Wake Up, N.F.L.

I attended the Green Bay Packer game against the Philadelphia Eagles last week at storied Lambeau Field last week.  It was a pleasant evening and the tailgating was fun and festive.  Lambeau is like a shrine with the twin statues of Curley Lambeau and Vince Lombardi standing like sentinals out front.  Perhaps the only other sports venue so steeped in tradition and legend as Lambeau is Fenway Park.

The Packers lost a close game that wasn’t decided until the last drive.  As a lifelong football fan, the entire experience should have been a memorable one.  But it left me uneasy about the future of the game and fed into the current narrative, that N.F.L. football is on the way out.

On the first play of the game, Packer running back Jamaal Williams was hit with a vicious head to head tackle by Eagle defensive end Derek Barnett and left the game strapped to a stretcher.  The Eagles got a penalty but a decision to toss Barnett from the game was reversed.  The game was held up for quite awhile while the medical team examined him and lifted him carefully onto the stretcher.  Eagle cornerback Avonte Williams left the game on a stretcher as well, although not because of an illegal hit.  And later in the game, Packer punt returner Darrius Shepard failed to make a fair catch and was “earholed” by an Eagle player in helmet to helmet contact after which the Eagle player danced and strutted around.   The hit was so loud that it made me cringe in the stands, and was totally unnecessary.

Some of the fans joined in the blood lust.  After one Eagle player went down, the guy behind me yelled, “I hope he ripped his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament).”  I turned and glared at him and it took every bit of self-control not to say, “Why would you say that, you fat slob?”

A few weeks ago, Gregg Easterbrook wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled, Football is Here to Stay (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/nfl-football.html?searchResultPosition=3).  I’m not entirely sure I agree. 

Head trauma haunts the game.  Numbers are already dropping in high schools across the country.  Even in football crazed places like New Jersey and Texas, coaches are beginning to have problems filling out rosters.  As much as I love the game, the brutal (and some illegal hits) I saw last week made me uneasy.  The vicious and illegal hit by Oakland Raider Vontaze Burfict on Sunday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqacb2fF_eY) seemed to cap off the weekend.

Physics is also at work.  While some rule changes have been implemented to protect players, the players of today are so much bigger, faster, stronger and well trained than a few decades ago.  Recently, I saw an old photo of Dick Butkus in a t-shirt.  In his day, he was the most feared player in the league.  He looks nothing like the bulked up, chiseled players of  today.  Force equals mass times acceleration.  Today’s trained players are hitting with tremendous kinetic energy.

This weekend convinced me that if the N.F.L. does not move more aggressively to clean up the unnecessary brutality, the game will be in trouble.  Already, it is rippling through at lower levels.  Participation rates are down.   Some grade school programs have ceased.  In the Chicago Public School system, some teams are down to 15-16 players and that will dry up soon.

The suicides of Dave Duerson, Andre Waters  Junior Seau and others loom as large as the heroes of yesteryear like Walter Payton, Bart Starr and Joe Montana in the annals of the sport.

The game is a tough, physical game and will always be.  But the N.F.L. must get much tougher and aggressive in policing and penalizing gratuitously vicious hits with long suspensions like Vontaze Burfict’s, and should consider banning repeat offenders like Burfict from the league.  Without tough action, football will become a small, niche sport like boxing, and perhaps worse, since it requires so many participants to make it fun.

Later, I mentioned this all to a friend and said I was deeply concerned about the survival of the game.  He simply responded, “They got rid of the gladiators, didn’t they?”