JOHN RIORDAN: America’s game facing its biggest challenge yet
The 47th Super Bowl, to be exact. The NFL cavalcade rode into New Orleans these past few days with a strew of unlikely storylines and bad press waiting to be scattered around its carefully managed temporary home for a week.
And yes, once again, concussion is dominating the discussion, the magnitude of this dilemma faced by the sport apparently becoming more and more evident as the stakes get higher.
It hasn’t helped that one of the sport’s most famous fans, the aforementioned Barack Obama, told the New Republic magazine this week that he’d be uncomfortable with any child of his playing the game.
“I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you, if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” he said. “And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”
It’s an incredibly complicated situation. There’s the short term problem of costly lawsuits for the game’s governing body as a whole. But its current figurehead and the man paid the big bucks to take all the flak, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, can’t win no matter how he responds because any decision he makes could impact negatively on the long- term future.
One of the many ironies about this Sunday’s showdown (and not just the one where it takes me until now to find time to mention the two teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens) is that the host city is one of the biggest victims of the on-field consequences of the NFL’s evolving and oft-criticised stance on overly aggressive hits to the head.
You might recall that the infamous bounty scandal originated (as far as we are publicly aware) at the New Orleans Saints, their defensive guru Gregg Williams running an incentive system that targeted opposition players for the reward of ego bolstered by significant amounts of cash.
His first season in charge (2009-10) yielded immediate results with the Super Bowl but his methods were exposed almost a year ago earning him a ban from the game. What was more troubling for the team that he left behind was that his former boss, head coach Sean Payton, was handed a season-long ban for the campaign just gone and the Saints disintegrated into a mess without him.
A bit of political manoeuvring last week saw to it that Goodell would symbolically reinstate Payton before he landed into the city where he is intensely despised while Payton, to his credit, has called on Saints fans to not give the visiting commissioner too hard a time. Easier asked for than done.
It bears repeating that the league has often stated their preference for an 18-game regular season, two more than the current system and two more than players want.
But one of the biggest mysteries which needs to be solved and which has to elicit some sympathy for the plight Goodell faces is trying to work out what the players want. It’s as if they would prefer to be in charge of their own demise.
Most notably, Baltimore Ravens safety (roughly equivalent to an association football central defender) Bernard Pollard is one such vocal opponent of the new laws which have restricted players in his position from making the tackles they’re used to making (in other words, using oneself as a human missile).
“Thirty years from now,” he told CBS, “I don’t think (the NFL) will be in existence. I could be wrong. It’s just my opinion but I think with the direction things are going — where they (NFL rules makers) want to lighten up, and they’re throwing flags (the equivalent of blowing the whistle) and everything else — there’s going to come a point where fans are going to get fed up with it.”
And the greatest irony of all: on Sunday, Alex Smith will stand around on the sideline for what could have been the biggest game of his life. Instead a mid-season concussion saw him miss a subsequent game, allowing the door to open for the breakout young star Colin Kaepernick. Smith hasn’t played a minute since and who knows where his career will go now. No wonder these guys live to play through the pain.
*john.w.riordan@gmail.com
Twitter: JohnWRiordan
