Make Football Better

Start by humanizing the men who play it

The awfulness of the Damar Hamlin situation presents an opportunity for the NFL to look itself in the mirror and take stock of its reflection. The same goes for the rest of us.

When we look at NFL players, whom do we see?

I’ve never had the love-hate relationship with the game that some own. Frankly, I think it’s hypocritical. You cannot go crazy with emotion when Your Guy makes a vicious hit on a QB or wideout, then go silent when the player receiving the hit doesn’t get up.

We love football partly for its violence. It’s impossible to separate what is acceptable and what is not. No one was penalized on the play Hamlin went down. No one did anything wrong.

We pass it off as part of the game. Until something tragic happens. Even then, the games will resume, and all of us who love them will rationalize the occasional tragedy as a cost of doing business. That’s not to disrespect Hamlin, his family or all who grieve today. It’s just the way we have come to see things. For football professionals, pain is implied in the contract. Risk is as inevitable as reward.

Right now would seem an opportune moment to change football for the better. Everyone can agree on that. Let’s make a positive change while the moment is still fresh.

Agreed. How?

Hamlin’s “injury’’ or whatever we choose to call it was apparently a fluke. That makes it no less tragic, but does offer perspective. It was a blow to a precise spot at a precise moment. This is not yet fact. An official cause has not been released. It is speculation, informed by medical professionals and by what actually occurred. It’s called commotio cordis.

WebMD:

Commotio cordis is a medical condition that happens when your heart suddenly stops beating (known as cardiac arrest). It usually happens when there's a serious blow or injury to the chest that causes abnormal electrical activity in the heart.

The condition is rare. It's most commonly seen among athletes ages 8-18 who play contact sports like football or martial arts. It can also happen in sports that involve blunt objects like baseballs, hockey pucks, or lacrosse balls.

The most common cause is an impact to the left side of your chest during a sports activity. The impact gives a sudden jolt to the heart muscle. This can cause the heart to have a sudden, irregular, and fast pattern of heartbeats (ventricular fibrillation) and effectively stop beating. Commotio cordis is the second leading cause of sudden cardiac death among athletes.

Do we increase the armor that encases players? Do we employ harder materials in the armor? Does the league legislate stricter rules for tackling? With every new rule comes a new level of potentially subjective interpretation. Fans, coaches and players already express frustration over current rules on tackling.

Do we blame ourselves for what happened to Damar Hamlin? Wear the hair shirt?

Maybe yes, to all of the above. But the league has made laudable strides when it comes to the safety of its players, on and off the field. This tragedy still happened. And loving the game should not be a guilty pleasure. Some of us enjoy NASCAR, some MMA. Those athletes face similar risks.

Maybe this, then. Maybe the next time a player no-shows at training camp or expresses a political opinion or decides his head hurts too much to play, even if he has cleared protocols, we give that player a break. We walk a mile in his cleats, as best as we can. We can humanize these guys all the time, not just when one of them is tragically hurt.

Maybe coaches don’t pressure injured players to play. “You can’t make the club in the tub’’ was a favorite Marvin Lewis expression. Ditch that medieval thinking. Ditch, too, as best you can, the macho-dumb thinking that equates playing through injuries with “toughness.’’

We’ve come a long way from Bear Bryant not allowing his players to hydrate in rhe brutal August heat in Texas. Maybe not far enough.

Football is not the easiest sport to humanize. The players are encased in armor. Their faces can’t be seen. Many of them own freakishly sculpted bodies most of us can’t relate to. Remember the video game NFL Blitz? Cartoon players with bloated bodies pile-drove each other into the turf. We loved it.

In 2014, one of the game’s creators described how Blitz worked:

DiVita and creative director Mark Turmell supplemented the wrestling moves with the neckbreaker, which DiVita describes as "a guy grabs another guy's neck and just drops on his back and basically cracks the guy's neck on his shoulder as the guy falls down." There also was stomping on the bodies of incapacitated players, exuberant trash talking involving bleeped-out curses, and mild blood spatter.

The league quickly washed its hands of the game. But perceptions can be hard things to kill.

What we can do, then, is change our perceptions of the men wearing the armor. Understand that their physical stature, athletic prowess and blind bravery doesn’t mean they don’t bleed and cry like the rest of us. We saw it Monday night.

Monday night could serve as a catalyst. At least, it could be a start. It could offer some meaning to a meaningless incident.

Now, then. . .

THE MONEY ROLLS IN for Hamlin’s GoFundMe page created to raise money for kids toys. It’s beyond $6 million now. Yahoo!:

One of the biggest donations, at $3,000, was under the name of New Orleans Saints quarterback Andy Dalton and his wife Jordan, who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Bills fans in 2018 when Andy's Cincinnati Bengals helped clinch a playoff berth for Buffalo.

Other names on the top donation list are Patriots owner Robert Kraft with an $18,003 donation, Tom Brady with $10,000, Russell Wilson and Ciara with $10,000 and Matthew Stafford with $12,000, pro wrestler Chris Jericho with two donations of $5,000 each, plus smaller donations from Devin McCourty, Jason McCourty, Andrew Whitworth, Erin Andrews, Brian Hoyer and George Kittle.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Not directly relatable to what we’re talking about, but close enough. A beauty from the wise and gentle lyrics of Jackson Browne.