There was a hit in the Pittsburgh/Cincy game that set of Cincinnati, the Pittsburgh player hit Giovani Bernard hard and basically put him out of the game. The hit was helmet to helmet, Bernard caught the ball and was just starting to run and the defender put down his head and popped him, you could see where his helmet hit Bernard’s and forced it up…yet according to Nantz and Simms, it was a ‘clean hit’, and Mike Carey, who was a pretty good ref in his day, said it was clean, and I can’t understand it being legal, two heads hitting like that is dangerous.
Football has a big problem, even if you leave out helmet to helmet contact, when you have someone running who can run a 4.4 40 and a defender running at him who is only slightly slower, when they meet there is massive deceleration, not to mention when you hit the ground. In Concussion, Dr. Omalu makes the point that woodpeckers and birds like Ospreys routinely take forces as high as 1000g’s on their heads, and they are fine, because their brains are held in place by these support structures that keep the brain from flopping around in the skull, whereas human beings have no such protection and yet football players can experience 100g’s…and with players getting bigger, faster, and stronger, it is only going to get worse.
A lot of the problem is with coaches at lower levels, a lot of them still have the old “put your head down and charge” kind of mentality, and if a kid is knocked senseless, or can’t seem to play, they are a wuss, and that doesn’t help. To give you an idea, my son went to middle school at a local private school known as much for nuturing kids as academics, and they offered football. My son had never played, and the idiot coach had him up against a kid several years older in tackling drills, kid slammed my son to the ground. My son is not one to cry, he got up, but told the coach he couldn’t lift his arm, the coach told him he just needed to ‘walk it off’…when my son said he still couldn’t use the arm, and wanted to go see the nurse, the coach basically told him to get lost, made him carry his gear back to the school, violating all kinds of rules (when a kid is hurt, you never send them someplace alone, guy probably did it thinking ‘kid is a sissy’ or something like that), my son ended up waiting outside the school because he couldn’t open the door holding his gear…it turned out his upper arm was broken (90% fracture), but the coach assumed it was my son being a weakling or something (that coach should thank his lucky stars my wife was there to calm me down, I was literally searching for my favorite baseball bat, I could have broken his legs no problem for doing what he did). The NFL has this program now to supposedly train coaches on safety, but it is window dressing, because most coaches still are doing the same thing (take a look at I think TLC, that has a program on little kids playing football, it is eye opening what they do to the kids).
I agree, the NFL is going to face a problem, because while there is still the culture of football, especially in communities where sports are seen as a way out, being the way to go, if kids stop being allowed to play football, where are the players going to come from? If I was going to encourage a kid to play a sport, it would be baseball, you get a lot better money, it is all guaranteed, and your lifetime is a lot longer in the sport, if you are good enough.