Tag Archives

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (Jan. 17, 2018) — Minnesota Vikings wide-out Stefon Diggs may go on to do many more spectacular things during his career. For now his miraculous walk-off touchdown to win last weekend’s playoff game vs. the New Orleans Saints remains his claim to fame. However, when we widen the scope on this play and connect a few dots, we link the signature moment of these 2018 playoffs to football evolution and the NFL’s most pressing issue.

Look at the picture that accompanies this essay (or watch the video of the play here). Examine with me what New Orleans Saints safety Marcus Williams (43 in white) was thinking as time expired.

We should first take a moment to pity Mr. Williams, a rookie, whose coaches consigned him to a god-awful position — “on an island,” as they say — by obliging him to defend half the field when the situation clearly called for the Mother of All Prevent Defenses. Still, even in this highly vulnerable position, all Williams needed to do was play center field and keep Mr. Diggs in front of him. Instead, Williams did what most American footballers tend to do in the 21^st century: He went for the “spectacle hit.” Head first.

Competitively, as we’ve seen, the results were disastrous. Williams even managed to compound his misfortune by comically whiffing on Diggs entirely. In doing so, he took out his own teammate — the only guy in a viable position to chase down the wide receiver once the ball was caught. What’s more, according to rules taking effect for the 2018 regular season, Williams’ head-first attempt should have earned him a 15-yard personal foul penalty.

However, if we step back a bit, we see here yet another consequence of football’s troubling evolution on the defensive side of scrimmage. Despite a litany of league-wide initiatives to curb head-first tackling — the result of mounting evidence linking repeated football-related head trauma to brain injury (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE) — the NFL’s hit culture remains firmly in place. Even in a situation like Williams’, where old fashioned, rugby-style tackling was called for, the defender acted on the instinct that football today engenders.

Football Evolution? This ain’t Perfection

NFL football in the here and now is plenty good fun, the most popular and culturally dominant game in 21^st century North America. Minnesota’s unlikely victory — indeed, three of the four games contested over the weekend — showcased exactly why this is so. NFL games can be hugely entertaining.

Yet it would be a stretch to consider the game “perfected”. Any sport played at the elite level exists as a moving target, a work in evolutionary progress, because the salient factors affecting that evolution — rules, tactics, substitution pattersn, equipment, geography, fashion, even the size and skill of the players involved — continue to shift and evolve. All this change transforms the way a game is played over the course of time, sometimes by design, sometimes organically without much guidance at all.

In 2018, we can add “culture” and “the legal process” to this list of salient change-agents. People took notice when former NFL player Ed Cunningham resigned from his position of ESPN football analyst — on account of the game’s growing concussion dilemma. In truth, we’ve become somewhat inured to stories like this because nearly every week brings a new one: be it evidence that concussions sustained in pee wee football can lead to adult brain trauma, or steps the Canadian Football League has taken to reduce the volume of dangerous hits.

The idea that former Patriots tight end and convicted murder suspect Aaron Hernandez might have committed his violent crimes while experiencing advanced-stage CTE adds to this potent mix the elements of irony and the macabre. Did you know that a class-action lawsuit, brought on behalf of current and former NCAA student-athletes, remains pending before Judge John Z. Lee of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois? Me neither. Class actions naturally have their own online portals these days. Visit this one and be prepared for the following greeting: “Welcome to the NCAA Student-Athlete Concussion Injury Litigation Website.”

Bit by bit, the forces of change would appear to be gathering over football, as they have continuously for more than a century. No game, it seems to me, has evolved so far, so quickly or so dangerously.

The Common Ancestor

Football’s robust evolutionary dynamics, when viewed in an historical context, have done more than change the game we know today. They have splintered a single organized athletic pursuit and set its various branches on separate, distinct paths around the world. In the early 19^th century, the word football referred to a single, entirely English sporting engagement. Today it can be used to describe soccer the world over, two forms of rugby (Union and League) in British Commonwealth nations, Gaelic football in Ireland, Aussie Rules down under in Oz, and American football (what Brits and other folks call “gridiron”) here in North America. Canadians have their own, fairly distinct brand of gridiron.

Time and geography tend to obscure this shared heritage, but Michael Munger’s excellent NYT column from early in 2017 reminds us how some athletic pursuits, once knit closely together and occupying the same exact cultural and geographic space, can diverge.

Munger also suggests the sanguine extent to which one game can perhaps learn from its distant cousins.

He asserts that rugby, for all its inherent brutality, doesn’t really have a concussion/CTE problem. Not on the scale the NFL has. Why? He argues that helmets in particular and excessive padding generally have needlessly and ironically transformed American football into an ever more dangerous, head-first hitting game. Munger’s key argument is this: Athletes wearing helmets will attempt and ultimately adopt more dangerous tackling techniques (dangerous even to their own heads) than someone lacking a helmet would ever dare attempt. By eschewing helmets through the decades, rugby has better avoided this particular evolutionary outcome.

The Peltzman Effect

At first blush, Munger’s point would appear a bit squishy and anecdotal. But we see this sort of behavioral tick all the time, and it has a name. “They call it the Peltzman effect, after the economist Sam Peltzman,” Munger explains. “The feeling of safety, it seems, induces us to be less careful. A famous illustration of the Peltzman effect is that the better sky diving gear becomes, the more chances sky divers take, keeping the fatality rate from sky diving roughly unchanged over time.”

This dynamic hits home with me. I rode bikes without a helmet my entire childhood and never once went over the handlebars. As a generally risk-averse adult, trying to show my young children a good example, I strapped on a helmet — and went over twice in the space of 18 months.

Stepping back a bit further, we also recognize how the common history of rugby and American football lends a new level of credence to Munger’s argument and observations. In another, less associative context, this idea would carry less weight: It is one thing for the NHL to borrow some in-game strategy from, say, international soccer. But it’s altogether more valid (and intriguing) to think that sister sports have the very real option of reaching back into their shared DNA in order to produce a more safe or otherwise more compelling state of play.

Because this much we know: There was a time when these two games were nearly identical. Like humans and chimps, they will always share a common ancestor. Munger has demonstrated for us how one sporting species so removed can still borrow, learn and perhaps benefit from another — if only the powers that be have the good sense to thoughtfully examine their own past.

Shared Sports Lineage is Commonplace

This blood-thick linkage between sports is hardly uncommon. Neither are the bonds and vestigial characteristics that remain, panda’s thumb-like, in spite of divergent evolutionary paths.

Most baseball fans recognize intellectually that cricket and its more schoolyard incarnation, rounders, ultimately begat baseball. Yet, as John Thorn makes clear in his wonderful book, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,” modern fans would be amazed at just how similar cricket and baseball remained as recently as 1915. That’s when baseball’s “powers that were” recognized that fans were beginning to go ape-shit for Babe Ruth’s long-ball displays. In reaction, the two major leagues quickly hardened the balls, created fences to hit them over, and so baseball was changed forever.

Up to that point, a softer ball and no outfield fencing rewarded contact and placement over power and distance. Wee Willie Keeler was famous for “hitting ‘em where they ain’t,” but that’s what every Major League Baseball batter did or tried to do throughout the 19^th century and well into the 20^th.

This shouldn’t surprise us: Finding the space between fielders had for centuries been, and continues to be, the singular goal of any cricket batsman. What’s more, many shared elements between the two sports remain timeless and completely unbroken. Bring a Brit to a modern baseball game and the thing they appreciate first and foremost? Fielding. For a cricket fan, that game aspect still computes directly and straightforwardly.

American football, too, is a fundamentally English game, though no sport has splintered away from the mother pursuit to such diverse effect. Geographic isolation and subtle changes in rules, tactics, equipment and fashion — over time — have accounted for the separate and distinct growth of these footballing offshoots, which will nevertheless share a common ancestor for all time.

Comparing Concussion Rates

Are concussion rates among former rugby and NFL septuagenarians relevant? Maybe they are. Munger is a former rugby player and when he compares his chosen sport to American football, he accurately cites a far lower concussion rate today among elite rugby players, who don’t wear and have never worn protective headgear. Some ruggers do wear a small cap to protect their ears from being mangled in the scrum. Many old school types still wrap their heads with tape, thereby pinning, securing and protecting their outer ears.

Gridiron players in America wore helmets for the same reason as early as the 1890s. But helmets as a means of meaningful cranial protection never caught on or evolved in the rugby context.

As generally hard bastards, rugby players are famouslyl dismissive of American football and its players, citing the candy-assed nature of today’s massively evolved headgear — and the proliferation of head-to-toe body padding.

Yet Munger’s nuanced argument moves well beyond this prejudice. The relative paucity of concussions in rugby speaks persuasively to the fact that its equipment and fashion choices, not just today but over the course of decades, have resulted in a safer game, cranially. His point is further buttressed when we take into account the distinct evolution of American football itself.

Do yourself a favor, flip over to the NFL Network sometime and watch anew some extended NFL Films archives from the 1950s and ‘60s. All manner of things will jump out at you, but I’m confident you’ll be most struck by the extent to which tackling still resembled the waist-down tackling of rugby. And do keep the unlucky Marcus Williams in mind: There is remarkably little hurling of one’s body at ball carriers, head first or otherwise. It was a fundamentalist’s dream.

Helmet Technology

Leather helmets were introduced to American football in the 1920s but this was mere window-dressing, a lingering attempt to shore up safety rules first introduced earlier in the century. More on that shortly. But honestly, what would a single layer of hardened leather really do to affect the way people tackled? Not much, vintage football footage reveals. Helmet technology didn’t truly affect the evolution of tackling until the 1970s, when the players recognized their heads were actually being protected. Prior to that era, the best way to bring down a ball carrier — the way coaches taught tackling, for decades, up to and including my own pee wee football days — was to get your head out of the way, wrap the guy up from the waist down, and drive those legs. In the open field, one wrapped him up and simply held on for dear life.

Hardy Brown was a linebacker for the 49ers and Redskins during the 1950s, and he is the subject of one such NFL Film. Just 6’1” and 190 pounds, he perfected a sort of drop-shoulder body blow that every once in a while caught some crossing flanker off balance and sent the poor guy flying. Brown was famous and somewhat notorious for this outlying maneuver, which illustrates just how rare his approach was at the time.

Yet even Brown ducked his head away from the runner, in the traditional rugby style, when administering his signature hits. Neither Brown nor anyone in the NFL dared deploy their noggins as part of the tackling process at this time. Helmet technology back then would not allow it. By that time helmets were made of hard plastic, but I’ve seen more sturdy headgear holding soft-serve ice cream at minor league baseball parks.

It was self-preservation, salted with decades of traditional coaching method, that obliged defenders to tackle in this traditional way — the way rugby players still tackle in the 21^st century.

When helmet technology improved, starting in the 1970s, American football players grew more and more reckless — as the Peltzman Effect would predict — and the game’s culture changed accordingly. Go watch something as recent as the first two Super Bowls, from 1967 and ’68. Then go watch any 21^st century Super Bowl archive. What you will see is a completely different attitude toward tackling, the byproduct of 40 years’ evolution in the art of defending, which, in large part, evolved on account of four decades of improvement in helmet technology.

These dynamics spill over film editing, of course. They also affect officiating. Put helmets and pads on NBA players. Let them play that way for a while. Eventually the game and its rules will evolve.

Technology-enabled ‘Hitting’

Changes in rules and equipment eventually influence technique, too. American football coaches all the way down to the pee wee level have adopted such changes in light of improved helmet technology. At all levels, the rugby-style tackling tradition still exists, but only side by side with a more dangerous, technology-enabled “hitting” tradition that fans, coaches and fellow players just happen to LOVE.

As with baseball and home runs, fans and media have further influenced and reinforced this evolution of the tackling ethos. “Lighting a guy up”, or merely laying him out, is not judged solely for its efficacy in stopping a runner’s progress, in bring a man to ground. It’s the spectacle of these hits that is met with hoots of delight, even if some might be followed by hushed tones of concern, fleeting chagrin, and polite applause as some casualty is wheeled off on a gurney.

For several decades, beginning in the 1970s, National Football League poobahs and programmers basked in this new strain of tackling. It made for undeniably great television. Players were (and remain) more or less dispensable and interchangeable. The fans loved Big Hit Culture. Today, in light of concussion tallies and CTE diagnoses, in light of revelations re. the long-term effects of multiple head trauma, even in kids as young as 12, attitudes appear to be modifying once again. The pendulum of change has swung back to a position football has not been obliged to occupy since 1906, when the collegiate game claimed several lives.

After years of public denial, today’s NFL is attempting to bolster that back-swing. Kickoff returns have been strongly discouraged, if not eliminated, by moving kickoff points further up the field, resulting in touchback after touchback. Why? Because they were judged to be highly and needlessly conducive to high-speed collisions.

Under a new ruling taking effect for the 2018 regular season, helmet-to-helmet tackles now draw maximum, 15-yard penalties. Multiple infractions will get you thrown out, suspended and fined.

Folks like Dr. Munger, a professor of political science at Duke, suggest doing away with helmets altogether. It’s an interesting proposal. Yet football has evolved in other ways that contribute to the modern frequency and severity of concussions. We need to recognize and better understand them before we fixate on any single response, lest the game descend (further) into some perverse, barbaric, bread-and-circuses delivery system. This sort of nuanced exploration is necessary because I fear that if American football continues unchecked on its current evolutionary course, no high school in the country will play it in 20 years’ time. The liability, the insurance policy premiums for public school systems, will simply become too high.

Conditioning and Tackling

Tackling technique isn’t the only fascinating antiquity served up by your typical late-night, half-in-the-bag, vintage NFL Films festival. You’ll notice that players are uniformly smaller, more wiry and whiter. The first two factors surely contribute to the fact that few in 1958 worried about an epidemic of concussions. The players weren’t big or fast enough to hurt each other in the same way, to the same degree, at the same speed, with the same troubling frequency they can and do today. What’s more, tackling techniques had yet to change by 1958.

But there’s something else going on here, in terms of velocity: Old-time football players were clearly engaged in something they considered a marathon, not a sprint.

By the early 1960s, the game had specialized to a point where nobody played both offense and defense anymore. Chuck Bednarik was the last fellow to play both ways on a consistent basis; he retired in 1962. Even once old-time players started specializing in offense or defense, however, game films show us something else: a lack of substitutions deployed from play to play. Clearly substitution tactics have evolved over time, as well. Today there are third-down tailback specialists, run-stopping specialists, pass-rushing specialists, nickel backs, etc. As many as 20 separate defensive guys might participate in any one set of downs.

Back in the day, as NFL Films illustrate, it was largely 11 v. 11 for long, long stretches.

What is the connection between specialization and increased exposure to head injury?

Specialization places a reduced onus on player fitness. Today’s American football players are, of course, superbly conditioned athletes in their own way. But they are built and conditioned to go very hard, very fast, in short bursts. Then they rest, in a huddle, or on the sideline, when any particular set of downs has concluded. Modern substitution patterns — alongside an astounding number of TV timeouts — provide modern players significant rest between bursts. 

Well rested players think nothing of hurling themselves at runner and receivers. Conserving energy is not what the modern game is about. Whereas, conservation of energy was very what two-way players were about. Through the 1960s, prior to specialization, NFL players were far less likely to expend the additional energy it takes to hurl one’s body at opponents headfirst — not when a simple rugby-style tackle would do.

NFL fan, media and team culture might remain strongly supportive of today’s all-out hitting culture, from a competitive standpoin, from an entertainment standpoint. But if NFL teams started playing 22 guys only — 11 on defense, 11 on offense — the hits and the concussions would diminish. Meanwhile, every 6’1″, 320-pound, run-stopping nose tackle would submit to obsolescence — or a diet. If each team played 11 men only, on offense and defense, the resulting concussions would diminish still further.

Spectacle Hitting at Odds with Endurance

On account of fan and media bloodlust, we can agree that showmanship also plays a role in today’s NFL’s hit culture. Football players in the 1950s and ‘60s did not play to the cameras in this way, at all, because, while the sporting culture was more reserved and conservative (read: whiter), there were also comparatively few TV cameras. Most games weren’t televised at all, which meant way less preening and precious few TV timeouts — perhaps the central, serial source of play stoppage that de-emphasizes the modern need for endurance.

NFL Films are often highly edited game tapes, but still — one can plainly see that play proceeded more or less uninterrupted. Go to a high school or small college football game: That’s what the NFL used to be like. Naturally, this sort of uninterrupted play, combined with a lack of substitution, asked even more of players physically. This emphasis on endurance limited players’ ability and willingness to administer potentially concussive hits. They still had to tackle the opponent. But as the game went on, they did so while conserving their energy as best they could — not expending that energy in superfluous ways.

These historical observations bring us back to the side-by-side evolutions of football and its sporting cousins. Rugby is a 15-a-side game that has traditionally frowned on substitution. This has been true of a third cousin, Association Football (or soccer, for short). For decades, neither game allowed substitutions at all. That was essentially the way American football was played into the 1940s. Only recently have substitutions been introduced to rugby. Still, it’s not unusual for a team’s best dozen players to play the entire 80 minutes.

Soccer at the international and professional levels today allows three substitutions per game. (Post Covid, international soccer has gone to five substitutions). In both the soccer and rugby contexts, once you’re off, you can’t come back on, meaning that 6 of 11 soccer players are expected to “go the full 90” without any sort of rest/substitution. In this way, ice hockey, where willy nilly substitution has most markedly reduced energy conservation, is the better comp for American football.

It’s a simple but critical point: As the game of American football changed, standards of fitness changed. Modern football players simply aren’t in the same kind of shape compared to guys in the 1950s. Manic/tactical substitution and the commercial broadcast of every game mean today’s players don’t require the same type of endurance. Today, a player’s value to his team relies far less on endurance and far more on bulk, strength and speed.

Bulk, strength and speed. These are the qualities so obviously lacking when we, equipped with our modern sensibilities, watch game film from the 1950s and ‘60s. Not surprisingly, these are the qualities — along with mature helmet technology — that make running backs, wide receivers and quarterbacks so very vulnerable today.

American Football has been Here Before

The game’s modern reckoning tends to obscure the fact that American football has been here before. At the turn of the 19^th century, the game’s inherent dangers provoked similarly widespread anxiety and heated public outcry. After all, participation wasn’t just concussing young men with dire long-term consequences; it was killing them outright, more or less immediately. In 1905, at least 18 college students died on the field, playing football. According to the Washington Post, some 45 football players died between 1900 and October 1905, “many from internal injuries, broken necks, concussions or broken backs.”

President Theodore Roosevelt, a noted fan of football and rigorous manly pursuits of all kinds, was inevitably drawn into this fray. Early in 1905, he used his bully pulpit to call for reform and ultimately summoned to the White House coaching luminaries from three big-time football factories of the day: Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Nothing concrete came of that skull session. Later that year, in November, when Union College halfback Harold Moore died on the field — of cerebral hemorrhage, after being kicked in the head while trying to tackle a New York University opponent — a meaningful cultural tipping point had arrived. Columbia, Duke and Northwestern all suspended their football programs summarily, and Roosevelt called his patrician Big Three back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This meeting did have an effect. Several important new rules were introduced for the 1906 season. One followed Munger’s formula, i.e. borrowing something back from rugby — at that time, not so distant a cousin. This rule change allowed teams to cede possession, at any time, by punting the ball downfield. Up to that point, American gridiron teams had been obliged to simply run the ball into the line four times, absorbing 25 percent more punishment, before turning the ball over downs.

Another change stopped and reset the game when a player went to ground with the ball. This mitigated the mayhem inherent to pig-piling and incessant ball-prying. In rugby there remains, to this day, no such stoppage. Ball carriers must instead relinquish the ball once tackled to the ground.

Implementation of the forward pass is another fairly direct outgrowth of the 1906 anti-violence reform effort. Not until 1913 did anyone figure out how to actually win games using this novel tactic. Notre Dame made its earliest reputation turning that trick. However, the mere threat of forward passing changed the game immediately. It spread defenses and drew men away from the line of scrimmage, where most of the mangling, mauling and maiming had been perpetrated.

On-field fatalities all but disappeared in wake of these changes. It took 70 further years of evolution to bring us Jack Tatum’s head-first paralyzing of wide receiver Daryl Stingley. That tragic hit was leveled on Aug. 12, 1978, the height of Pittsburgh center Mike Webster’s Hall of Fame career. Today he is dead, a victim of CTE — one of hundreds and hundreds. One imagines that Munger isn’t the only rugby fan who looks across the ages at its sister sport and says to himself, “Dearie me. That’s not cricket. Not at all.”