The other night while watching Dallas Cowboys preseason football, I couldn't help but notice the performance of rookie wide receiver Cole Beasley. While watching Beasley I couldn't help but think, "Too bad he's too small to make it in the NFL. What a great game this would be if guys like Beasley could make it."
And then it dawned on me: I know how to save football.
Save football? Am I joking? Not at all. You see, football is on a death trajectory.
A few weeks ago, noted columnist George Will documented several of the premature deaths and suicides of post-career football players, almost all of which are due to brain injury. And we know the cause--the ever bulkier weight of NFL players. Will points out that, in 1980, only three NFL players weighed over 300 lbs. In 2011, 352 players weighed over 300 lbs, with three over 350 lbs.
The kinetic energy delivered by today's enormous players is simply more than can be compensated for, either by protective gear or through liability insurance.
The NFL is facing a tidal wave of legal liability related to all this traumatic brain injury, and as soon as a few of those lawsuits are decided or settled, the floodgates will open.
Professional football contributes about $5 billion to the overall economy, and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. If you're an industry that generates billions in economic activity but you keep seeing your talent commit suicide or end up with dementia at age 45, and you're facing towering legal liability, you have a problem.
I'm not a football expert, but I am a think tank guy. If we know the cause of a problem, we can almost always solve the problem if there is a will to do so.
And football can easily be fixed. All it takes is one simple change.
Weight limits.
Weight limits would cut down on traumatic brain injury and other injuries. Weight limits would also help with the steroid/performance enhancement problem that is related to piling on huge amounts of weight. By changing the culture of football a few degrees back toward athleticism and away from unnatural bulk, players would have less incentive to take shortcuts toward building up bulk that their own hearts can't sustain, much less the other guy's cranium.
And the benefits of this culture change would flow all the way down through college and high school to youth leagues.
Some will object to the idea of imposing weight limits, but those objections are without merit. Sports are highly regulated, especially to guard the players' safety. And rules change all the time, especially in the NFL, which has been particularly willing to change rules almost every season in order to tweak either the safety or the enjoyment of the sport.
In truth, imposing weight limits on professional football is an easy conceptual step, but selling the idea will take time. Once there, in fairness to current players, weight limits should be phased in, perhaps 10 lbs per season, eventually settling on a weight limit of perhaps 285 lbs.
The result would be a safer, faster, more athletic and more entertaining game played by players who have not spent their entire lives gorging 8,000 calories a day and ingesting chemicals designed to make them unnaturally large, and who will thus have a greater chance of living long enough to watch their sons play the game--if there is still a game.