Column: Are you ready for some football (history)?

Monday Night Football is about as close to a staple of American society as you can get, I think. I was at the New Meadowlands (or MetLife Stadium, as the many, many signs will remind you) this past Monday night, with tickets courtesy of the Butler College Office, to watch the Jets play the Dolphins, and it should have been an experience good enough to fill a column. I’ve probably watched somewhere in the ballpark of 300 NFL games on television in my life (or 900 hours, or ... 37.5 days, yikes), but this was the first one I had ever seen in person. More than that, it was Monday night.

To anyone who stayed home and watched, it’s not news that the game wasn’t a very good one. Miami is a very bad team, possibly Andrew Luck-bad. And one thing that being there in person did help me to understand is that although Jets coach Rex Ryan does his best to wave his hands, telling the media to “look over here, look at me,” the team he coaches has no coherent offensive attack. They have no set of core defensive personnel that, when on the field, can be effective against the pass and the run. Mark Sanchez cannot make the throws that Ryan Fitzpatrick or Matt Hasselbeck or Jason Campbell (may he rest in peace) can.

There were a few highlights. Darrelle Revis did his Darrelle Revis thing. Matched up with Brandon Marshall almost all night, Revis picked off two passes, one in his own end zone that he took 100 yards the other way for a momentum-shifting score. There might be better players in the league than Revis — Aaron Rodgers, Calvin Johnson, Patrick Willis — but I’m almost positive there isn’t one that changes the landscape of every play he’s in as thoroughly as he does.

And what else? There might have been something to write about the low Princeton turnout. For $25 seats offered to all of Butler and Wilson, maybe 20 students came — an amiable mix of casual and less casual fans, few if any of whom counted themselves as Jets fans (I am not one). Was the time commitment too large? Do students here just not care about sports? Were most of the people who do care unable to come because they were at, um, sports practice? Who knows? Oh — Shonn Greene ran over a ref! That was cool.

Maybe the most interesting thing was the Ring of Honor ceremony the Jets orchestrated at halftime, when much of the crowd was in the bathroom or getting food. On hand were the four 2011 inductees — they were to be presented with a ring from owner Woody Johnson. Their names are to be placed, along with other Jets “worth remembering,” on banners that circle the inside of the stadium. What struck me, as a young person with a passing interest in the Jets and an intense interest in professional football, was that of the four men being celebrated — arguably four of the 10 or so most important players to ever suit up for the Jets — I had heard of none of them.

Larry Grantham; Freeman McNeil; Gerry Philbin; Al Toon. Grantham and Philbin were two key defensive cogs on the Super Bowl III winning Jets — Grantham was the team MVP that year. McNeil, before Curtis Martin came along, was the most prolific running back the Jets ever had. Al Toon was a wildly popular, 6-foot-4-inch wide receiver — a first-round pick.

Football is unique in the way it both glorifies and ignores the players that comprise its history. NFL Films is without a doubt the best source of archival material that any professional league has. But beyond Johnny Unitas and Jim Brown, can you think of a player whose highlight reel would be primarily in black and white? Go beyond that: How many players can you think of who played the bulk of their careers before 1980? In baseball, kids grow up with history in the forefront — it’s Mays and Cobb and Mantle instead of Puckett and Griffey, Jr. and (Bernie) Williams. In basketball, whole eras can be defined by players — by Jordan, by Bird and Magic, by Chamberlain. It’s no coincidence the Hall of Fame for each of the two is more important, more revered, than that of the NFL.

Part of that is about the individuality of baseball and the personality of basketball, and part of it is that football is a younger game, but I think a great deal of the forgetting that goes on with the NFL is intentional. The reason fans who grow up with Adrian Peterson don’t hear about Eric Dickerson, or the reason young Michael Vick fans don’t hear about Randall Cunningham, is simple: Football is about now. It’s about this instant.

When Larry Grantham got a chance to speak to the crowd, he spoke passionately about the honor of it, that the night was the greatest honor he had ever received. He was a Jet for 13 years, and he played without the aid of modern training staffs and modern medicine. Al Toon retired at 29 after eight years and at least nine concussions, and he has suffered from post-concussion syndrome ever since. His words seemed fine, but those of McNeil were markedly halting and slurred.

The concept is gaining traction, but it bears repeating: No sport — almost no profession — takes the same toll on the body and mind as football does. You hear the stories — All-Pros who at 55 have trouble just getting out of bed in the morning; Super Bowl heroes from the early days who die homeless, or by their own hand, or simply from the physical deterioration of their brains. These players are autonomous human beings capable of making their own decisions. They chose to make money in exchange for the destruction of their lives. But they also definitively deserve more help from the league that benefits from the groundwork they set down.

It starts, like all things tend to, with the fans. The league doesn’t care about the pensions and healthcare costs and depressive episodes of its past players because the fans have given them no reason to care. At the risk of sounding like a PSA: That needs to change. Learn about the history of your favorite team (sorry, Texans, Panthers and Jaguars fans). Do your best to learn about their successes and failures and qualities and personas. Once you’ve done that, it becomes significantly less difficult to treat them as people. Otherwise, I think, we are all guilty of dealing with players the way ownership always has and still does and is celebrated for — as inhuman commodities, for buying and selling and trading and, ultimately, discarding.