End Football Now

This morning I watched a great football match. Although this post is not really about that football.

England fell behind, came back through an incredible individual effort by Kelly Smith (who pulled off her shoes to celebrate the goals), then was tied at the death by Japan. The game featured several hard collisions, with one goalie nearly knocked out and another player lying injured while play continued around her.

Football, or soccer, can be a dangerous game. Some great players from the past have died from the impact of repeated concussions with the hard leather balls used in the 1960s.

Chelsea goalie Peter Cech now plays with a helmet that looks like a
diving cap, after his skull was fractured a year ago in a game with
Reading. (I hope the move toward getting head coverings for all soccer
players continues.)

But compared with American football, this is nothing. It’s like
comparing the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center bombings, to use a
currency we all should be thinking about today.

American football has always been a hard game. It was first played
in 1869 by Princeton and Rutgers, a way to give people too young for
the Civil War something like battle experience. Its death toll nearly
killed it, until President Theodore Roosevelt intervened 100 years ago,
creating the NCAA.

We have reached another moment, similar to that TR faced. But no one seems to notice it.

When a player like Kevin Everett is paralyzed for life on a very ordinary play no one takes heed.  Men near my age, who survived the game, like Earl Campbell,
now gimp about like ghosts. I saw
Everson Walls and Ron Springs on TV
the other day. They’re younger than I am. They look like they’re each
75. Walls was talking about donating one of his kidneys to Spring. Everyone knows of the horrors endured by retired veterans whose  post-career health coverage proved inadequate.

This is an issue which goes beyond politics. A-list blogger Oliver Willis is a huge football fan. For years I scoured the agate seeking information on my old alma mater, Rice University,
but now I’m proud that the football team is crap. Compare our
priorities to those of, say, TCU, and it’s like comparing a lab to a
sausage factory.

Yet the Owls play on. They are forced to play on, forced to drop $10
million a year on this killing business, because football is the sole
driver of intercollegiate athletics today. Barely a quarter of Division
I schools make any money at it, yet all must pour money down this
rathole, or else their other sport programs — for both men and women
— will suffer.

I have a modest proposal which can solve the financial problem, and
might alleviate some of the physical problems by slowing the game down,
making it more aerobic. Every effort to change the rules or improve
equipment over the last century has been matched by faster, stronger
players, by harder collisions, just as every effort to improve safety
in cars leads to worse driving and the number of accidents remains
level.

My proposal is to return to one platoon, which ruled the game from the 1940s through the early 1960s and which was strictly enforced before 1941. Limit substitutions to three per play.
If four are injured, each substitution is a five-yard penalty. No more
three teams. Players must learn to go both ways. You bring in the
quarterback, a runner, and a receiver on first down, pull them off for
a kicker on fourth down, and rotate everyone else in-and-out.

Players will have to be become more aerobic. They will have to
become smaller. The costs of the game will be cut in half. I don’t care
what this does to the idea of college as a farm system for the NFL, that’s not the purpose of college, let ’em make their own farm system.
Conflicts between womens’ sports and "non-revenue" mens’ sports will be
reduced.

Something drastic must be done, and soon, if American football is to
survive. Already millions of parents, like me, are refusing to let
their kids play the game. We let them play soccer, maybe basketball,
tennis and golf, but middle class America no longer contributes to the
meat-grinder as it once did. The demographic source of American
footballers continues to go down, and so in time should that of
American football fans.

Until drastic action occurs to make American football safer I’m
going to become a devotee of the beautiful game, and I suggest you do
likewise.