The Best American Sports Writing 2014(17)

I also asked longtime Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist and former All–Big Ten defensive back Rick Telander about “Heads Up.” His reply was dryly incredulous: “Does the ball carrier cooperate with you?”

“Have I seen behavior modification not work?” Guskiewicz says. “Absolutely. It doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. But I’ve seen it work.”

In fairness to Guskiewicz, his program is far more involved than the NFL’s youth tackling clinics. This season, players at nearby Chapel Hill High School have been outfitted with special helmets that measure the location and intensity of hits to the head. When a player suffers a series of what Guskiewicz calls “bad hits”—that is, head hits that are too hard, too frequent, or too often on the crown of the helmet, based on deviations from previously established positional averages—trainers and coaches will study video with the player and attempt to make changes to their collision technique.

“During the first half of the season, we identify who has a bad hit profile,” he says. “We put them into a coaching intervention that links video footage and data from accelerometers in their helmets. Then we study them for the second half of the season to see if we can reduce those bad hit numbers and put them into safer play.”

One problem: the force threshold for “bad hits” is largely a matter of guesswork—while some studies suggest that hits over 60 to 80 g’s significantly increase the likelihood of concussion, there is no hard-and-fast rule. One player can absorb a 100 g blow and appear perfectly fine; another can take a 30 g hit and be knocked out cold. No hits are good hits. Moreover, basing the “bad hits” frequency threshold on positional averages seems odd. A defensive back who absorbs 250 hits to the head during the first half of a season might be in line for an intervention; a defensive lineman who absorbs the same total might not. Are their brains all that different?

More doubts. I express them to Guskiewicz. I tell him that both the “Heads Up” push and new rules across football penalizing certain types of helmet hits seem like a replay of the 1970s, when football responded to criticism from the American Medical Association by banning “butt-blocking” (blows delivered with the face mask or front and top of the helmet to an opponent in close line play) and “face-tackling” (driving the face mask or front and top of the helmet into a runner), all while calling on coaches to teach “correct, head-up blocking and tackling.”

Has anything really changed?

“We have a kid at the high school who I already know—based on watching video from last year on kickoffs—has a bad hits profile,” Guskiewicz says. “We’re already starting to work with him for this season. I can show you video footage of a guy who changed his behavior in three weeks. We’ve been working on this for eight years. We didn’t come up with it overnight.”

Suppose Guskiewicz is right. Suppose he’s on to something. Sensor-equipped helmets are expensive. Video intervention takes time. Guskiewicz’s lab is partially funded by the NFL, and staffed by paid research assistants. What about the typical Pop Warner squad? Or high schools that already are facing budget shortfalls? I’m reminded of something journalist Stefan Fatsis said at the Aspen Institute roundtable:





You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game in the country?





I’m also reminded of something else Guskiewicz told me, the first thing out of his mouth when I asked him if children should play the sport.

“It’s not for everyone,” he said.





Monet shakes her head. She knows it sounds ridiculous. Looking back, she really should have known better. After all, she once watched her brother Mike get knocked unconscious during a Lions game. Her mom ran down to the team’s bench. Monet stayed put and bawled. Sitting in the very same Pontiac Silverdome skybox, she also saw Detroit lineman Mike Utley taken off the field on a stretcher after suffering a 1991 spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Monet felt a chill, a queasy sensation in her stomach. But never mind that.

“I honestly didn’t realize that football was violent,” she says. “It was just football. Even now, with my [family member] suffering, when I watch a game and they’re trying to make calls about players hitting too hard, fining them, I don’t know if they should do that. It’s like, ‘That’s football!’”