The one bad thing about Michael Sam outing himself to the world as a gay man is that the footage of his gameplay that ESPN insists on airing in a constant loop consists mostly of him tossing Vanderbilt players around like rag dolls. As Austyn Carta-Samuels tweeted earlier, “If anyone misses watching me play turn on ESPN. I think I’ve been sacked by Michael Sam over 150 times in the last few hours…”
But setting aside the abuse suffered by our offensive line and quarterback, this is absolutely the biggest sports story of the year. This is not Dave Kopay coming out years later, this is not Jason Collins coming out at the end of his career – this is the SEC’s co-defensive player of the year, the linchpin of the defense of the #5 team in the country, a team one loss against Auburn removed from probably playing for a national championship, a unanimous first-team All-American and therefore, logically speaking, an almost sure thing to be picked on the first day of the draft (yes, I know the first round is broken out all on its own now, but you know how conservative I am).
And he’s gay.
First off, let’s not mince words: Michael Sam has balls the size of church bells to do what he’s done. He could have kept his mouth shut, or even just stifled it until the draft was done and his contract was assured. Instead, he put it out there for the world to see, for 32 teams to weight and consider – and guaranteed that he would go to a team willing to be the home of the first openly gay NFL player. He also put a lot of pressure on himself to perform – if he can’t play, if he struggles, you can expect Tebow volumes of coverage about whether he’s a distraction, whether the pressure is too much, and from every side – this won’t be a beat writer and a division guy on ESPN, this will be a hundred media outlets at Tuesday practices. He squared up to the challenge, and I can’t imagine that it’s not a huge load off his mind just to have it out there and play it as it comes.
The other heroes in this, of course, are his teammates and coaches. Supposedly, he outed himself to the team at the beginning of last season, when the coaches were doing the old “tell us something about yourself” to get the team talking with each other, and he dropped that bombshell. And his team considered it and rolled right on as if nothing had changed. That ain’t hay, folks. That’s college football. That’s the SEC. That’s a team with national aspirations. If they were distracted or sidelined or negatively impacted, they sure didn’t look like in Nashville, or anywhere else in their twelve wins. And let’s face it, they could have won at South Carolina (double-OT slugfest that might have been the best game of the year) and probably could have beaten Auburn if Gus Malzahn’s mad-scientist act hadn’t gone batshit loonball.
But they rolled with it, and they won with him, and they had his back the whole way. That ain’t hay, folks. That’s the generation after mine, and it’s the generation that will ultimately redeem the South. They probably heard all the stuff you hear growing up about race and homosexuality and foreigners and everything else, but they also know kids of other colors and preferences, and they listen to Frank Ocean and they watch Glee and they wonder what some Southern kids always have: if they’re lying about this, what else are they lying about?
They will save us. You can hang that on Michael Sam, too: not for ourselves alone.
Well done, young man. You didn’t have to do our O-line like that, though.