Safety improvements to football would increase competitiveness

Alex Grant’s column in the January 27th edition of the Longmeadow News about the safety of high school football was a wake-up call for me, and it should generate a thoughtful dialogue among community leaders.

The studies revealing the dangers of head injuries in football are not new, but they are becoming increasingly precise in ways that demand ongoing attention and re-examination, especially from those of us who support and participate in youth football, as my son and I do. For me, the key piece of information provided by Mr. Grant was the finding that medically significant head trauma occurs in collisions that are not severe enough to cause a concussion.

My decision to let my son play football was not easy, but at the end of the day I was satisfied that concussions were the danger to be avoided and contented myself with the notion that I would make my son sit out the remainder of a football season if he got a concussion. If the research on more subtle, even indiscernible, head injuries resulting from routine play in football is sufficiently established, then I will have to strongly reconsider the pros and cons of youth football for my kids.
Many football fans and former players, now parents, see this type of research as an assault on the purity of a game that has considerable -positive- impact on the physical and character development of its players. I share their desire to protect the game and thereby its positive impacts on players. However, I’m not sure that defending the style of play dominant today qualifies as defending the “purity” of the game.

I think there is an argument to be made that these troubling injuries represent, not hard, tough play of a hard, tough game, but rather lazy, unskilled, and misguided play of a game that should require greater intelligence, athleticism and agility from all 11 players. In other words, the increased safety risks of contemporary football represent the real assault on the purity of the game.

As competitive football has become increasingly so, protective gear has evolved in ways that improve safety on the one hand, but that facilitate changes in strategy and tactics as well. The replacement of intelligence, athleticism, agility, and proper form and technique with brute force and power has clearly been an unintended by-product of advances in safety equipment, which are now used to protect from and to project punishment. The increased value of brute force and strength has also clearly allowed less athletic, even less healthy, young men to become valuable players. It has created an incentive to intentionally engage in body development that we know has negative impacts on short and long-term health.

Even linemen on both sides of the ball 50 years ago had to be much more athletic, quick on their feet, and thoughtful. They could rarely rely on size or brute force to overwhelm opponents, nor could they use their entire body as a weapon on every play. The bone crushing “hits” on receivers and backs by defensive players at all levels of football today are just that, “hits.” They are not tackles. They are not the product of expert tackling, but rather they are the result of expert “hitting” which pleases the crowd and adds another psychological layer to football strategy, but it does not equal the level of intelligence, agility, and athleticism required of good tackling. It also results in higher scoring games due to less effective tackling, which ironically is a win-win for pro football where the bottom line is about entertainment. You get highlight reel hits and highlight reel scoring, neither of which should be important in amateur athletics.

The biggest complaint about youth football players is their lack of sound tackling skills. But just as youth basketball players mimic the fundamentally unsound maneuvers of NBA players, such as traveling and carrying, young football players see NFL “hits” as the way it’s supposed to be done. The most serious injuries in football come most frequently from bad tackling technique; from “hits,” not from sound tackles.

The NFL doesn’t really play the game designed by Walter Camp at Yale University in the 1870’s, and because the “pro game” is about entertainment, not physical fitness or character development, I believe that youth, high school, and even college football need to set themselves apart from the game’s professional incarnation in much the same way as youth, high school, and college wrestling have always done. Today, neither pro football nor pro wrestling have anything to do with fitness or character development, which makes both incompatible with the goals of youth, high school, and college athletics.

I believe that football can be played safely, not by demanding less of an important quality like toughness, but rather by requiring more of qualities like, tactical intelligence, teamwork, athleticism, quickness, and agility. Restoration of amateur football’s purity may require smaller shoulder pads, helmets without face masks that can be used as weapons, and rules reforms that reduce the functionality of uncontrolled power. It may prove less exciting for the fans in the stands, but it would also prove much more competitive, and frankly more difficult, for the players on the field, which I think everyone would admit is far more important for the development of student-athletes.