Bernstein: The Reckoning The NFL Needs
By Dan Bernstein-
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) An open letter...
From: Owners of the 32 NFL teams
To: Players
Re: Fixing the game
It's time for us all to come clean, putting an end to both old conflicts and unnecessary new complications. The game in which we are invested is perilously close to breaking, with an on-field product that has suffered due to our disingenuous attempts to stave off litigation and satisfy misguided critics.
We want to get back to playing this game as it was intended to be, and we are going to start by agreeing on what is actually going on out there.
NFL football will destroy you physically, by some combination of inexorable erosion and blunt-force trauma. By choosing to play in this league, you increase your likelihood of either dying younger or experiencing a lesser quality of life when you are done. We are fully aware that this has been proved and accepted, and we will share this information with you freely.
The slow creep of our cynical efforts to make an inherently violent game safer has somehow created a sport we all struggle to understand, and this must stop. We have been frightened of your class-action suits over our handling of your health and terrified that governmental forces would expose our decades-long efforts to minimize the game's peril and the damage it does to you, so we responded with cosmetic changes and layers of byzantine rules.
We were wrong.
Wrong to hide from former players what was happening to their bodies, and for that we will compensate them financially and create an ongoing and evolving after-care operation. Wrong to use the game itself as our insulation, hiding behind concern for your safety when we have merely been protecting our profits, our franchise values and our public image.
We are prepared to reopen the collective bargaining agreement to come to new terms that establish a new, clear understanding that's entirely transparent. Henceforth, you play in the NFL at your own risk. Medical attention will be available as you desire and protections can be negotiated as you wish, but we will remove the pretense that we can or should protect you beyond reason from each other on the field of play.
We understand that this is also your goal, to take football back from officials, administrators and lawyers and return the real game to Sunday afternoons. You now play indecisively and too carefully, expecting yet another capricious penalty flag from the hand of an overworked, part-time employee burdened with an ever-shifting regulatory system. You don't quite know how to tackle or block anymore, how to stiff-arm or where to place your hands. Learning and un-learning are part of every practice.
No more.
We will scale back overwrought interpretations of defenselessness and return the responsibility to you. For example, there will be no such thing as an illegal "blindside block." We feel the player in pursuit should simply be better aware of his surroundings. Helmets sometimes make contact with helmets and hands make contact with the face, and to think otherwise makes little sense.
Just because a ball-carrier goes tumbling out of bounds after a hit close to the sideline doesn't mean any wrong was done, and a tackler in mid-air when a whistle blows can't be expected to stop his flight as if by magic. We understand that precious quarterbacks can be injured, because they have the ball more than anyone else. It's up to us to conduct our business in a way that confronts the reality that expensive assets can be incapacitated and devalued.
We don't want NFL football to have to try to be safer anymore, and neither do you. It's not safe, and it's not supposed to be.
Football has always been a glorious simulation of combat that provides spectacle and sense of group identification for millions of people. For your role in this lucrative entertainment business, you risk great harm to your physical being in exchange for relatively large sums of money and fame upon which you can continue to trade.
We have finally let misguided agendas twist the highest level of professional football into something tedious and untenable. We've lost sight of this truth that can set the game free to return to what it should be.
We look forward to your response, encouraged that a more open understanding of our respective responsibilities can allow the NFL to hold fast to its essence – the world's biggest, strongest, fastest athletes colliding with great force at high speeds, with preternatural timing and coordination, representing our modern city-states in something far better than war.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.