football
Can the NFL Recover Its Own Fumble?
My father was a successful high school football coach. He was an old school, three yards and a cloud of dust sort of coach. Nothing bothered him more than watching his offense fumble the football. Offenders of what he considered the ultimate football sin were made to carry a football around school all day, every day until the next game. Conversely, as a defensive minded coach, nothing delighted him more than when his defensive unit caused and recovered a fumble.
It’s happened… again. Why not flag football?
Why not flag football? It’s happened….again. A Georgia high school football player who came out of a game with an injury and then lost consciousness on the sideline has died, officials said. Dylan Thomas, a 16-year-old junior linebacker for the Pike County Pirates, came out of a game in the third quarter Friday night with
High School Tackle Football: Its Origins Foretell its Future
USA Football, the NFL funded national governing body for the sport recently held its annual meeting in Orlando. According to a January 30, 2018 account in the New York Times, they would have been better off holding it at a beach resort as it would have made it much easier for participants to dig holes
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Why Not Flag Football?
Originally published in the June 15, 2015 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Why Not Flag Football? It’s time for parents, school officials, the sports media, fans and anyone else who continues to resist the need to reconsider and re-imagine tackle football at the youth, junior high and high school levels to take a long, hard
College Coaching Salaries: A New Level of Absurdity
I’ve participated in, worked in, studied, researched and written about college athletics for over 40 years. It’s not often that I see something that makes me sit up, take notice and say “Are you kidding me?” Last week I had such a moment when LSU announced that it signed its’ defensive coordinator, Dave Aranda, to
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Creating a Football “Safe Space” for Kids and Parents
When football legends Bo Jackson, Harry Carson and Mike Ditka say it, it’s a big deal. People pay attention to what athletes of their stature say. The “it” is that they would never let their sons play football. With increasing revelations regarding the link between tackle football and brain trauma, this should come as no
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WSJ – Coming Soon to Campus: The $100,000 Hotel Room
By Laine Higgins Texas A&M University on Thursday will hold a lottery in which the winners walk away with an unusual—and very expensive—prize: The right to pay $100,000 for a hotel reservation. The six-figure price tag is largely based on a single amenity: The yet-to-be-built hotel will sit across the street—96 feet away, to be
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High School Football: The Folly of Trying to Sustain the Unsustainable
There were two recent items in the media regarding high school tackle football that, taken together, provide a strong hint of the future of the sport in our schools. The first was a report that a three-judge panel of Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court rejected an attempt by the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) to have a
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Brain on Football vs. Brain on Music
Picture this. A magnified image of a cross section of the human brain. The image shows hundreds of tiny brownish bits. These bits are toxic proteins, called tau, that form after brain trauma. Tau can inhibit cellular functions in the brain, leading to depression, dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease)