NFL's headhunting culture needs to change

At least the NFL leopard has changed some of its spots by at last acknowledging the risk of permanent brain damage inherent in its sport. Now comes the tough part, actually transforming a culture that so values the headhunter ethic.

After years of denial, the NFL's announcement last week - that it will hang posters in all 32 team locker rooms warning players about the long-term dangers of head trauma - would seem a drastic leap forward if it weren't so obviously overdue.

"Why this took so long, I don't know," said Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic neuropathlogist who eight years ago diagnosed so-called "punch-drunk" syndrome during his autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster. "I'm no genius; this is something I read about in medical school more than 20 years ago."

The specific disease is CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and was most recently seen in Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals receiver who died in December at 26. In fact, Omalu found CTE, which only can be detected posthumously, in all of the first nine former NFL players he examined - even as high school football players have reported suffering between 43,000 to 67,000 concussions per year.

"And it's not just about concussions," Omalu said in a telephone interview. "It's about repeated blows to the head. Helmets do not prevent concussions or [undiagnosed] sub-concussions, because they don't stop the brain from bumping around in the skull. We have to take the head out of the game."

The revolutionary first step, advocated by former Harvard lineman and pro wrestler Chris Nowinski of the Sports Legacy Institute, is a dramatic reduction of hitting in practice sessions - a recommendation, backed by the players' association endorsement, that would truly rearrange the leopard's spots.

"I would hate," San Francisco 49ers head coach Mike Singletary told the San Jose Mercury-News last week, "for someone to come in and say, 'Coach, you're doing too much; coach, you have to cut back here.' Then we have a problem ..." It also was last week that the sport fondly remembered Ohio State/Oakland Raiders viciously aggressive defensive back Jack Tatum, dead of a heart attack at 61, as the "Assassin." Ohio State still proudly presents players a Jack Tatum Hit of the Week Award.

Especially pertinent to this discussion is how the no-hitting approach has been used, with overwhelming success, for more than 50 years at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn. "We haven't made a tackle on the practice field," said John Gagliardi, who next month will commence his 62nd year as a college head coach, "since 1958."

Gagliardi's theory is that hitting in practice only hurts his own players, and his teams, which compete in non-scholarship Division III, have won 471 games, making him easily the winningest college coach in history (.784 percentage), far ahead of the late Eddie Robinson of Grambling (408) and Penn State's Joe Paterno (394). St. John's has gone undefeated four times this decade and hasn't had a losing season since 1973.

To eager recruits who ask Gagliardi, "Who do I hit? Who do I kill?" he reminds them they first need to know where to line up, where to go to find the ball, how to avoid a block. "Eventually," he tells them, "you'll make the tackle. If you're in the hospital, you won't make the tackle."

NFL coaches, he said, "certainly don't need my advice. I'm not looking for converts. Certain things - religion, politics - you'll never change. But I think we lead the world in fewest injuries. It isn't rocket science to me. I'll never forget the first time we won the national championship and at a clinic afterwards a fellow says to me, 'Don't you think, if you'd have hit more, you've have done better.' Well, I said, 'I don't know. We played 12 games and won them all. I don't know how we could've won 13.'"