NEW ORLEANS -- President Obama's well-stated concerns about the physical dangers of football are now chum in the water in the run-up to Super Bowl XLVII.
Opinions are being gathered. The depth of the speakers' knowledge about what Obama said or the direction of rules changes matters less than having some "sound" to pass along.
Speaking to the New Republic, Obama said "I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence.
"In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much."
All manner of questions have already been posed to players from the Niners and Ravens based on these comments.
Bernard Pollard, Ravens safety and the NFL's resident Aristotle (at least for this news cycle), theorized that the NFL would cease to exist in 30 years because of safety measures that have only been broached so far when four fat guys sit on a set and spitball about NFL safety.
"Thirty years from now, I don't think it will be in existence," Pollard told CBSSports.com. "I could be wrong. It's just my opinion, but I think with the direction things are going -- where [NFL rules makers] want to lighten up, and they're throwing flags and everything else -- there's going to come a point where fans are going to get fed up with it. Guys are getting fined, and they're talking about, 'Let's take away the strike zone' and 'Take the pads off' or 'Take the helmets off.' It's going to be a thing where fans aren't going to want to watch it anymore.
"The league is trying to move in the right direction [with player safety] but, at the same time, [coaches] want bigger, stronger and faster year in and year out," Pollard added. "And that means you're going to keep getting big hits and concussions and blown-out knees. The only thing I'm waiting for ... and, Lord, I hope it doesn't happen ... is a guy dying on the field. We've had everything else happen there except for a death. We understand what we signed up for, and it sucks."
We can disagree on the lengths to which football needs to go in order to change. I think the game is already changing because of the penal system in place for head and neck shots on defenseless players and heightened awareness.
Additionally, once the NFLPA and the league approve HGH testing, we'll see how much "bigger, stronger, faster" players get.
Because of heightened concussion awareness and the cultural shift away from marginalizing head injuries, the game is probably safer now than its ever been.
Junior Seau, whose family filed suit against the NFL last week, never missed a game with a concussion in his 20-year NFL career. He undoubtedly had them. Why did he never tap out? Why did he continue on playing despite his family's concerns that his behavior was becoming more erratic?
The culture of ignoring head trauma or dismissing its existence as the cost of doing business. A culture the players have been complicit in. A culture that is fading fast.
There will be no more Junior Seaus, one hopes, because the players will have the balls to stand up and say, "I'm screwed up," and their coaches -- cowed by the lessons of players like Seau -- will not look down on them as they may have just five years ago.
Obama articulated that too in his interview. That NFL players are men making adult decisions about how to earn their money, the same way the guy working on an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico does.
"I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they're grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies," he said. "You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That's something that I'd like to see the NCAA think about."
The real truth? The NFL's probably safer now than it's ever been.
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