Beyond Targeting: How to Make Football Safer

When the first targeting flag is thrown this college football season, resulting in the ejection of a player for a hit deemed excessively dangerous, the PFT Commenter crowd will inevitably come out of the woodwork and lament that the game has turned into "touch football."

Of course, that's not true. Football remains a high-speed collision sport, with tackling and vicious blows still a major part of the game. In fact, the brain damage that can result from that violence is why the National Football League and National Collegiate Athletic Association are potentially on the hook for more than a billion dollars, combined, in proposed class action concussion lawsuit settlements. It's also why football participation rates are dropping.

Football as we know it faces at least the possibility of a long-term decline, and even eventual banishment to the cultural and mass-marketing backwaters, much like boxing before it. The threat to America's preeminent sporting cash cow—not to mention the health of its participants—has left the sport's powers-that-be scrambling to answer a question: What changes can make football safer while ensuring that the game remains recognizable?

I posed this question to numerous doctors, trainers, and former players. Here is some of what they had to say about what a future, safer version of the game might look like.

Sensors for Referees

The big hits to the head that end up on the next morning's SportsCenter are what we most commonly associate with concussions, but it's not defenseless wide receivers who are most susceptible to long-term head injuries.

Repeated subconcussive blows to the head, particularly those that occur on the offensive line, increasingly are believed to be far more damaging as they build up over time. These hits are also the most difficult to legislate out of the game. After all, the referees who could police them are far more focused on the rest of the field; even if they were watching the trenches, it would be difficult for them see particularly dangerous hits, or throw flags on helmet-to-helmet contact that doesn't seem especially dangerous in isolation.

"We've talked to referees who said they only call spearing penalties if it's the quarterback or the defenseless receiver," said Dr. Eric Nauman, of the Purdue Neurotrauma Group.

Nauman and his group at Purdue have found that linemen take 1,000 to 1,500 head hits per season "at an adequate amount of force to have some impact to the way the brain is functioning."

Calling penalties on the line could make football significantly safer. According to Nauman, researchers are developing the technology to do it, with sensors that can tell referees "if players put their head down to engage in head-to-head contact," resulting in an unnecessarily dangerous impact.

Sensors won't catch every hit, and penalizing all helmet contact along the line of scrimmage would be impractical. Determining the contact thresholds for penalties will be difficult. Still, as awareness of the danger of subconcussive hits grows, developing technology that can monitor head blows along the line of scrimmage could be helpful.

Eliminate Kickoffs

In an effort to reduce the number of high-speed hits, college football has already moved up the kickoff line and awarded five extra yards for touchbacks. That's a step in the right direction, but it's not enough to make a huge difference.

Teams work on kickoffs at pretty much every practice, and it calls for some major, high-speed hitting for everyone on the field—the blockers and the tacklers, not just the return man. When I went to Notre Dame practice earlier this year, the kickoff portion featured the most intense hitting of the entire session.

Given that these full-throttle blows are among the most dangerous to players, it would make sense to eliminate them entirely, and instead spot the ball at the 20-yard line. Kickoffs are fun, but football is still football without them.

Eliminate the Three-Point Stance

The people who lobby for change in football often are cast as villains hell-bent on destroying the sport, but that certainly can't be said of Dr. Julian Bailes. In fact, Bailes once said, "My whole life was football."

Now the chairman of the NorthShore Neurological Institute, in Chicago, Bailes still loves football, but he's also an proponent for playing the game as safely as possible. That's why he has proposed a radical idea to change the way linemen play.

"I advocated to the NFL several years ago that they should take linemen out of the three-point stance," Bailes told VICE Sports. "We had several former NFL linemen that did not have a concussion that were diagnosed with CTE."

The three-point stance—in which a lineman crouches with a hand on the ground—allows linemen to launch themselves, using their head as a weapon. A stand-up (or two-point) stance would eliminate a lot of the head-to-head contact that occurs in the trenches. This would certainly be a change for those who teach fundamentals on the line, but it's not entirely uncommon for some positions: defensive ends, for example, already employ the stand-up stance at times.

Bailes isn't the only person thinking about dumping the three-point stance; John Madden has repeatedly advocated for a change, while NFL commissioner Roger Goodell once told CBS's Face the Nation that it eventually could be outlawed.

Less Contact Throughout the Season

While helmet companies tout technological advances, no one in the medical community thinks a future helmet will magically solve football's brain damage crisis. "There's no concussion-proof helmet," Bailes said. "Equipment is another component, but I don't think it's the answer." Similarly, ballyhooed "safe" tackling programs, such as the NFL-sponsored Heads Up youth initiative or Pete Carroll-endorsed rugby-style takedowns, can't remove the human head from what will always been a violent leverage contest that the low man wins.

No head trauma is good head trauma. Many researchers studying the link between hits to the head and brain damage—including CTE, other neurodegenerative diseases, post-concussion syndrome, and a host of other health problems—have found that the damage is cumulative and compounding. The more you get hit, the higher the level of risk.

As such, the most effective change might be the most simple: play less football. Get rid of as much tackling as possible. Take almost all of the hitting out of practice, practice tackling only in very controlled environments, and maybe even limit the number of games allowed for players at each level of the sport.

This is likely to rub some old-school coaches the wrong way. It's not likely to please athletic departments, NFL owners, television-rights holders, or fans, either. Less football means less programming means less entertainment means less money.

Still, it's possible. Once upon a time, tackle football before high school was rare. High school, college, and even professional seasons were shorter. Thursday night football was not a thing. Players had longer offseasons, with more time to rest and recover. Before advances in orthopedic surgery and, let's be frank, painkilling pharmacology, players were sidelined more often, or had their careers cut shorter by injury. Either way, they were exposed to less head contact.

Leagues and schools already have been reducing hits in practice, but more can be done. John Gagliardi coached at St. John's University in Minnesota for 64 seasons, and for decades eliminated all hitting and tackling in practice.

He's also the winningest coach in college football history.

Football in its current form is not "flag football," but as the lawsuits and brain injuries pile up, the people who run the sport might be forced to make drastic changes that move it further toward that end of the spectrum. That won't please purists who don't want to see any changes to the sport they love. In the end, though, small concessions might end up saving the game—or, at least, a version of it that's similar to what we watch today.