Turning Football Back Into Rugby, For Sanity's Sake, At Great Cost

I BECAME A FOOTBALL FAN when football was a game of blocking and tackling, before blocking and tackling became hitting. In 1869, Rutgers and Princeton played a 4-2 game, the first ever recorded game of American football, and it more resembled rugby than it resembles our game today. Passing was illegal, and every play was a scrum initiated from a packed triangular offensive formation, with all plays ending in a huge pile of humanity a few feet removed from where the football initially lay. The legalization of passing several decades later was the first significant change in the all leather, smash mouth sport where the worst injuries were usually bumps, bruises, and nosebleeds, rugby style. I enjoyed watching the Cleveland Browns and Jim Brown defeat the Baltimore Colts and Johnny Unitas 27-0 in December, 1964, because my dad predicted a Colt's victory, and I was rooting for Brown, because he was black, and I was a reverse racist, always rooting for the underdog. Listening to the Missouri Tigers radio broadcasts in the mid sixties, with announcers Malan Aldridge, Sparky Stalcup, and somebody they called "coach", sponsored by MFA oil and MFA insurance, it awed me that the offensive and defensive linemen weighed in at around 230 to 240 pounds. That was big meat in those days. One Saturday afternoon in 1968 Mizzou beat Army, 7-3, the very same day that the World series game between St. Louis and Detroit ended with the same score. We love vicarious violence in America, and are willing to pay for it. Better weight lifting equipment and natural selection has given us the three hundred pound-plus offensive and defensive lines, and quarterbacks can no longer "scramble". Fran Tarkenton used to take the snap, and, if he couldn't find a receiver, he would run around in the backfield for what seemed like a full minute, until he found somebody open, or found a running lane, while two hundred and fifty pound sluggards chased him in vain, and he danced and dodged out of their grasp with ease. Tark wasn't the only QB who could do that. Today's three hundred pounders are far more agile than their ancestors, and are as quick and agile as the quarterbacks, who have only a few seconds to do or die. IN 1985, William Perry of the Chicago Bears was called "refrigerator" merely because he weighed three hundred pounds. Now, they are all fridges. Players who retired before 1970 had a far lower incidence of late life dementia and permanent physical paralyzing injuries than today's retirees. There is talk, serious talk among coaches, to turn back the clock, and re-rugby-fy the game, to reverse our modern insanity which says that the harder the block and tackle, the harder the hit, the better. Now that high schoolers weigh in at three hundred, it might be time to think about it. The only drawback would be the loss of billions of dollars in revenue to the billionaire who own the game, and the loss of our precious vicarious violence from our high def flat screen fantasy world of couch potatoes, hot wings, and cold beer.