Fathers Produce Leaders of Men
Because of their backgrounds, some football coaches can get away with saying things, even true things, that would get other football coaches fired.
University of Colorado football coach
Deion Sanders spoke such a truth in a recent interview with the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen.
Eisen asked Sanders what he thought of Philadelphia quarterback Jalen Hurts, who once lost the starting quarterback job at Alabama to Tua Tagovailoa before transferring to the University of Oklahoma, where he led the Sooners to a Big 12 championship. Sanders praised Hurts’s tenacity, noting how what happened at Alabama propelled him to succeed first at Oklahoma and then in the NFL.
“Can you tell who that is just by talking to them?” Eisen followed up, noting that as a new college football coach, Sanders has to make judgments about thousands of high school football players.
“Well, we have different attributes: smart, tough, fast, disciplined with character,” Sanders began. “Now quarterbacks are different. We want a mother and father, you know, dual parent,” he continued. “He has to be a leader of men.”
Sanders also said he wanted his offensive linemen to come from married families too, particularly ones that have “a strong father that they adhere to.”
Unlike Sanders, I have never coached football, so I can’t speak to how well his observations reflect the reality of which quarterbacks and offensive linemen produce the best on-field results. There is, however, plenty of research showing that boys from married two-parent homes have much better educational, professional, and life success than boys from single-parent homes.
Boys raised by fathers are more likely to stay out of trouble in school, more likely to graduate from high school and from college, more likely to be employed as adults, and more likely to go on to start and maintain successful families of their own.
This shouldn’t be controversial. This should be (and is) common sense. Unfortunately, a majority of the public and an overwhelming majority of Democrats refuse to acknowledge that it is true. They say that single-parent households are just as effective at raising children as married households. Many may wish that were true — that married and single-parent households give children an equal chance to succeed. But it is just not true, as the data do not bear it out. And the sooner more people go back to acknowledging that truth, the sooner we can do something to fix it.