By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/?m=1
So the NFL is going to start suspending the people responsible for its most "egregious" head-to-head collisions.
Good.
Start with the officials.
Charles LeClaire/US Presswire James Harrison's hit against Mohamed Massaquoi in last Sunday's game.
It's one thing for players not to know the rules, but players aren't paid to know what constitutes encroachment or how many seconds to put back on the game clock in defiance of the whole space-time continuum. Officials, as I understood it from the ancient texts, in addition to being paid expressly for those purposes, owe their professional existence to not only knowing the rules, but to enforcing them correctly.
But that's strictly theory.
Perhaps owing to the unrelenting cadence of high-speed collisions, perhaps in deference to marketing forces that position the game as some celebration of violent acts you'd get arrested for in any other place, the modern NFL official enforces league rules selectively, ignoring some, insisting that others receive 100 percent compliance.
So please, keep those end-zone celebrations tasteful. Catering is frowned upon, certainly.
The most ignored rule in the league's ever-fluid digest of not-terribly-well-written rules is the one about the helmet. I'd even say it's ignored "egregiously," a word the NFL brass rarely delivers unto the fan base until somebody's really, really upset. I'm talking about the rule that prohibits "using any part of the player's helmet or facemask to butt, spear, or ram an opponent violently or unnecessarily."
If there are 130 plays in an NFL game, I'm going to say that something like that happens on at least a third of them. In the Steelers-Cleveland game Sunday, eight penalties were called, none for that particular violation.
Where is the flag for a defender running into an opponent head first? Where is the flag for the defender who launches himself at another player's head, intentionally compromising the safety of both's brains?
You might see a penalty flag occasionally for this, but they are nowhere near as common as the violation, and thus, nowhere near as common as concussions are in this game. The NFL, most conspicuously, but to similar extents the colleges and high schools as well, have created a football field where just about any kind of collision is not only permitted but encouraged.
Sunday was an especially brutal day for purposeful head trauma, coming as it did one day after a Rutgers University player was paralyzed below the neck making a tackle against Army. So the announcement Tuesday that suspensions are forthcoming for players who have no respect for the cognitive future of others or for themselves was most welcome.
It's not an overreaction in any sense, and, after decade of underreacting to the game's snowballing dangers, or not reacting at all, it's doubtful the NFL would even be, as Mike Tomlin might put it, overreaction capable.
There are plenty of overreactions out there, but they're nowhere near the implementation stage by any football administrators. One is the proposed elimination of helmets. Since rugby players routinely tackle each other without commonly disastrous head-banging, this theory goes, your footballers would be better off without them. Wrong, I'm afraid. Rugby is played by not-very-big people running not-very-fast, and players generally have enough to time to protect their heads. Football players explode at each other in bursts of adrenaline, the traffic often not allowing for even minimally protective reactions.
James Harrison's hit on Joshua Cribbs Sunday could not likely have been helped, because Cribbs changed direction directly into Harrison's path. But that's not the same as saying it shouldn't have been flagged. When a defensive player hits someone head first, flags should fly. It's the only thing that is going to change the way people are tackling. Harrison's hit on Mohamed Massaquoi, the one for which he'll pay $75,000, met every conceivable interpretation of unnecessary roughness and violated the newly legislated protections for defenseless receivers.
The fine itself, James apparently believes, is the media's fault.
Another overreaction would be to widen the field. The theory here is that the increased space will give players more operating room and thus more time to avert debilitating collisions. I think this would have the opposite impact. More space might make the game more exciting, particularly the running game, but given more room to run, the speeds attained by attacking defenders might only increase, and thus the danger.
What's truly astounding in all of this is the level of danger to which players will subject each other. New England defensive back Brandon Meriweather's helmet-to-helmet launch toward Baltimore tight end Todd Heap borders on the unconscionable.
Had Meriweather saved that one for this Sunday, I presume he'd have been suspended.
And still, that might still be too presumptuous, as I'm not at all sure he'd even be flagged.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10293/1096543-66.stm#ixzz12tVxLRHM
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