I am not a medical doctor man.
I have no advanced degrees in understanding how to prevent the very gross human body from spontaneously combusting or collapsing into a heap of phalanges, ears, and intestine. If you need some kind of basic medical care, you are generally better off consulting a box of Ritz crackers than asking me to fix whatever boo boos you might've just incurred.
But despite my general lack of medical knowledge, I do know that your brain is fairly important. It is not usually advised, for example, to allow it to slosh violently against the sides of your skull like toilet bowl water in an RV bathroom.
Anyway, for a sport that's become acutely aware of the impact of concussions on its long term viability, it still feels like football in general (and football's governing organizations specifically) isn't quite willing to take more than baby steps to rectify the perception that people have of the sport.
For instance:
In response to results from a five-year concussion study released earlier this spring, an NCAA legislative committee is deeply exploring ways to make the annual August camp a safer place, officials told Sports Illustrated in interviews this week. The Football Oversight Committee (FOC), college football’s highest policy-making group, plans to present recommendations soon[...]
Sports Illustrated reports that the FOC is considering reducing the number of padded practices in fall camp from 21 to eight, allowing only two full scrimmages per camp, and eliminating archaic one-on-one tackling drills that are concussion-generating machines. A four year study of several college football programs showed that the large majority of concussions from players were sustained in practice, and the NCAA wants to take steps to address that.
Actually, quick aside on that topic, from the article:
The changes are along similar lines to what the NFL and its players union has done. Their collective bargaining agreement limits padded practices and these collision drills.
“A lot of our coaches have already done away with the drills,” [American Football Coaches Association Executive Director Todd] Berry says. “I don’t know anybody that has done Bull in the Ring since the 1980s.”
Really, Todd?
You don't know anybody in the last 40 years that has lined up two players in full pads in an enclosed space and had them run at each other? You haven't seen the approximately one billion examples of exactly that in youth football on YouTube? You haven't seen college football programs use these drills in hype videos to promote their brand? You haven't seen media outlets use said videos of said drills to generate precious, precious clicks? Turn on your monitor, dude.
It's telling that any proposed changes to sacred practice cows in football is met with skepticism or been ignored; the Ivy League banned in-season tackling at practices years ago, greatly reducing concussions, but that approach hasn't caught on with the wider football world as of yet.
And maybe that world isn't ready to make those kinds of changes. Gene Smith has said that "If I was czar, I would eliminate tackle football until the age of 13 [...] I don’t think anybody should be playing tackle football until they’re 13 years old" but I don't see anyone listening too closely to what Gene Smith, national championship-winning football player and enormously successful athletic director has to say on that subject as of yet. Maybe they will soon.
Which is unfortunate, because it's a worthwhile argument that the sport needs to have. How do we as consumers of a sport manage the desires of a football coach who wants "a million reps" and is kept up most nights thinking about ways that Dabo Swinney is trying to screw him over, with the needs of the brains of the players that he coaches to not be turned into a slurry? And for that matter, how do Day and Smith, two people who genuinely care for the wellbeing of the athletes they're in charge of, manage that problem? Can they?
Football (and by "football" I mean everyone at every level playing, coaching, administering, and watching at home) needs to decide how seriously it takes safety in the sport. A desire for reduced concussions and fewer injuries can't exist hand-in-hand with longer seasons, additional games, toddlers in helmets reenacting Lord of the Flies, and a culture that celebrates when Piggy gets knocked out cold during a scrimmage of seven year olds.
Gene Smith is right about tackle football, but the world that replaces YouTube Pee Wee football highlights set to some P.O.D. song from 2002 with uh... literally anything else doesn't exist yet. There is an internal conflict that needs to be decided within a sport that wrings its hands over Justin Fields having a manageable epilepsy condition and pushes for more regular season games at the highest level (with a tiny expansion of rosters) in the same breath.
Football will never be fully "safe" as long as it remains a contact sport, and that's okay; it doesn't need to be. But what it does need is a willingness to redefine itself into something smarter and more flexible. Into something less willing to chew up the brains of young people and spit them out before they get out of middle school.
