In the third episode of American sports storyAaron Hernandez (Josh Rivera) — a star tight end for the Florida Gators — receives the John Mackey Award. During the ceremony, he’s introduced to the award’s namesake (Martin Fisher), an NFL hall of famer who, like so many players before him, was left disabled by dementia after retiring from the game. As an attendant helps Mackey out of his wheelchair to pose for a photo, the camera slowly pans from his face — his expression bewildered, vaguely vacant — to Hernandez, whose smile beams with youth and promise.

Eight years later, in 2017, Aaron Hernandez would hang himself in his prison cell after being sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Odin Lloyd (J. Alex Brinson). An autopsy revealed that Hernandez, 27, had severe brain damage known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a condition that can lead to “aggressiveness, explosiveness, impulsiveness, depression, memory loss, and other cognitive changes” — from repeated head injuries sustained during his college and professional football careers.

Created by Stuart Zicherman (The Americans) and based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., American sports story (premiering September 17 on FX) explores the prejudices and calcified opinions surrounding Hernandez and the crimes he committed. The somber, relentlessly sad limited series attempts to humanize the New England Patriots tight end as a troubled young man grappling with a history of abuse, internalized homophobia and sports institutions that treated his body like a commodity. While Sports story doesn’t absolve Hernandez of blame — nor should it — but misses the opportunity to give the NFL the stern rebuke it deserves for its role in the player’s downfall.

As teenagers growing up in Bristol, Connecticut, Aaron and his brother, DJ (Ean Castellanos), train for football careers with their father, Dennis (Vincent Laresca), an abusive, controlling bully who also frequently clashes with the boys’ mother, Terri (Tammy Blanchard). At his father’s urging, Aaron plans to play for the University of Connecticut, like his older brother—but after Dennis unexpectedly dies, Aaron begins considering offers from other eager football suitors, including Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck), the winning, charismatic coach of the Florida Gators.

Inexperienced, easily blinded and hungry for approval from male authority figures, Aaron is no match for the smooth sales pitch and shiny, often empty promises of the coaches and scouts trying to lure him into their program. Nor does he benefit from the Gators’ no-consequences culture — which includes employing a lawyer, Huntley Johnson (Jeffrey Nordling), to keep players out of trouble with the law.

The Hernandez saga could certainly fall under the heading American crime story banner; instead, it’s the first in a new sports-themed expansion from executive producer Ryan Murphy’s American Story franchise. Perhaps the goal is to broaden the audience beyond true-crime aficionados, but for curious gridiron fans, it’s worth noting that Hernandez isn’t drafted by the National Football League until halfway through the 10-episode season. Zicherman spends the first four episodes exploring the self-destructive cycle that begins to consume Aaron’s life: At work, he takes brutal physical (and verbal) beatings on the field, leaving him frustrated and looking for an escape. He turns to drugs and begins to socialize more with his dealer, Alexander Bradley (Roland Buck III).

Though engaged to his high school sweetheart, Shayanna (Jaylen Barron), Aaron can’t ignore his attraction to men—including Chris (Jake Cannavale), a kind-hearted physical therapist. The ensuing guilt and shame over these secret relationships causes him to push himself even harder in competitions, resulting in even more catastrophic damage to his brain and body. Sports story presents this toxic cocktail — Hernandez’s insecurity and immaturity, drug-fueled paranoia, and devotion to an organization that wanted him on the field at all costs — as the driving force behind his downfall. Through it all, Rivera captures the boyish charm and goofy charisma of Hernandez’s public persona, while instilling his moments of doubt and impulsive rage with unsettling power.

None of the big-name football figures involved in Hernandez’s career — including Meyer, Patriots owner Robert Kraft (Jerry Levine) and the team’s legendary head coach, Bill Belichick (Norbert Leo Butz) — emerge unscathed. The NFL and college football industries are painted as uncompromising institutions run by wealthy men who view their players as little more than profit margins. Yazbeck delivers a standout performance as Meyer, whose avuncular warmth and magnetism turns to icy indifference once Aaron Hernandez is no longer useful to his program. The only people who treat Hernandez with any semblance of humanity are his agent, Brian Murphy (the always welcome Thomas Sadoski), and Patriots quarterback Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger, effectively dull).

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Sports story is most compelling when it takes aim at the football industrial complex itself — which it doesn’t do nearly enough. The fourth episode gives viewers a far-too-brief glimpse into the annual NFL Scouting Combine, when representatives from all 32 teams evaluate college prospects against a series of physical and mental challenges. As a long line of shirtless players lines up to be weighed, measured and otherwise judged before an audience, one black athlete turns to another and sneers, “Now I know why they call this a slave auction.” It’s one of the few overt mentions of race in the NFL, and the distinctly uncomfortable optics of (predominantly) white owners overseeing a league with a majority of non-white players.

Oddly enough, the show also downplays the NFL’s long and controversial history with CTE. While viewers often see Aaron’s apparent side effects of head trauma — a high-pitched ringing in his ears, moments of memory loss, blurred vision — Sports story fails to explore the issue in depth. At one point, a story about the NFL’s $765 million settlement with injured players in 2013 plays on a TV in a character’s hospital room, and the show spends only a few minutes on the shocking results of the neuropathological study of Hernandez’s brain.

To be fair, the NFL, which was not involved in the creation of Sports storyprobably won’t love this show. But for an anthology franchise that has been so successful at exposing the larger societal and circumstantial factors behind outrageous true crimes in the past — systemic racism and sexism (The People vs. OJ Simpson), marginalization of the LGBTQ community (The Murder of Gianni Versace), unbridled and irresponsible media sensationalism in politics (Deposition) — Sports story takes a surprisingly ambiguous stance on the League’s role in Hernandez’s downward spiral.

Perhaps the producers and FX didn’t want to antagonize the NFL, an entity that once got ESPN to cancel its own football-themed scripted drama because it wasn’t happy with the way the players were being portrayed. Or perhaps the Sports story team didn’t want to risk looking like they were going to show up at a lot of sympathy for Hernandez, who is the most vilified and ridiculed NFL player since Orenthal James Simpson. But without a sharp point of view, American sports story is little more than a well-executed retelling of another American tragedy, this time about a broken young man surrounded by people who fail him — almost as much as he fails himself. Grade: B