Player safety needs to be discussed.
I promised this awhile ago and the post is finally happening. Before I go into player safety I just wanted to update you all on a few things:
1) The Podcast will become more active in the New Year.
2) The blog will be the main medium, the podcast will be an add-on so to speak. Don't worry, everything will still be free to access.
3) There are additional ideas in the works that I will share at a later time.
Now since that is all out of the way, PLAYER SAFETY! There are multiple ways to address player safety concerns at an organizational level as far as any football organization (league, team, etc...) is concerned. Rules, equipment, and facilities are really the three main parts of this equation, so that is what I am going to focus on here.
From a rules standpoint, there are a few things that would greatly increase player safety that are currently not in most football rulebooks. One of these rules would be a “Strike Zone” for tackling. The exact specifications of such a “Strike Zone” are up for debate, but legally eliminating hits to both the head/neck area and the lower extremities would greatly reduce injury risks. Another rule that could be implemented depending on the exact format this takes is the old Arena Football League “Jack In The Box” rule. For those who don't know, in the Arena Football League, one of the linebackers was not allowed to blitz and was confined to an area that they could not leave without drawing a penalty. One less person flying around at full speed is going to reduce injury risks. There are other ideas as far as the rules go, but I feel this is a good place to end this part of the discussion in this post.
Equipment is something else that needs to be looked at. The beauty of playing in the arena/indoor game is that the footwear component is not as restrictive as opposed to the outdoor game where cleats are a must have. Helmets are another area to be looked at and there is a case to be made for rugby style headgear over the traditional hard helmet in terms of mitigating injury risks. This is something that the A7FL has taken up and from what I've seen, it has worked overall. I truly think that there is a similar argument that can be made for smaller shoulder/chest pads, but that has to be experimented with so we can have hard data on the matter. There are other places where equipment can be tweaked, but I hit on what I feel are the major points here.
Lastly, facilities greatly impact player safety. One of the reasons I would choose creating an indoor/arena league over an outdoor league is the consistency in both the facilities and the conditions. You're not going to have a torrential downpour or a blizzard in an arena unless there's a whole in the roof and if that's the case, the game should be cancelled anyway. You also don't have the negatives of the elements wearing on the playing surface in the indoor/arena game, which in turn mitigates injury risks.
In conclusion, there are multiple ways to mitigate injury risks. Looking at rules, equipment, and facilities are three ways to do that. One more way to do that is to look at the schedule. If all the games were played the same day of the week, then there wouldn't be changes to the schedule such as playing Sunday then playing 4 days later on a Thursday. I think that the schedule the NFL currently does increases injury risks. The goal of any football league should be to mitigate injury risks and look at all ways in which that could be accomplished. This is one of the reasons why we need a Brand New Shield.