Unpopular Opinion: High School Football Players Putting College Stickers on Their Helmets is Classless

I’ve been seeing a handful of clips coming through my feeds on Tik Tok and Instagram of the youths these days doing something that, as a former player myself, I believe to be unsportsmanlike at best and trashy at worst.

There are now high school football players out there putting stickers of the College Football programs they committed to in the rear quadrants/backsides of their helmets. Some have gone even lower and put a sticker of every school they got offers from.

Call me jealous (I’m not), call me an old man shouting at a cloud, but from a sportsmanship perspective I think it’s despicable. There’s end zone cellys, and instagram highlight reels which are just signs of the times, and then there’s this.

This is a distasteful, needless flex. It’s rubbing the fact that you’re getting to play college ball in the faces of everyone else on the field. “Look how important I am.” Even the placement of the stickers, on the backs of the helmets, are positioned in such a manner that they’re best viewed as the player runs away from his opponents; literally, economically and metaphorically leaving them in the dust. Dude, we watch film. We know who you are. You don’t need to tell us.

There’s nothing gentlemanly about this. This isn’t dapping up your boys after a score or an interception. It’s prolonged taunting. When you’re playing for your school, you are representing YOUR SCHOOL on that field. Your team. Not yourself. It’s the utmost basic, bare minimum essential principle of a team sport that is apparently lost on them now.

I’m more angry at the adults in the room, the coaches and parents, for allowing this BS. Such a bad example.

I blame the leaking of our national obsession with college football, college recruiting and scouting into the lives of younger and younger kids, and I blame NIL. Chasing a big bag over love of the game, beyond basic compensation for health and safety risks.

If we’d seen shit like that on an opposing team back before NIL, back in the late 00’s and early 10’s when my friends and I played, back when we just loved smash-mouth football? We’d do everything we could to make the game absolute hell for the kid with stickers. Go for his knees, twist his ankles, targeting, whatever. Anything to ruin his season, assuming we could even touch him. Shit, behind closed doors our coaches might have even condoned it.

Multiple teammates of mine went on to play college ball and even now are in the NFL and I am so proud of them. None of them would have done shit like this.

Rant over. I hate what’s happened to our favorite sport.