In the National Football League, it is the year of the orthopod. Football, the cognoscenti like to say, is a game of injuries, but this year, it sometimes seems as though that’s all that it is. That, and the blown call, anyway.
ESPN recently did a little segment on the casualties suffered by one of the teams playing in its Monday night game. Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco had torn two tendons in his knee a couple of weeks earlier. But he managed to engineer a game-winning drive before leaving the field and heading to the OR and a long, painful rehab. Earlier in the season, Flacco’s favorite pass receiver, Steve Smith Sr., had gone down with a torn Achilles tendon. It was the end of his season and, probably, his career. The team’s primary running back, Justin Forsett, broke his arm in two places, finishing his season. And then, in the first game this fall, Terrell Suggs had torn his Achilles tendon. He, also, was done for the year.
Elsewhere around the league: Peyton Manning, out with an injury to his foot. Andrew Luck, the man drafted by the Indianapolis Colts to be the next Manning, was sidelined (as they say) with broken ribs . . . among other things. Tony Romo of the Cowboys broke his collarbone, rehabbed enough to come back, and, after a game and a half, broke it again. Arian Foster, running back for the Texans, was done with a torn Achilles. Jimmy Graham, Seahawks tight end, blew out his knee.
And on and on. The New England Patriots suffered so many injuries that even the genius of coach Bill Belichick could not compensate. Quarterback Tom Brady, missing his favorite pass receiver, Julian Edelman (broken foot), and the offensive linemen who were accustomed to protecting him, couldn’t keep the Patriots undefeated. They lost two in a row.
Most of the conversation about football and injuries deals, of course, with concussions. Along with pitches for car insurance, beer, and fantasy football, recent broadcasts of NFL games have been peppered with ads for the eponymously named movie.
Concussion is one of those “based on a true story” films. Will Smith plays the lead role of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist who studied the connection between concussions and a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). His published findings have been challenged, but the evidence is disturbing. The brains of 96 percent of football players examined in a recent study by the VA and Boston University showed evidence of CTE. In an especially poignant note, the family of NFL legend Frank Gifford announced after his recent death that examination of his brain showed he suffered from CTE.
The concern over concussions has even trickled down to the level of the players. The sovereign remedy for dealing with a hard hit to the head that did not actually leave you unconscious was always to shrug it off. The player “got his bell rung.” Part of the game. Shake it off and get back in there.
But concern over the long-term effects of concussions—on the health of both players and the NFL—has changed that, even if not sufficiently. Players who may have been concussed are taken out of the game and subjected to what is called a “concussion protocol.” A series of tests is administered on the sidelines and in the locker room to determine if the player has, indeed, been concussed. If so, he is not allowed to return to that game and may be kept out of further games until he is medically cleared to play.
Players, being tough guys, often resist even being evaluated and, if the evaluation indicates they have been concussed, will still insist on getting back out there. The team may take a player’s helmet away to make sure he gets the message.
In a league of tough guys, Ben Roethlisberger of the Pittsburgh Steelers is among the toughest. He has “played through” all manner of injuries to include what he thought was a sprained ankle but turned out to be a broken foot. Earlier this season, he injured a knee—sprained ligament and bone bruises—and was held out of several games. When he did, finally, suit up, it was as an emergency backup for Landry Jones, who injured his leg early in the game. The convalescent Roethlisberger came in and passed for 379 yards and three touchdowns.
On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the Steelers played the Seahawks in Seattle, and Roethlisberger threw for over 400 yards. With his team behind, late in the game, he was hit in the head on a play that cost the Seahawks a roughing penalty. On the sidelines, a few plays later he approached the trainers and told them he was experiencing symptoms and wanted to be evaluated for a concussion. Landry Jones replaced him and threw an interception to end the game. The Steelers’ chances of coming back would have doubtless been better if Roethlisberger had been under center.
“I’ll play through any injury,” he said later, “but brain.”
Roethlisberger was medically cleared to start the Steelers’ next game. He completed 24 of 39 pass attempts for 364 yards and four touchdowns in a rout of the Indianapolis Colts, whose quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck, left the game in the fourth quarter with a neck injury. Hasselbeck is a 40-year-old backup who would not have started the game if Andrew Luck had not been sidelined with a lacerated kidney and a partially torn abdominal muscle.
Those are, of course, just part of the game—the sort of inuries that send players to the operating room every week and of which there seem to be more and more every year. Where a concussion might cause a player to miss part of a game and, if it is serious enough, sit out another one or two weeks, a blown knee means the end of a season and, perhaps, a career. And as the rules are rewritten to protect players from blows to the head, outlawing the helmet-to-helmet hit that was the signature tactic of a number of the NFL’s superstar headhunters, players have begun going low to make the tackle. For a receiver, going hard over the middle, it is a Hobson’s choice. Or maybe not. Players, being young and gifted, no doubt feel immortal or, anyway, that the bill for all those hits to the head—that thing called CTE—will not come due for a long, long time. Their speed and their legs are the key to their career. They might prefer to be hit high.
For the fan—the grizzled sort, anyway—the injuries are leaching something vital from the game. You could once expect a unit, like those Steeler defenses of the Chuck Noll years, to be more or less intact for an entire season. Mean Joe Greene would be in there pretty much every game. In the contemporary game, it is unusual for someone to play every snap of every game. The game depends on backups and good fortune. Green Bay’s prospects for the season changed drastically when their star receiver Jordy Nelson went down in a preseason game. Blew out his ACL for nothing.
A fan begins to feel almost complicit. Yes, the players are out there of their own free will. They will fight when they are told to come out because they may have been concussed. They will play through all manner of pain. It is their pride. They are warriors.
And yet . . . the injuries do take something out of the game, and you wonder why there are so many of them and, then, if there is anything to be done. The answer to the first question is, in large part, mass times velocity. The players are bigger and faster than ever. And yet bones, ligaments, internal organs . . . these are still weak and vulnerable. There is no known way to make them tougher. And the players will keep getting bigger and faster.
During one of those many, many injury timeouts during a game I was following recently on television, I told the others in the room about how there used to be this thing called “one-platoon-football.” I never saw it played, but I read about it and heard stories when I was researching a book on the history of the Alabama/Auburn rivalry.
In those days, players went for 60 minutes. You played offense and defense. Just like in basketball. On a change of possession, a halfback became a defensive back. A lineman might become the center. Even the quarterback stayed on the field and played defense. Which probably motivated him to keep a drive going as long as possible. Much better to take the snap from center and then hand the ball off or throw it down field than to have to cover and tackle pass receivers.
In this kind of football, the players would still be fast but there would not be so many behemoths out there. And by the fourth quarter, everyone would be tired and there would be less momentum behind every collision.
We talked about that for a while. Someone even brought up the possibility of going back to leather helmets.
Then the injured player was taken to the locker room “for further evaluation,” another player replaced him, and the game went on.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
