Without more player-safety, football's a losing game

Big 12 Conference Commissioner Bob Bowlsby covered a lot of ground at his league's football media day Monday. His comments on the need for NCAA reforms made the most headlines, and understandably so. His willingness to freely say what he said on the subject tells me NCAA reforms are coming sooner rather than later.

But most importantly, in my opinion, was Bowlsby being unafraid to address football's ever-growing need to do something about head injuries in the sport. That got short shrift in most of the stories I read about Bowlsby's 45-minute talk at the podium Monday. His comments:

We also have undertaken a very significant concussion research and prevention program that we think is altogether appropriate. We have developed a conference position statement that was developed by Ed Stewart and Murphy Grant, who is a sports medicine professional at the University of Kansas. It has been unanimously adopted by our administrators and by our football coaches. It is in conjunction with the position statement and the development of our conference protocols.

We are working on a partnership with USA Football, which is an NFL undertaking that is intended to teach young people to play the game properly and to play it safely. The initiative is called Heads Up Football, and there is a link to it on our website if you want to get to the Heads Up Football link.

But player safety is a very important element of what we're doing. The commissioners collectively actually took the initiative and sent directive to the rules committee that we wanted progress made on both concussive head injuries and the cumulative effect of repetitive blows to the head. ...

You'll see that a lot during the season. Head injuries are obviously a real challenge. We need to have prevention reflected in the rules. This is certainly not an attempt to, as some hosts said, sissify college football. Just as it's important to us and it's important to parents and important to players and it's important to our coaches, we need to have the rules reflect the right way to play the game, and we need to make sure that it's a game you can play safely and not compromise the rest of your life in the process of excellence.

The issue of concussions in football is serious, serious stuff, and getting more serious with each season.  The game just gets more violent. It is leaving a lot of former players in bad ways, and not just at the NFL level.

If this continues to accelerate, it's just a matter of time until we see players dying on the football field. It's well-established how head injuries in football have altered lives for the worse, even the worst.

I've heard coaches who say concussions have always been part of football. While true, that's not at all a helpful statement. Players are only getting bigger and faster. The development of finely-tuned physical freaks in football gets more sophisticated all the time. The sport, at its highest levels, is savagery. If you've never stood on the sideline at an NFL or NCAA game, you'd be flabbergasted at the punishment given and taken.

So this isn't the time for lip service from the powers that be in the NFL or college athletics or high school administration/athletics. They need to be active about this. According to Bowlsby, he and his fellow commissioners aren't standing on the sideline on this issue. They know football is the golden goose for them and all the athletic departments they serve. From a strictly practical matter, they can't have football looking like it's not for the faint-of-hear.

A friend of mine suggested recently that aliens will drop by here in 100 years, see the massive stadiums that were built for football, and learn what a violent, dangerous spectacle football was, and they "These creatures were stupid."

Football will never be safe-safe. Neither will boxing or auto racing or skiing or dozens of other sporting activities. But anything and everything possible must be done to protect football players' heads. Because it really is just a game.