Reforming Football

THE YOUNG MAN who had a heart attack on a football field is going to be just fine, thank God, and thanks to science and modern medicine. People have been asking the question "What is the NFL going to do"? Just when I think that someone is finally raising the issue of the inherently violent nature of the game because of the young man's injury and provide sugggestons for reform, no, they're talking about scheduling a make up date for the game that was canceled. We are left to bring up the far more pressing matter here. Of the several different kinds of football: rugby football, soccer football, Canadian football, Australian football, and American football, American football is arguably the most harmful and dangerous. It almsot seems as if everybody who plays American football for even a relatively short period of time ends up with at least one serious injury, often one which causes lifelong debilitation, below the neck, above the neck, or both. Violent though U.S. football has always been, its more so than ever now, partly because of the greatly increased size, speed, and strength of modern athletes, and partly because the demand for violence by the general public, by American culture, is strong and unrelenting. This enhanced violence is obvious to people who have been watching the sport for, say, more than half a century. One posible solution or at least improvement is already in the rulebook: the rule against unnecessary roughness, and the five yard penalty that goes along with it. It almsot seems as if American football culture is started to expect that blockers and tacklers do more than merely block and tackle, that they do what we call "hit". As if the goal now is not berely to bring the ball carrier to the ground, but to drive him into the ground. Or, not merely to block the path of a potential tackler to the ball carrier, but to eliminate the ability of the would be tackler to continue playing. The advent of this change in football culture seems to coincide with the general trend in American culture, movies, music, books, video games, and so forth, towards greater levels of violence. The "roughing the passer" penalty carries with it a larger penalty than "unnecessary roughness", and applies only to the quarterback or to the player throwing the football. The "unnecessary roughness" penalty, a smaller penalty, can apply to any player at any time. Just by the very nature of football, it wouldn't require very many such penalities to motivate every football team to avoid making needless violent blocks and tackles, to generally and fundamentlly change football culture to make it less violent, and to renew emphasis on and the importance of form blocking and tackling, effective blocking and tackling, rather than violence. We all know the difference.