Whenever Russ Huesman watches son Jacob quarterback the Baylor Red Raiders, he doesn’t need a helmet-to-helmet hit to become concerned about his oldest child’s health.
“I cringe every time he gets tackled,” said the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football coach. “Low, high or middle. They pretty much all make me nervous.”
But that doesn’t mean he thinks the NFL getting tough on flagrant hits – especially helmet-to-helmet collisions – will trickle down to the high school and college games.
“We’ve always been taught and coached to go through a receiver high when the ball’s up there,” said Huesman, who played defensive back for the Mocs in the early 1980s and has spent most of his career linked to the defensive side of the ball.
“I’ve hit guys in the hip before, and that hurt me. I’ve gotten stingers tackling that way. So we teach our players to go high if the ball’s high. But we never, ever talk about destroying a person. We never teach, ‘Launch through it. Come out of your shoes like a missile.’ But you see it all the time in the NFL.”
If the NFL has its way, you’ll see far less of what happened Sunday, when the Pittsburgh Steelers’ James Harrison delivered two vicious helmet-to-helmet hits against the Cleveland Browns and drew a flag for neither. And the Eagles’ DeSean Jackson sustained a “severe” concussion from a helmet-to-helmet hit from Atlanta’s Dunta Robinson. And Detroit’s Zack Follett was temporily frozen on the turf after a helmet-to-helmet collision with the New York Giants’ Jason Pierre-Paul.
Only Robinson’s hit on Jackson earned a flag, but on Tuesday the NFL fined Robinson $50,000, Harrison $75,000 and the Patriots’ Brandon Meriweather $50,000 for a hit he delivered on Baltimore’s Todd Heap.
Said Ray Anderson, the NFL’s vice president of football operations, during an appearance on ESPN: “We’ve got to get the message to players that these devastating hits and head shots will be met with a very necessary higher standard of accountability. We have to dispel the notion that you get one free pass in these egregious or flagrant fouls.”
Not that the NFL witnessed football at its most dangerous or tragic this past weekend. That troubling distinction goes to Rutgers defensive player Eric LeGrand, who was paralyzed from the neck down after making a special-teams tackle against Army on Saturday.
“I still think kickoffs may be the most dangerous play in football,” Huesman said. “Everyone’s running at a high speed for a longer period of time. There have always been a lot of injuries on kickoffs.”
Injuries have been a huge part of the NFL for the entirety of its 88 years of existence. The NFL is so hard on its players’ health that the average life expectancy for someone with four years of league experience is a shade over 55 years, or about 22 years less than an average American male.
But it’s not just the length of life that has NFL officials worried. More than 60 percent of NFL players will have had at least one concussion before they retire. The Eagles’ Jackson just suffered his second of the year. No wonder that a study commissioned by the league found that its players are 19 times more likely to suffer a disease such as Alzheimer’s than those who don’t play professonal football.
“We’re certainly concerned,” Anderson said. “The fundamentally old way of wrapping up and tackling seems to have faded away. A lot of the increase is from hits to blow guys up. That has become a more popular way of doing things.”
McCallie assistant coach Adam Caine coached Tennessee Titans All-Pro defensive back Cortland Finnegan when he played at Samford University. Despite Finnegan’s penchant for personal-foul penalties in the NFL, Caine said he’s always viewed him as “a clean player.”
But, he added, “The way Cortland could explode through contact is something you can’t teach. Those guys in the NFL are from another world. When you’re out there running a 4.5 or 4.4 [40-yard time] and you’ve got 30 yards of steam, something’s going to happen.”
Fortunately, Caine is yet to see high school kids emulate the head-hunting of the NFL.
“We teach our kids to play with hips down, chest down, heads and eyes up,” Caine said. “I still think the low man wins. Bad things happen when you go high.”
Now if the NFL can just hammer that into its high-priced headhunters.