It is a melancholy sight for anyone who wanders into a sports bar on a Sunday afternoon to behold a television screen crowded with young men of extraordinary size, speed and violence, hurling themselves at one another for the amusement of a nation that claims, in the very same broadcast window, to have moved beyond judging people by what their bodies can do. The National Football League has spent seven consecutive seasons stenciling "End Racism" into the turf of its end zones. It has never once stenciled anything into the 40-yard dash.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this represents an intolerable inconsistency, and I hope I shall not be censured for proposing a solution both cheap, easy and wholly in keeping with the league's own stated commitments.

The Problem, Stated Plainly

Every February, the league gathers its finest physical specimens into a stadium in Indianapolis and subjects them to an examination of almost Spartan cruelty: the 40-yard dash, the 225-pound bench press, the vertical leap, the three-cone drill. Whosoever runs fastest, lifts most and leaps highest is rewarded with a career. Whosoever cannot is sent home, regardless of character, regardless of need, regardless of the diversity of experience he might otherwise bring to a locker room.

This is, I submit, precisely the sort of narrow, outcome-obsessed gatekeeping the league claims to oppose everywhere else in American life. And yet the league has never applied its own equity standard to itself. It is well past time it did.

How This Might Look in Practice

Consider the quarterback position, traditionally reserved for men who can throw a football sixty yards while eleven opponents attempt to remove his head from his shoulders. Under my proposal, this requirement is revealed for the exclusionary relic it always was. An actuary of unimpeachable spreadsheet skill, having never thrown a football competitively, could be installed under center on the strength of his aptitude scores alone, with the understanding that his completion percentage is a small price to pay for the moral clarity of the roster.

At strong safety, I propose a museum security guard in his mid-fifties, a man of good character and questionable knees, who has spent thirty years successfully preventing patrons from touching the Rembrandts. His open-field tackling may leave something to be desired. His commitment to institutional values will not.

Long snapper, a position requiring split-second precision under physical duress, seems an ideal home for a retired ventriloquist, a man who has spent a career keeping his composure while another voice does all the talking, which is, when one considers it, most of what Congress already expects from its own long snappers.

And for the front office, I would suggest nothing be changed at all, since it is there, in general managers' suites and ownership boxes, that the league's own report card already shows its equity commitments mysteriously evaporating. But that is a separate modest proposal, for a separate season.

Objections, Anticipated and Answered

Some will object that professional football is a business, that fans pay to watch excellence, and that a league fielding actuaries and museum guards at cornerback will hemorrhage revenue, sponsors and the very television contracts that fund the equity initiatives in question. This objection, while grounded in commerce, misses the deeper point. What is a fourth-quarter comeback against the quiet dignity of a roster that finally looks like America, or at least like America's org chart?

Others will note that the league's current roster, built entirely from testing and performance, already happens to be majority Black by a wide margin, and that a demographic-target system might therefore require the league to remove players for the crime of having tested too well. To this I have no answer, except to observe that consistency was never promised to be comfortable, only to be consistent.

A Concluding Thought

I have no personal interest in this proposal beyond the public good. I do not own a franchise. I have never been within a hundred yards of the Combine's bench press. I offer this scheme freely, in the hope that a league so eager to stencil its values into the grass might, just once, let those values reach as far as the roster standing on top of them.

Until then, the stencil says one thing. The stopwatch says another. And the stopwatch, so far, is the only one that has ever been consistently obeyed.