The first results on google’s autofill feature are, well, fake news. Photo courtesy of Health and Sports Co-Editor Aidan Field. 

  Many students at San Luis Obispo High School participate in football, however the sport is surrounded by stigmas and stereotypes. Football players are consistently portrayed as dumb and rude in American pop-culture. It’s such an incredibly common stereotype that almost every piece of literature and media that takes place at or around a high school uses the football player stereotype at least once. Notable shows such as the movie “Heathers” paint football players in a negative light.

  “I feel like sometimes the players are kind of just willing to fall into it, and just accept the stereotype with grades or activities off the field,” said football player and senior quarterback Jace Gomes.

  High-schoolers who are in football are by no means a small number of people. In the 2021-22 school year, there were over 84 thousand high school football players in the state of California alone. Even though this number has declined from previous years, the amount of football players in the state still remains strong. 

   This means that out of the over 1.7 million Californian teens who are enrolled in public high school, almost five percent of them are in football. That’s not a small group of people to be stereotyping. 

  It is true that football players on average have slightly lower SAT scores than the average student. This can be expected since athletic schedules usually leave less time to perfect academic skills, but not all football players score low academically. 

  Scores that athletes have can also be offset by other factors. Families that highly prioritize academics might not allow their children to participate in sports. This makes students that aren’t in any sports do better academically on average, not because of the fact that they aren’t in any sports, but because a higher proportion of the student population that has been pressured to do better academically is also absent from the sporting rosters, and under-represented in sports participation as a result.

  It’s worth noting that other types of athletes also have lower SAT scores than average. But, they aren’t portrayed with the same kinds of stereotypes that football players are. In fact, men’s basketball players on average scored even worse than football players on the SAT, but, they’re never portrayed as negatively as football players. It is also important to acknowledge that test scores aren’t an accurate measure of someone’s intelligence.

  “Coach Thompson has done a very good job at getting rid of those stereotypes,” said Gomes. 

  Ultimately, every individual is different, so generalizing and stigmatizing a group of people is harmful and football players are no exception.

  Sources: usnews.com, latimes.com, cde.ca.gov