Simon Veness reports on a Perfect Storm of NFL controversy caused by a week of savagery and injury.
What is an acceptable tackle in the hard-hitting gridiron world?
Just when you thought the season was starting to make sense (well, kind of), along comes Headhuntgate to throw everything up in the air again.
And this is not just a short-lived, storm-in-a-teacup furore over a couple of bad tackles. This is a headline-making, chest-thumping, out-and-out hurricane of protest and counter-protest over an increasing scale of savagery and injury that has been long in the making.
The fact it has hit the news reports on main channels like CNN and MSNBC serves to indicate last Sunday's outburst of sickening hits - four of which have been deemed 'illegal' by the NFL - has reached a level of consciousness (no pun intended when it comes to the ensuing concussions involved) that can no longer be ignored.
But it has been brewing for a while, this Perfect Storm of controversy over what is - and most certainly isn't - an acceptable tackle in the hard-hitting gridiron world.
Illegal
Mssrs Harrison, Robinson and Meriweather are all counting the cost, literally, of their actions last weekend after fines totalling $170,000 from an outraged league, who reviewed the hits against Joshua Cribbs and Mohamed Massaquoi (Harrison), DeSean Jackson (Robinson) and Todd Heap (Meriweather) as "flagrant or egregious".
You have to love the league's ponderous terminology in matters like this, by the way. 'Egregious' just means 'flagrant', or simply 'extremely bad'. But, according to the NFL rule-book, hits to the head are against the rules, i.e. illegal in sporting terms. A 'bad' tackle has to be one that fails in its inherent mission, because a 'good' tackle is one that succeeds. An 'extremely bad' tackle would therefore have to be one that misses altogether. None of Sunday's 'hits' missed their target. They were simply illegal, fouls that deserved the full penalty of the rules, which already allow for immediate ejection.
The fact none of the offenders were ejected (in a couple of cases they weren't even flagged) is part of the problem and would have helped to abate the storm that has been whipped up in all corners of the media from Sunday night, and which has raged back and forth ever since.
Outraged observers, notably Sports Illustrated's venerable football writer Peter King and NBC's player-turned-pundit Rodney Harrison (quite a switch there, for a defensive back who was fined more than any other during his playing days), have led a chorus of disapproval, not just at the Terrible Trio but at a growing trend the league has notably failed to deal with or even discern.
Risk factor
The initial reaction was distinctly of the knee-jerk variety, with the league first warning of suspensions for any repeat incidents and then handing out swingeing fines to Harrison and Co. "Hurrah!" said the media lynch-mob, completely ignoring the fact that this is:
1) A major officiating breakdown, as the penalties for anything "flagrant or egregious" are quite clear and state that this kind of thing should be dealt with on the field by an ejection, with subsequent fines once the disciplinary committee has had chance to review the events (not simply react to a press outcry). And
2) Something which has been brewing for years as players get faster, bigger and less disciplined with the demand for results becoming more severe game by game.
The counter reaction was led by ESPN's former Washington and Denver lineman Mark Schlereth (among others), who insisted this was an outrageous mis-step by the league, who have been tacitly encouraging and glorifying 'the big hit' in their bid for ever-increasing viewing figures.
Schlereth's strident insistence that none of the fined threesome did anything other than what they have been coached to do rings slightly hollow to my ears as I feel fairly sure Meriweather certainly was never urged to try to take off an unprotected receiver's head with his own helmet by ANY coach. But you know what Schlereth means. Loud, violent hits are now the stock-in-trade of NFL films as much as pretty, 50-yard touchdown passes. And the risk factor has been rising steadily as a result.
Target
Concussions have been a growing part of the league landscape for at least the past five years and yet absolutely nothing has been done, prior to Sunday, to even reinforce the existing rules, let alone to provide added security for this vulnerable target.
So far this season, which is only five games old for some teams, Philadelphia have had SIX players sidelined by concussion; there were FIVE in Week Two's 16 games and SEVEN in Weeks Four and Six (with only 14 games); quarterbacks Kevin Kolb, Aaron Rodgers, Jay Cutler, David Garrard and Matt Moore have all been dinged; and Cleveland lost TWO men to Harrison last weekend alone.
Evidence of former players suffering significant brain damage and dementia piles up, and yet (unlike rugby) there are still NO rules regarding players sitting out for a set period after any such brain-rattling incident, which, as we are told on almost every news station, is as violent and traumatic in terms of brain injury as being in a head-on car smash.
Many players insist it is just "the way the game is; it's what we sign up for." Harrison has even claimed, quite preposterously, he is ready to quit because "I don't feel I can continue to play and be effective under these rules." Perhaps they should all read the autopsy report on Andre Waters, the ferocious Eagles safety who suffered multiple concussions and whose brain - after he killed himself at the age of 44 - showed signs of Alzheimer's disease and deterioration usually seen only in an 85-year-old.
In the same way you can't allow players to officiate the games, you can't allow them to legislate for health and safety, even if it is THEIR health and safety. But, with the extensive use of in-game replay that the NFL already has, there is simply no excuse for not getting this right, game by game, incident by incident, until the 'head-hunters' have become an endangered species.
And now back to your normal programming...
Week Seven's TV-games-in-a-nutshell: St Louis at Tampa Bay (on SSHD2 from 5.30pm) is very much the Upstart Bowl, two teams that have over-achieved to date in racking up three wins each and confounding the expert predictions of doom and gloom. It may not be a pretty game in terms of offence (but then, how many have so far this year?), but the winner can certainly claim to be well ahead of the learning curve in 2010.
Amazingly, San Diego's home date with New England (SSHD2 from 9pm) is starting to look like the Last Chance Bowl for Chargers head coach Norv Turner. After three years of being the Best In The West but failing quite miserably in the play-offs, Turner's woeful under-achievers sit at 2-4 in a truly awful division and you feel one more defeat would tip the front office balance towards making a change sooner rather than later.
In fact, Turner, Wade 'Emperor Nero' Phillips at Dallas, San Francisco's Mike Singletary, John Fox at Carolina, Cleveland's Eric Mangini and even Josh McDaniels in Denver are all treading on increasingly shaky ground as the 'L's pile up, and it wouldn't be surprising if there was at least one firing before Week Eight's games are very old.
On with the show....
