Josh Rosen is widely seen as the best passer in this month’s NFL draft. But since the UCLA quarterback’s junior season was cut short by two concussions in less than a month, Rosen has been picked apart by unnamed league insiders who question his love for the game and see his intelligence and intellectual curiosity as red flags. Even Rosen’s former head coach has stirred the pot. Jim Mora, who lives a few blocks from Rosen in the posh Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach, said the Cleveland Browns should take USC quarterback Sam Darnold first overall because Darnold, who also grew up in a Southern California beach town, has a “blue-collar, gritty attitude.”
Trying to make sense of why the NFL seems so wary of Rosen, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King concluded that the league has an “inherent distrust of rich kids.” But in an age when top middle school prospects have private throwing instructors, rich kids rule the quarterback position. Tom Brady’s father owns a national insurance consultancy. New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who like Rosen was a youth tennis star, is the son of a prominent Texas lawyer. And Peyton and Eli Manning learned football from their legendary (and rich) quarterback father Archie Manning. These four quarterbacks have combined to win nine of the last 15 Super Bowls.
The NFL’s distrust of Rosen isn’t about money; it’s about class and concussions. At a time when the league is on the defensive about player safety and youth football participation is falling, the outspoken, freethinking Rosen is a star player the league might not be able to control.
Yes, Rosen comes from a wealthy family. His mother, Elizabeth Lippincott, who graduated from Princeton and has worked as a book editor, is the great-great-granddaughter of 19th-century industrialist Joseph Wharton, who founded the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. His father, Charles Rosen, is a whistleblowing spine surgeon who lost out on becoming U.S. surgeon general in part because his peers despised him for revealing their financial connections to the medical-device industry.
Rosen’s parents have supported his NFL ambitions. They’ve also nurtured his penchant for calling out powerful people and institutions. While at UCLA, Rosen mocked the school for inking a $280 million athletic sponsorship deal with Under Armour, writing on Instagram, “We’re still amateurs though … Gotta love non-profits #NCAA.” He also defended top college players who choose to sit out bowl games for fear of sustaining injuries that could jeopardize their NFL paydays, and he posted a photo of himself wearing a “Fuck Trump” hat at a Trump golf course.
Rosen’s political views could make him a controversial figure in a league that’s silenced players, like former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who bring politics onto the playing field. But the NFL knows player safety is the one issue that could truly imperil its billion-dollar franchises.
The concussion crisis is now threatening the NFL’s talent pipeline. About 25,000 fewer students played high school football in 2016 than the previous year, according to a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations. At least two wealthy school districts in California have struggled to field football teams, while state lawmakers are considering trailblazing legislation that would prohibit minors from playing organized tackle football before high school.
Given that highly educated coastal elites increasingly see football as too dangerous for their sons to play, it should come as no surprise that the NFL sees Rosen, the son of highly educated coastal-elite parents, as a soft, untrustworthy outsider.
Any chance Rosen had to ease the league’s collective angst about him vanished with last season’s concussions, the second of which kept him out of UCLA’s bowl game. Ross Tucker, a former NFL offensive lineman and Ivy League graduate, has openly made the connection between Rosen’s roots and his concussion history. “His mom went to Princeton; his dad went to Penn and is a renowned spine surgeon,” Tucker told CBS Radio. “If you draft him in the top five picks, he gets a minimum of $24 million fully guaranteed. Let’s be logical about this: How many concussions is he going to play through?”
This gets to the heart of why the NFL seems so concerned about Rosen’s intelligence and wide-ranging interests. In football’s concussion era, those traits make him a risky bet: Rosen isn’t just a potential injury bust. He’s a potential time bomb for the entire league.
Imagine if Rosen becomes a star, then quits football after sustaining more concussions. What’s to stop him from using his smarts to make the case that the sport is inherently unsafe?
If owners like the Houston Texans’ Bob McNair liken Kaepernick and his allies to “inmates running the prison,” they have to worry that Rosen could be the proverbial fox in the henhouse.
Rosen has to some extent cemented his own reputation for being entitled and indifferent toward football. As a high schooler at the Elite 11 quarterback camp, he feuded with his instructors and said he saw football as a means to an end. “For something to be the most important thing in your life, it has to be able to last a lifetime,” he said. “Football ends at some point.”
In a recent interview with ESPN, Rosen tried to address the league’s concerns about him. He professed his love for football and said that although he’s “acutely aware” of the risk of brain damage that comes from playing the sport, “I’m not going to say anything about … concussions until I know all the facts.”
In the same interview, he called his father his hero, adding that “he’s fought pharmaceutical companies and corruption in the medical industry his entire life. He’s gone David vs. Goliath time and time again and won every time. He’s a moral person who does what’s right.” One wonders what such a moral person might say about a corporate entity that long resisted acknowledging the link between concussions and degenerative brain diseases and that formed a concussion committee led by a rheumatologist with no background in brain science that produced reports discounting the harm posed by repeated blows to the head.
The NFL has good reason to fear doctors who demand honest medical research as well as freethinking, concussion-prone superstars who are acutely aware of the dangers they face when they take the field.
None of this is to say that Rosen won’t be drafted early in the first round of the NFL draft. He might even go third overall to the New York Jets, a team whose owner, Woody Johnson, is Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. A quarterback-starved league can’t ignore his talent. But for perhaps the first time, team executives must ask themselves if they can trust their franchises—and their jobs—to someone who might end up questioning whether pro football should exist.
