Watching football

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on football made an explicit comparison to dog-fighting, and Migs's post talks about boxing. The distinction that I think will save football is that it's not intentionally dangerous the way the other two sports are. The entire concept of dog-fighting and boxing is to physically damage your opponent. (Dog-fighting has the additional lack-of-free-will issue, but that's peripheral to the point here.) While football has violence built in (you have to tackle the other guy to stop them from scoring), it doesn't contain intent to injure. In fact, intent to injure will get you suspended, fined, etc. Thus, even without any changes to the current ruleset, it is more palatable than boxing.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily take it over the threshold of acceptability, because boxing is really far below the line. Furthermore, with the evidence of the danger of traumatic concussions having gone mainstream, I would hope that the sport could not legitimately continue without making some kinds of changes.

The danger of changes, though, is that they'll respond to the wrong problem. Bill Simmons has mentioned a variety of times that he wants new concussion rules in place involving automatic time-off for concussions, including a full year after a second concussion in a season. But this doesn't come anywhere near addressing the findings Gladwell wrote about: offensive linemen don't report concussions all that often. They just slam and slam and slam and then, after they're retired into obscurity, they get stupid and then they die. It's particularly insidious because the glamour players in the league aren't the ones affected by this. Dan Marino and Deion Sanders are television commentators. Jonathan Ogden is not.

In terms of concrete changes, I'm in favor of mandating the principles of the A-11 offense. I think you could combine this with widening the field (why on football and basketball play on the same dimensions they've always played despite radical increases in the size and athleticism of the players mystifies me) to essentially eliminate trench warfare.

Of course, players would still get hit and concussions would still happen. But I think technology and continued crackdowns on "defenseless receiver" hits could help reduce the risk to the level of acceptability.

I think we can all agree that the following video is a great example of acceptable violence in football: