Player/Haters

This week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell came down hard on the New Orleans Saints for knowingly allowing former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams to operate an illegal bounty system. Opinions around the league generally sympathized with the penalty; the Saints’ infraction, while possibly committed by other teams at other times, was considered egregious enough to warrant some of Führer Goodell’s iron-fisted flexing. Then a tape surfaced of a bounty-mode Williams instructing his defense to do things like take out Michael Crabtree’s ACL and re-concuss Kyle Williams (poor, poor Kyle Williams). Surprisingly, the speech was widely defended. Many players agreed that incentivizing a career-ending injury specifically was wrong, but the rest of it, well, that’s football! Although the league community mostly abides the league's punishments, this knee-jerk defense of football’s violence offers a good opportunity to mull the state of Roger Goodell’s years-long campaign to make the NFL safer.

Rules protecting offensive players, especially quarterbacks, have been multiplying for years. Often these rules are met with derision. Players like James Harrison, who if not for football would no doubt be out injuring people in other ways, tweets angrily in lament of his emasculated sport. The notion (among defensive players like Harrison and Bernard Pollard, anyway) is that the attention on Bountygate is yet another Goodell encroachment into the sanctity of a game so violent that defenders are arguably incentivized to injure the opposition by the very signing of their contracts.

The two commonest reasons for why players oppose Goodell’s hard line on injuries are 1) that he’s unconcerned about player safety and is merely looking to protect himself from liability, and 2) that he’s ruining the spirit of the game by reducing the degree of danger. I have problems with both of these assertions.

Roger Goodell’s efforts to make football a safer sport have been heavy-handed and capricious, but most outraged player reactions make no sense. Football needs to change. I’m sure the vast majority of players understand that rules developed when offensive linemen were Tony Romo’s size cannot continue to apply to a league full of Suhs, Ngatas, and Mario Williamses without cataclysmic injury becoming commonplace. So if the prospect of legal culpability is what’s compelling the commissioner to proactively prevent player injuries, well, could there be a more ringing endorsement of the legal system? Or of the commissioner? If it is Goodell’s CYA instinct that allows little DeSean Jackson to live to see and actually recognize his own grandchildren, then the system of accountability works. That Goodell’s interests lie more with the owners than safety for the players’ sakes is no reason to oppose his efforts to make the game safer. Outrage would be better spent on the league’s desire to extend the season to 18 games, or on their shameful record of denying worker’s comp claims.

I get the frustration. Football players, specifically defenders, are coached all their lives to intimidate, destroy, and dominate. Those who succeed at the highest level are the ones who that the most. The league instructing them to soften up is tantamount to telling them to stop doing their jobs so well. Given the intense, perpetual pressure to maintain one’s position and the clearly improvised punishments for illegal hits, their exasperation is understandable. But because players are immersed in executing the coaching they’ve received their entire lives, they make poor theorists on changing that coaching. Roger Goodell has a better vantage point and a keen sense of his responsibility as a businessman, if not a humanist, to do so. So let James Harrison get smash-smash-angry about a new rule. It’s not his job to wonder how differently he’d play if he were penalized in high school for dangerous hits. It is the league’s. Moreover, I think players would welcome change if they honestly weighed an awkward paradigm shift against the prospect of better post-retirement lives.

The fans should have a much easier time dealing with such a shift. We’re always hearing that Americans love football for the violence. I personally disagree. To me, football is most entertaining as a skillful, gladiatorial chess match. Would you rather watch an overtime featuring all of the best players playing at a peak level, or one in which they’re injury-hobbled and replaced by backups? This bloodlust we’re supposed to have is a waste of physical talent. Michael Crabtree is one of the world’s best route-runners, so that’s what I want to see him do. Anyone can tear an ACL. The same goes for baseball, by the way. I would much rather watch small ball—fast base running, smart play calls—than roidoids’s smacking BP all day, which is supposedly what we like. I register my dissent.

Anyone moaning about rules enacted to protect defenseless receivers need to wonder how many Darryl Stingleys would have to accumulate before the James Harrisons of the world permitted the game to change. And don’t forget that sociopaths like him are more vociferous in their reaction to safety-geared rules than other players for obvious reasons. A quarterback can’t tweet “Finally my dam knees r protected ! !” because he’s supposed to be a warrior. Still, I bet many players are quietly glad that the game is rounding a corner. The rules of football need to change in order to avoid tragedy, and I think in the process will preserve what I find most compelling about the sport. As long as they reform the game fairly and concretely, I commend the NFL for taking steps to achieve a new standard of safety, no matter what the motivation. Players should too.