Rub some dirt on it
OFFSEASON! Let’s do the concussion/safety chat since there is no real news.
So concussions. They bad. What are we gonna do about that stuff?
My personal views: I hate many of the new safety rules. Helmet to Helmet, Roughing the passer, illegal contact…all those rules. But I don’t hate them because they make the game more wussy, I hate them because they are half-assed fixes to a real problem and cause more issues than they solve. Banning Helmet to Helmet hits is great in theory, but in practice it’s terrible. For every good call, we get several of the following:
-Defender led with shoulder in clean hit, but ref was at the wrong angle and called it anyway
-Defender was aiming low, but receiver ducked down upon the catch and ran into the defender, yet the defender gets called anyway
-Defender already in midair and unable to defy the laws of physics then the receiver turns into him (This is a major issue I have with roughing the passer. Seems like the defender is already in midair when the ball leaves and he can’t stop his momentum then, why should he get called?)
-Clean hit, but it looked bad in real time so the ref plays it safe and flags the defender anyway.
Also, now defenders are aiming even lower, at the knees, and what a surprise, knee injuries were at an astounding level last year. Correlation =/= causation, but woof, doesn’t look good.
I’ve made it clear on earlier comics, but I’m very much in favor of the changes for safety. I just think the NFL has done a crap job of it so far and the rule changes they’ve made have been bad to mediocre and haven’t really solved anything while making the game worse. We should always make sure the refs have as few big subjective calls to make, not more. Refs are human and the game is fast paced, they aren’t going to get it right all the time. The more highly subjective calls they have to make, the more likely they will screw it up, and then everyone is unhappy. Plus, those calls are devastating for defenses, which just sucks even more.
It’s a contact sport. The violence is never going away, it’s part of the appeal. They need to figure out better ways to fix the current violence though.
What about Jerry Rice Jr. trying out in his dads team continuing his legacy?
I’ve heard some people argue that the solution might be less padding. The argument is that, because pads are so thick and absorb so much impact, players are more apt to hit harder, because they feel less of it, and they feel more protected from any harm(All the pads in the world can’t stop a concussion, or keep your knee from twisting unnaturally and tearing). If you make less padding, then players will have to be more careful because otherwise they’ll put themselves on IR with one tackle.
Don’t agree with the argument, but it’s an interesting angle.
Personally, I’d like to see more knee braces – I’m sure a lot of people, including a lot of people here, won’t like that idea, but according to my Pats fan friends, Welker’s worn one since tearing his ACL, and he seems to run fine. I have one I got from a sports doctor when I injured my knee a few years ago, and it barely impinges any movement. Granted Welker isn’t running a 4.3 sprint, and I’m probably not even running a 4.8 sprint, but mine is light enough and Welker’s still effective enough that I think it wouldn’t be that huge an impact. Plus everyone would be wearing them instead of just a few QBs and most linemen, so it’d impact everyone equally.
As far as concussions go, I’m honestly wondering if we’re eventually going to reach the point where football players have the option of getting a mesh inserted into their skulls that helps slow the brain in the event of concussion forces to help prevent them. It sounds ridiculous, but considering how much players destroy their bodies already for the game, I don’t feel like that’d be too extreme if it can stop concussions. Medical science has done stranger things.
As my name might suggest I am on the side that less pads would make the game safer. Take away the overall thickness of items such as helmets then players will be a lot more careful about the types of plays they make. No matter what issues Rugby has, head to head clashes were never an issue as very few people are willing to slam their head against somebody else without protection.
Out of curiosity:
What’s the average salary of a professional rugby player? What’s the turnover-rate in professional rugby leagues? While helmets *did* directly lead to head-to-head collision frequency in the NFL, they dramatically reduced injury in tackling and in accidental collisions (particularly at the lines). Rugby, for all its gritty toughness of its nature, is such a fundamentally different game that you’re kidding yourself if you think Rugby’s light pads would suffice in the NFL. Blocking is vastly different (and was one of the leading causes of injury and death in the NFL before pads and helmets were introduced). You don’t have WRs sprinting 25 mph to get hit by a 220 lbs free safety likewise sprinting 25 mph to smash into you in mid air. The total body strength in rugby is vastly inferior to the total body strength in the NFL– and, excluding head-to-head spearing, every other place that padding is used today is in use because those were areas players were attacking, or attacking with, already. Unless you fundamentally change the physical nature of the NFL to match the physical nature of Rugby, I’m sorry, the claim that lighter pads will change things is based on poor assumptions and an even poorer understanding of the differences between the two games.
I agree the force of impact in rugby and football is not comparable even in body to body contact, my proposal would be all the pads on the shoulders and body can be as big as you like but reduce the size and hardness of the helmet. That way that a player is forced to consider the impact of a head first collision on their own brain rather than considering their head as a primary weapon for impact. The idea that your head is protected and enclosed in hard plastic and usable as a blunt force trauma weapon is what leads to “brain shake” type injuries and long term concussion related problems
To add on to this point. In Rugby if you go for somebodies knees if you aren’t careful with your head then your going to get a knee right to the face and while you may slow the player down, chances are you also just had your nose broken. In football with the helmet there is not as much worry as should the same play occur then it is the tackled player who is most likely to get injured.
My point was to say that the type of protection worn makes a vast difference in the type of tackling that occurs on a game field. The game has evolved to take into account the type of protection and equipment used, and should the equipment change then the game will change as well. The point of this comic, and the discussion around injuries in general is that the sport of Football is going to have to find some way to change to reduce injuries or else the sport will die.
It’s a completely different tackle. In rugby you’re taught to tackle with your shoulder and then wrap up with the arms. In American Football you’re taught to lead across the body and there is no need to wrap up with your arms. Leading across the body means you’re more likely to get your guy down but you’re also more likely to get contact between head and something.
You’re also not allowed to tackle in the air in rugby, which at least reduces the chances of someone smashing their head on the ground.
Also concussion protocol in professional rugby was implemented before the NFL. A concussion meant generally an automatic three week hiatus from playing. Of course unsurprisingly there were a lot of ‘neck stingers’ and so forth reported by the unscrupulous. And there’s been widespread abuse of the system.
Also also, rugby has its own large concussion scandal coming. Last year a bunch of former players were considering a lawsuit similar to that from the former NFL players.
And I’m not entirely sure what @Averien means by: ‘The total body strength in rugby is vastly inferior to the total body strength in the NFL’. If anything, I’d argue it was the other way – a rugby player has to do a variety of tasks while NFL players specialise more.
Incidentally average career is around seven years. The average is probably helped because there is less roster churn in rugby. And fringe players can go to a lower professional league instead of ending their career entirely.
I’m not sure what role salary plays in player safety but rugby salaries are significantly lower than NFL salaries – even in the French league which operates different capping rules.
There are bad calls on holding (both called and not called), pass interference (called and not called, especially not-called on offense), on *pick a rule*. That’s part of the game, and a lot of those rules are necessary for the fairness and fun of the game. While there are issues that need addressed, some of your complaints are rules that, frankly, should remain.
It is very rare that leaving your feet is smart as a defender. If you get juked, or blocked mid air, you are out of the play. If you leave your feet, you’re *usually* not playing smart football, as sound tackling involves tackling with your legs as much as your arms. The only reason to leave your feet would involve a last-ditch effort to tackle, and that should almost never involve helmet-to-anything, as you’re trying to grab the bottom of someone’s legs. If you want a rule that’s less subjective, and doesn’t care about how fast the game is, make launching yourself with any contact above the less illegal. You might get a few cases of bad calls with hits at/near the waist, but those are approaching the area of bad form, anyway.
I do agree that a lot of clean hits get called because the receiver/QB/highly-paid-whoever’s head jerked on the hit, and the ref called it. There are some crews in the NFL that are particularly horrible about that. For that reason, I think that the NFL simply needs better officiating, particularly off the field. The NFL has the budget for 26 people who can watch every player of every game, and the cameras to boot. They should no have the authority to throw a flag, but they should have the ability to cancel one if they can see within 10 seconds of slow-mo that the flag is wrong. Flags can change a game in horrible ways, and while they *SHOULD* change a game if the penalty was legit, they should never do so when the flag is bogus. We have the technology to address that issue, and the NFL has the money to fund the manpower and cameras to solve it. Let’s fix it.
As for equipment, thigh and knee pads/braces are a necessity that is too often over-looked because players feel it hinders speed, and to a degree it does. But to that degree, it’s going to hinder everyone if they are required, so net problem? Zero. The biggest thing, though, are helmets. The NFL has no mandate to use the safest helmets on the market, which are kinda goofy looking. Welker has worn one since his concussions, and he got made fun of for it. Aaron Rodgers has worn one since his first concussion. Neither has had a concussion since. It’s not just about padding with this, it’s distribution of force, and oh, MAN would they make a difference. All testing on them (and there’s some pretty wicked testing going on in VA), has shown the capacity to cut concussions by significantly less than half, and in some cases, by as much as 90%. What’s more, they are *particularly* capable of cutting down on lower-impact concussions, which are the biggest problem as those are a plague in high school and college football; with the highest-rated helmets right now, concussions would go from millions per year to thousands– not tens of thousands, thousands. In the NFL, it would both reduce frequency dramatically (at least half, more likely by 70%), and would significantly reduce the severity of them, and virtually eliminate the frequent, minor concussions that seem to be the most significant cause of long-term brain injury.
And Clarifactor, your early argument is one that a lot of Rugby people like to make. It’s also an argument that has a “man factor” to it. It’s also rather silly. The NFL has the over-all highest momentum of any sport on the planet. Yes, there are some sports with higher average weight, a very few sports with higher speed, but none are close to the total impact velocity in the NFL. Players will hit as hard and as fast as they are allowed, because A) the less-talented players have a career of 3 years, and NOT doing their absolute best will get them cut, and B) a lot of the MOST talented players still have that feeling of invincibility. The reason people hit as hard and as fast as they do, relative to “back in the day”, is because the science of sports has improved so much. The average lineman today runs a faster 40 than the average *ANYONE* in the 1960s or earlier. There are wide receivers today bigger than the average lineman of the 1972 Dolphins, and there isn’t a starting lineman today who isn’t lifting more than the strongest person in the NFL in the same year. People are bigger, they are stronger, they are faster today in the NFL, on a whole, than in any sport in the world today, and than they were in the NFL of yesteryear. That’s not because they have pads– it’s because we have learned how and NO sport in the world demands as much total athleticism as football does, let alone demands so much athleticism and demands contact. Lighter pads won’t stop the hitting; they’ll just increase the destruction. Ed McCaffery is kind of proof of that– he’s a less talented guy who wore as little padding as he possibly could, and never met an over-the-middle-body-extended-catch he didn’t try to make. His career ended when his femur damn near came out his thigh. And that was a decade ago.
Players care about their safety on a theoretical level; they don’t care about their safety in the middle of the game when their adrenaline is through the roof, their competitive instincts are raging, etc… Asking them to self regulate is silly.
The closest to truth that that comes with is that leading-with-the-head increased with helmets, but even with that new problem, the total head injuries from football have declined massively– and that’s in spite more people playing it, and in spite of better methods to actually detect such injury. There’s absolutely no science or legitimate psychology to back the idea up, and the less circulation it gets, the better.
Id agree that in the nfl players are bigger and faster than in most other sports, but thats in large part due to the fact that they play such short bursts. Athleticism overall is ridiculously hard to judge, but saying that american football requires more than any other sport is really hard to justify when the reason rugby players arent as big and arent as fast is because they have to regulate their size to actually be able to play an 80 minute game, whereas players in the nfl only have to play about half a game (which often doesnt even mean a full 30 minutes as they dont play every snap and the clock can be running even when play isnt happening). Thats not to say that american football players have it easier, the bursts they perform in are at 100% every time, it just means they require a different type of athleticism. Id have to argue that soccer players require the most athleticism at the top level (EPL and all that), simply because more people play soccer, and theres more money in it, so the best athletes in soccer are taken from a larger sample size than in the nfl.
In regards to losing pads, Id have to say it wouldnt work without a major modification of the game. Both for the reasons you give and for the simple fact that players in the air can be hit. Take a bad fall from the air without protection and its a one way ticket to shoulder reconstruction central
Regarding total athleticism, I agree that burst vs. sustain are different forms of athleticism. But then add in the expectation of speed, strength, agility, dexterity, and endurance (yes, there is an endurance to repeated burst), name a sport that comes close. Rugby limits strength and size, sacrificing a great number of athletic necessities in order to meet a single one, endurance. Soccer has a larger pool, and while the athletes may have greater potential athleticism, there is less emphasis on a total-body-thoroughness than there is in the NFL. Don’t take my word for it: numerous events and competitions designed to test over-all athleticism show that where soccer players at the elite level have greater lower-body dexterity and sustained endurance, NFL players win on total strength (upper, core, lower), manual dexterity, burst– note that’s an average; wide receivers and DBs tend to be at or near elite levels of soccer players in terms of lower-body dexterity, as do, curiously, offensive linemen, though they tend to be far lower on sustained endurance. Soccer is also far more a technique oriented sport than football, and reactive– that’s not to dismiss it; it’s a different skill-set being added in that is not athletic, but is still necessary for the sport. I’m not making a claim that the NFL is the most difficult sport; it is a claim that it is the most *athletic* sport– and this bears out in another key demonstration: it takes an exceptional, generationally-rare talent (Rice, Matthews), to play in the NFL past 33, 34 (excluding QB, which is arguably the least athletic, most technique-oriented position in football). There are more elite-level soccer players who continue, despite decreased athleticism due to age, longer into their careers because other aspects necessary for the game can mitigate those factors. I played soccer for years; I appreciate the sport more than I enjoy it, and I’m not dismissing its difficulty… I would rate it as the fourth most athletically intensive team sport (behind football, rugby, basketball, in that order), out there, and probably the team sport that requires the second most technique (behind baseball and its derivatives).
Sorry for the multiple wall-of-texts. Conciseness is not among my gifts.
Look how many words you wrote
I see a Roll Tide shirt. It may not be concussions just the Alabama education system
Wheres the sexy rexy?
Lower left corner, on the grass, right above the “tallest” yellow flower.
I’m surprised you haven’t done a comic for the Greg Hardy story. Is it because it’s too similar to the Kaep ‘story’? At least people on reddit were much more hesitant to blame Greg when nobody knew any details.
Too similar to the Ray Rice story more like it
Can we just talk for a minute that, during the fight, Hardy apparently threw his girlfriend onto a couch covered in firearms? How stupid do you have to be to take someone you’re attacking, and forcefully move them towards a pile of guns?
All the ‘bama hoodie made me think of was the spectabulously irate callers that Paul Finebaum gets on his ESPN shows. “ROLL DAMN TIDE!” – folk seriously need to get the hell over they bad self.
Otto Graham balled in Chuck Taylor All-Stars. Saw it in a pic someone posted from HOF in Canton. Just wanted to share that tidbit of awesome with y’all.
Roll Tide, hell. Hotty Toddy!