Shield power

Truth bomb for you this morning, as a 5-foot-9 pipsqueak considers a life among giants: Professional football will break you.

It is, in fact, designed to break you.

Its appeal, and much of the gravitational pull for those who play it, is in a great sense predicated on the inevitability of that breakage. The entire edifice of the National Football League -- its operational business model -- is constructed on that inevitability, on the premise that the game wears out its human assets at an alarming rate, and thus those assets must be constantly replenished.

Which brings us back to the 5-9 pipsqueak.

His name is Kyler Murray, and he's not just any 5-9 pipsqueak. He just won the Heisman Trophy, for one thing, as the quarterback of the Oklahoma Sooners. He's a dazzling athlete. And he's projected as a first-round draft pick in next April's NFL draft.

Which is why he's decided to enter that draft. Even though, unlike many of his peers, he's got other options.

For Murray, the main option is baseball, in which he also dazzles. It's why the Oakland Athletics made him the ninth overall pick in last June's draft. It's why they've signed him to a $5 million contract.

On the other hand ... it's only baseball.

This will not sit well with the generation who still regards it as the National Pastime, swaddled in myth and legend and unassailable history. It is not, of course. That is football now. That has been football for some span of years.

And so the NFL, aka the Shield, remains unsurpassed in its attraction to young men like Kyler Murray, who was raised swaddled in all of its myths and legends just as surely as his grandfather was with baseball's. The game will break you, it's designed to break you, and yet there will always be Kyler Murrays willing to be broken. It's why the pearl-clutchers predicting doom for football are so utterly wrong; if players will in the future not play it as long as they do now, they will still play it.

Even when it makes as little sense as it does in Murray's case.

No quarterback as tiny as Murray has played in the NFL since Doug Flutie three decades ago, and that was before football became the game it is today. A good case in point is Lamar Jackson, another Heisman winner, another smallish guy the draft gurus all said should choose another position. He proved them wrong this season, but the jury is still well out on whether or not, at 6-2 and 212 pounds, he'll be able to survive running as much as he runs right now.

Murray is a runner/passer cut from much the same mold. With, of course, one glaring difference:

At 5-9 and 194, he's almost half-a-foot shorter and almost 20 pounds lighter than Jackson.

And yet ... the Shield casts its spell. And so Murray will throw in his lot next April, even though the actuarial tables suggest he'd have a much longer career and make much more money long-term playing baseball.

Eventually, he may realize that, and come back to the baseball fold, if only for the economics. Other baseball/football standouts have done that. But just the fact he's willing to give the NFL a shot speaks volumes about football's place in the American sporting consciousness.

And baseball's as well.