Your Take: Turn Back the Clock For Safety

The recently completed football season will go down in history as the year of the concussion. Not because the game fundamentally changed, but improvements in head injury detection have forced a closer examination of the subject at all levels of the game. The football community is no longer taking a “head in the sand”  approach to a problem that has existed for a long time but only now is beginning to be understood. In the future, head injuries in football will decline. The solution will involve technology, improved equipment, improved medical attention, coaching and player attitude changes.

    But, more than anything else, it will hinge on rule changes. Rule changes in football are the fastest way to reduce concussions. To improve the game and reduce head injuries, perhaps a return to some form of single platoon football should be considered.

    The 1960’s and early 70’s were, statistically, the most dangerous years to play football. The practice of spearing wasn’t just coached but encouraged. Leading with the head was considered a safe way to tackle. Today, no one would think of leading a practice session or coaching clinic in “How to Spear Tackle”. Spearing didn’t just go away. It took a steady, long-term program to educate coaches and players on the dangers of leading with the head.

    The 1960’s were also a time when football became a more dynamic, wide-open game. The basic change was from single platoon, eleven players a side, to the multiple offenses and defenses that continue in the game today.

    Have we overspecialized football players into such neat categories that they have lost the benefits of the game instilled in athletes like Jim Brown, who not only was Syracuse’s leading rusher but also the field goal kicker and contributed eight interceptions as the best player on the Syracuse defense? Chuck Bednarik, the last “60 Minute Man” in the NFL, started at Penn as the offensive center, defensive linebacker and punter. Bednarik has been an outspoken, though not too serious, critic of the evolution of football, joking that current NFL players couldn’t tackle his wife Emma.

    Bednarik also laughs at players who need a breather after one or two series. No one expects a modern professional or collegiate football player to play sixty minutes non-stop. If anything, the anticipation is that the athlete will play a series or two and then be swapped out for a breather, to quickly return to the game. Or be used in only specific situations. Not to mention the advent of the special teams concept.

    As specialization in football has become ever more refined, the size and strength of players has accelerated. Skilled position players have increased in size, speed and strength as well. Their situational usage allows even greater focus on bulk and speed and less concern for conditioning.

    Are collisions more severe for larger players hitting each other at higher speeds? The product of mass multiplied by velocity is momentum. And, while momentum will increase with either an increase in mass or velocity, it will increase exponentially with an increase in both. Furthermore, the energy that needs to be absorbed in any impact isn’t a factor of velocity, but velocity squared. So, small increases in speed have a way of becoming much larger forces that protective equipment designers must learn to contend with and design for.

    By reducing the velocity of football impacts, injury rates would be decreased without radical changes in equipment design. How to slow everybody down? Return to single platoon football, take the specialists out of the game and return football to a game played by teams of all-around athletes, disciplined and conditioned to work as a team for sixty minutes. Smaller players traveling at slower speeds would have an immediate positive impact on the mass and speed of collisions.

    Single platoon football has other benefits as well. First, the players stay on the field and battle throughout the game against each other. A cheap shot delivered to an unsuspecting quarterback is one thing. But a cheap shot delivered on a player who is about to switch to linebacker by a player who is about to switch to quarterback is entirely different. Reciprocity becomes not some unreal concept, but a very real threat.

    Some say that a return to single platoon football will reduce the game to a simplistic ground game and punting for field position, missing today’s exciting combinations of sets, formations, and specialists. Yet, one of the most recent trends in football, the “Wildcat Offense” is a direct throwback to the single wing formation run by General Neyland at Tennessee, Curley Lambeau at Green Bay, Knute Rockne at Notre Dame and many other legends of the single platoon era. A West Coast-style short controlled passing game would add a new dimension to single platoon football, due to the changes in the passing game that have developed over several decades and won’t disappear overnight.

    No one expects teams at all levels of the game to switch to single platoon football in 2011. But the question is worth examining, especially at the youth and high school levels. Yes, tougher helmet tests, more and better-trained medical staff at games, attitude changes by coaches and players will help, but without a major change in the structure of the game, the violent collisions at the root of the problem won’t be dramatically reduced. Somewhere between the football of Rockne’s Four Horsemen and today’s game, there could be a compromise to reduce injuries. It’s a possibility worth investigating.

Joe Hadar is Vice President of Hadar Athletic Company.