disorders. The NFL league offi ce claimed that the show was a gross misrepresentation of life in the NFL. This paper examines the real life events and issues in the NFL and reveals that Playmakers did not misrepresent professional football but rather, it cast an important critical light on many issues in professional sport and NFL football in particular. Key words : American football; Television; Violence; Crime; Deviance Resume En 2003, L’ESPN la premiere d’une nouvelle serie intitulee Playmakersqui ont fourni un compte rendu fi ctif de la vie sur et hors du terrain de football professionnel. Malgre les evaluations d'ecoute eleves et des recompenses qu’il a recues de la television, le spectacle a ete annule au cours de la premiere saison. Playmakers a raconte l’histoire d’une equipe professionnelle de football fi ctive, les Cougars, a partir d’une ville non identifi ee americaine. Le spectacle represente divers actes de criminalite et de deviance dans le football canadien, tels que: la violence prejudiciable sur le terrain, l’utilisation de steroides, de l’utilisation antalgique, la consommation de drogues illicites, la violence boite de nuit, la violence domestique, l’homosexualite, et les troubles alimentaires. Le bureau de la ligue NFL a affirme que le spectacle etait une deformation grossiere de la vie dans la NFL. Ce document examine les evenements reels et les enjeux de la NFL et revele que Playmakers n’a pas denature le football professionnel, mais plutot, il jette une lumiere critique importante sur de nombreuses questions dans le sport professionnel et de la NFL du football en particulier. Mots cles : Football Americain; Television; La violence; La criminalite; La deviance
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".