I have been meaning to write about football injuries for a long time now. No, this is not about concussions, though the recent increase in interest toward concussions--both from the public and within the sport--is a very good step in the right direction. It's incredibly obvious that repeated blows to the head, which are of course common in football, will shorten and handicap a human being's life. I don't need to explain why that is a huge concern.
Actually what has interested me for a while is sudden traumatic injuries. Paralysis, severe ligament damage, broken bones of all variety, and the body generally being made to move in ways it wasn't meant to move.
Background: I don't like watching people get hurt. MMA is displeasing to me, for example. When an athlete hyperextends a joint and they show the replays on TV I will always look away.
In a violent sport such as football, serious injuries are unavoidable. The participants and the audience accept this. But lines can be crossed. Football players have become more and more efficient implements of violence, and faster moving bodies produce more dangerous collisions. The whole sport is seemingly on an unstoppable path toward true self-destruction. I mean, literally, someone is going to get killed, on the field, during a game, in front of millions of TV viewers. I can't possibly be the only person who realizes how inevitable this is? Secondarily, I can't possibly be the only person who thinks this is wrong?
Watch a clip of an old football game sometime. Even as recent as the 1970s will do. Don't watch the game, but the players. They were so much smaller and moved so much slower and collided with each other so much gentler (relative term). People still got hurt, and sometimes seriously, but the imminent mortal danger that I'm talking about wasn't there. A guy like "Mean" Joe Greene was famous for being a big and nasty guy. He was 6'4" and weighed 269 pounds. Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers current quarterback, is 6'5" and weighs 241. Football is a game played today by entirely different kinds of athletes.
To illustrate this point in another way, watch a lightweight boxing match sometime. Then watch a heavyweight contest. Different worlds. It's hard for the lightweights to knock each other out, even though they are both so small, because they're just not strong enough. But if you matched a heavyweight versus a lightweight, the heavyweight would seriously struggle to beat the little guy, even though his power advantage is massive. Why? Because he's probably not fast enough to land a solid punch on the more nimble lightweight. Today's football players are like an unholy mixture of the two boxers: both big and strong enough to inflict damage, and also fast enough to compound that force.
I guess a lot of this is obvious. The reason I decided it was a pressing concern has nothing to do with it, though. The clearest risk in football today is the failure of helmets to stay on heads. It used to be you rarely saw a player's helmet pop off on the field, and when you did, it was more of a blooper, something to laugh at. Hey, look at that player without his helmet, haha. Now, through either poor design or--most likely--poor attention to actually buckling them on properly, helmets seem to come loose on every other play. Of course players are taught to be tough and to finish plays, too. I think you can see what I'm getting at. Someone is going to die on the field, perhaps soon. Someone's head is going to get split open, literally. Hey players: there is no glory is getting your head split open. It doesn't make you tough, it makes you dead.
So the combination of helmets coming loose and players--through evolution, constant weightlifting, and of course steroids--morphing into deadly instruments themselves, will surely lead to what will be called tragedy. I guess the question is: who will care? Will the games go on? Will changes be made, instantly or over time? Will TV productions change at all? There is definitely a gladiator effect in play with today's NFL, from both the players' and fans' aspects. An important thing is to understand, as a fan, how you feel about this complicity. Are you ok having your players die on the field? If not, would you support mandatory increases in time missed after injuries (such as with the ongoing concussion debate), or even changes in the rules? If you are conscientious about this issue at all, then you would have to be fully in support of anything that increases safety. So, while I'm at it, let's see if I can come up with anything.
(disclaimer--these might be terrible ideas.)
Possible solutions to the NFL's upcoming death problem:
1. Fewer players. Perhaps 9-on-9 instead of 11-on-11. Fewer players means less hitting and more space. Naturally offense would increase substantially, but that's something we'd have to deal with.
2. Bigger fields. This is just a corollary to #1. The only downside here is that with more space, some players might actually have more room to build up speed and then actually hit harder.
3. Mandatory weight limits. A radical idea, sure, but maybe no lineman could be more than 310 pounds, no linebacker more than 260, and no running back more than 235. The relationship between size and speed and violence is a geometric one, so that a reduction of any would have a potentially large impact, pun intended.
4. Full-scale steroid and hormone testing. Obviously.
5. Increased pad protection. This would not only help protect players from hits, but it would also slow them down and make their hits less dangerous. This is my favorite solution so far. In the absence of #3, this would have a similar if less drastic effect.
6. Bigger penalties and bigger fines. This is my least favorite solution because it bastardizes not just the game but the players themselves. (Oddly, this is the solution that is closest to the NFL's current approach. Go figure.) But you could make unnecessary hits penalized up to 50 yards or more, and fines could be raised almost limitlessly, until the players finally got it.
The unfortunate reality of some of these improvements is that it would reduce competitiveness. But maybe that itself is a larger issue. Maybe the NFL, in so long dancing with the devil that is violence, has let itself go too far, so that the only way to save itself is to turn itself into something different. I mean, maybe they have crossed the point of no return with regards to player safety.
(Now, a personal note. I am a fan of the Steelers. They have been a franchise famous for tough football and aggressive often violent defenses. During the 1970s, they also apperently helped proliferate the use of steroids to exacerbate the violence problem. Maybe my favorite Steeler of all time is Troy Polamalu, a man who's freakish athleticism and reckless play renders him bascially incapable of staying healthy. A human body just isn't equipped to handle his level of physical ability. Finally, probably my most admired Steeler of my lifetime is Hines Ward, a man often called the dirtiest player in the league because of his deliberately violent hits, and a man who has been brutalized himself more times than I can count. Of course one of the reasons people, including myself, love him is that he bounces right up from these nasty hits with a smile on his face every time, as though he enjoys the violence. I am sure he does enjoy it. But how is he any different from a Roman gladiator and how are we any different from the bloodthirsty fans? Hines Ward's life after the age of 60, if he makes it that far, will be pathetic. Sure, it is the path he has chosen, but what does it mean to have helped and supported him along that path?)
UPDATE: If you agree with any of this, you ought to check out Part II of ESPN.com's Malcolm Gladwell-Bill Simmons email exchange. Or at least one little section of it, as it's very long. Amazingly, it was published the very same day as my blog post here and more amazingly it contains some very similar arguing points (one of them even mentions weight limits, for crying out loud). You'll just have to trust me as a non-plagiarist. I guess it's a good thing though: this stuff is a more present concern to more people, so the chance is just slightly higher that positive changes are possible.
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