Football is a great American invention whose popularity seems to be growing around the world, if the NFL’s first-ever game in Germany a few weeks ago is any indication.
The sport, played at any level, has much to admire. But there also is one thing to fear: injuries. And as the players get bigger, especially at the professional and college levels, almost all of them can count on getting hurt.
Pro football is the rare occupation with virtually a 100% injury rate because of the game’s physical requirements of blocking and tackling. The NFL and the NCAA have made plenty of efforts to reduce injuries, but they still occur regularly — possibly more often than ever before.
The NFL has made “concussion protocol” a normal part of sports terminology, but those and other head injuries remain a huge risk of the game. A number of former players have developed a degenerative neurological disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, caused by a career’s worth of head collisions.
The injury outlook may seem bleak, but Leana S. Wen, a columnist on The Washington Post website, interviewed a college football coach who has reduced his players’ injuries and concussions by doing one thing: eliminating live tackling at the team’s football practices.
The coach is Buddy Teevens at Dartmouth College, a member of the Ivy League. He said his players tackle every day in practice, “but we tackle inanimate objects, not people.”
Maybe Dartmouth was the perfect place to make such a radical change. The college’s school of engineering developed a robotic moving dummy, called the “mobile virtual player,” to use in tackling drills.
Teevens said the change allows him and his assistants to run the team through more tackling drills, always against a dummy instead of another player.
It also lets coaches break down the phases of proper tackling for players. “We went from missing a good bunch of tackles, like 15 to 20 a game, to just three to five,” Teevens said. “In my opinion, that’s because we tackle more than anybody else — we just don’t tackle each other.”
So what’s not to like? Well, it’s not tradition. Teevens said critics in the sport have told him that kids need to be tough and play through injuries. The rest of the Ivy League has followed Dartmouth, but only to a point. The other schools have eliminated full-contact hits during regular-season practices, but they still allow them during offseason workouts.
Teevens admitted he was worried that eliminating tackling in practice in 2010 would cost the team games. But since then, Dartmouth has won three Ivy League titles.
Granted, Dartmouth and the Ivy League are pretty far from the Southeastern Conference and other titans of college football. But it makes sense to reduce the number of player collisions. That ought to keep more of them healthier.
“Unless we change the way we coach the game, we’re not going to have a game to coach,” Teevens said. He has an excellent point.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
