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Sports

110 Years of Football's Empty Culture Changes

The modern NFL proudly touts its "culture change," but a look at the game's history demonstrates how empty such promises have always been.
Photo by Mitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports

About halfway through a video introducing Heads Up Football—a safety initiative sponsored by USA Football, the National Football League's youth arm—league commissioner Roger Goodell appears on a youth game field, wearing a black track jacket wearing the organization's red, white, and blue logo.

"It will help us change the culture of the game," Goodell says of Heads Up, which purports to "literally take the whole head" out of football through a mix of increased concussion awareness, enhanced tackling techniques, and football clinics for skittish moms. "Which always has to be focused on safety first."

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In recent years, "culture change" has become the NFL's unofficial motto, a catch-all cure for the bad publicity and battered brains plaguing football. When Goodell spoke at the Harvard School of Public Health two years ago, he committed himself to changing "the culture of football" to better protect players; in the wake of the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal, Pro Football Talk reported "Goodell sees bounty case as a turning point in NFL's culture change." The same pithy phrase was invoked when the commissioner addressed cadets at West Point on a new NFL/Army TBI (traumatic brain injury) partnership; when he issued a response to the Jonathan Martin hazing scandal; and when NFL executive Troy Vincent penned a Time magazine editorial on the league's hamfisted response to domestic violence in December 2014. Indeed, pick a negative NFL news story, and the standard league spin is that said event is either: (a) proof that the desired culture change is taking hold; (b) evidence that culture change takes time and that the rest of us, especially football's critics, need to be patient.

Is it?

Do we?

Roger Goodell enjoying a moment of frivolity with Chris Christie. Photo by The Star-Ledger-USA TODAY Sports

Football has faced similar crises throughout its history dating back to its infancy on the grounds of the Northeast's elite colleges. Whenever the game's violence and casualties become too much for the public to ignore, football's stewards offer the same promise of "culture change" Goodell has pushed for the last few years, and every time, the gestures have proven empty.

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"Football is on trial," President Teddy Roosevelt told a number of influential figures in late 1905, after roughly 20 players, mostly teenagers, had died playing football. That year wasn't an aberration: safety concerns had been building for over a decade, with player deaths an ongoing issue."Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it," Roosevelt continued, "and so I have called you all down here to see whether you won't all agree to abide by by both the letter and spirit of the rules, for that will help."

Football was violent. That much was understood. That much was celebrated, by serious thinkers and elite university student participants alike. As college football's popularity surged, former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote in 1896 that "the time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors." Seven years later, Roosevelt himself wrote in Harper's Weekly that "the sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk. It is mere unmanly folly to try to do away with the sport because the risk exists."

Roosevelt, it should be noted, was "too short and slight to play football," according to the Smithsonian. Still, he was calling for culture change—for the sport to shape up and stick to its rules, so that the world-conquering manliness could continue, without all of the inconvenient killings. Out of Roosevelt's exhortations came the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, now known as the NCAA, a governing body that would codify the shift toward a kinder, gentler game.

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Did culture change work? In 1929, New Yorker writer John R. Tunis turned his sights on football for one of the chapters of his book, $port$: Heroics and Hysterics (a true classic in dissenting sports writing, available in its entirety online). The sport was increasingly popular, with the NFL in its infancy and big-ticket college games like Harvard University versus Yale University drawing crowds of up to 80,000.

The football establishment's outward focus on the rules remained. So did the game's violence. Tunis quotes Mr. E. K. Hall, chairman of the Football Rules Committee. "Football contains practically every essential to the highest type of sport…. It calls for and develops confidence, courage, nerve…. Its continual flashes of physical contact test the temper as almost no other game and afford continued and invaluable experience in developing control. It develops a fine quality of sportsmanship."

Tunis cites a Syracuse-Army game "in which the character-building was of such a strenuous nature that the quarterback of the former team had to be removed from the field for roughness and assault." He cites a Harvard-Yale game in which a no-name player baited a star into a fight, resulting in a double ejection. And most strikingly, he tells of "Fight Week," a mid-season week of practice in which "murder was forbidden but little else." These torturous weeks were considered necessary to build tolerance for what one disgruntled Harvard star described as the "terrific grind necessary to keep in the running."

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In 1931, things had become serious enough for the American Football Coaches Association to establish the Annual Survey of Football Fatalities, as well as surveys of non-fatal injuries. The survey noted at least one death "which resulted directly from participation in the fundamental skills of football" in every year from 1931 to the present, except for 1990. The survey also counted at least four "indirect" fatalities —typically related to overexertion, like a heart attack or heat stroke—in every season since 1966.

With football coaches controlling the studies, it should be no surprise the reports were twisted to serve the same ideas Roosevelt touted—that injuries and deaths were the result of culture, not physics and biology. "Poor Leadership Blamed For Gridiron Injuries," reads a massive headline on page seven of the December 26, 1933 edition of the St. Petersburg Evening Independent. The subheadline continues, "Many Hurts Classed As Negligence."

The report suggested over one quarter of that season's injuries "might have been avoided by 'adequate leadership.'" These injuries included those caused by "inadequate coaching," "fatigue," "poor playing fields," "carelessness," and "physical condition." In reality, the Associated Press buried the lede. The report reads: "Although the survey, conducted for a coaches committee headed by Dr. Marvin A. (Mal) Stevens, former head coach at Yale, showed that the natural hazards of the game still were the major cause of all accidents, many of the most severe injuries and 27.8 per cent of the total could have been avoided by closer attention to playing fields, coaching and the players' condition."

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Deftly buried in the middle of a 65-word sentence is the admission the NFL is viciously fighting against today: "The natural hazards of the game still were the major cause of all accidents." But it is hard to imagine the person who opened this newspaper—or one of the many others across the country containing the report—coming away with that conclusion:

In 1968, 36 football players died and another 30 suffered permanent paralysis. This crisis—reminiscent of the one facing Roosevelt—led to an emphasis on eliminating "spearing" and other types of head-first-tackling, and also the creation of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), a helmet industry-funded nonprofit that sets minimum safety standards. In 1971, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFSHSA) defined spearing as "deliberately and maliciously driving the helmet into a player who is down or who is held so that he is going down or who his held so that his forward progress is stopped or who is obviously out of the play." Rolls right off the tongue. By this definition, an AFCA study found only 28 out of 166 head injuries—just 16.9 percent—were suffered due to spearing or its fellow techniques, "stick," "goring," "face to the numbers," "form," and "butt" blocking and tackling.

No matter. Despite the fact that five out of six head injuries didn't fall into football's own newly-created category of preventable injury, spearing and other forms of leading with the head were (and still are, according to this year's Annual Survey of Football Injury Research) considered the primary cause of harm. Culture change was in the air. "Coaches coming out of college today don't know anything but head-on blocking and tackling," one NFSHSA member said in 1975. That year, the organization printed 100,000 copies of two separate brochures, one titled, "Facts on Football Safety" and one ominously named, "Butt Blocking and Spearing, Dangerous," effectively Heads Up Football 30 years before its time. Other suggestions were made by physicians, such as the removal of the recently introduced mandatory facemask and a shift from spikes to soccer cleats. These suggestions, still echoed today, were dismissed in favor of the brochures and, in New York State, an "experimental program known as SCAM (Selection/Classification Age-Maturity Matching)," which claimed to use "physical maturity to match students for athletic competition."

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By 1973 the total of directly-related football deaths had dropped to nine. Only once after 1980, in 1986, did direct casualties reach double digits. Culture change had finally made a significant difference—only the change had nothing to do with football, and everything to do with plastics. Thanks to NOCSAE, sturdier helmets were preventing skull fractures, and in 1980 the Associated Press issued a report on the massive success of the new technology. "No matter how you look at it, all the helmets have improved," Dr. L. Murray Thomas of the Wayne State University School of Medicine, where NOCSAE's research took place, told the AP. "We are seeing fewer injuries. I don't think, however, you can have a contact spot and not have injuries. We may be getting very close to the irreducible low."

Today, of course, football is worried about a type of head injury that isn't preventable—and may not be reducible—through advances in helmet design: concussions and brain damage. Unsurprisingly, culture change is being peddled an an antidote, same as it ever was. Heads Up Football's "Key Components"—"Education & Certification," "Equipment Fitting," "Concussion Recognition & Awareness," "Heat & Hydration," and "Heads Up Tackling"—are all panaceas that can be found in Roosevelt's 1905 suggestions, the AFCA's reports from the 1930s, or the solutions borne from NOCSAE's creation in 1968. BountyGate's emphasis on curbing player misbehavior for safety's sake recalled both a 1928 study of American college life, The Campus, that lamented "in the past many coaches have taught that anything was 'all right' which the players could 'get away with.'" It also mirrors the claims of Wayne State researcher Dr. Voight Hodgson that "human error is the biggest cause of injuries in football today." In fact, former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue blasted Goodell's ruling on the Saints bounty scandal as much for being "an impediment rather than an instrument of change … to enhance the health and safety of NFL players" as for lacking due process and relying on shaky evidence.

Unquestionably, Goodell received the message. His office has made it impossible to watch or follow the NFL without seeing a message of culture change, a message that the sport is making progress on this issue, a message that the concussion crisis is a problem we can solve if we all work together, follow the rules, and use proper form. Is that the case? Michael Oriard played offensive line at Notre Dame in the late 1960s and with the Kansas City Chiefs from 1970 to 1973, right as NOCSAE and the Wayne State researchers were applying football's latest fix. What was "manliness" for Roosevelt's day became "the right stuff" by 1983, when Oriard published a New York Times editorial titled "Why Football Injuries Remain A Part Of The Game." Oriard talks of the "particular respect" he and his teammates developed for "those battered warriors who continue through injury." Players weren't out to prove their talent level, according to Oriard—talent was a given. The question was if you had what it took to play in the NFL, if you had "the right stuff." "What we had to prove individually," Oriard writes, "was our willingness to play hurt, our toughness."

"Efforts to minimize injuries must grapple not just with the size and speed of today's players, but with the ideological underpinning of football for more than a century," he continues. "More than that, they must wrestle with even older attitudes that led football's early promoters to place such a premium on physical risk."

This is the true football culture that needs changing: the one in which athletes earn income, scholarships, and glory by absorbing, enduring, and ignoring brain and bodily harm. The one in which young men are incentivized to destroy themselves for profit and amusement. Real, tangible solutions have been proposed for years—larger rosters, fewer games, better medical care, more rest and recovery, guaranteed scholarships and contracts, an end to children strapping on heavy helmets and smashing each other's heads, the removal of the false protection of the facemask, just as examples. But these fixes come with an expensive price tag, a much higher cost than a few slickly-produced USA Football videos. They also require an unwanted reckoning, an acknowledgement that the sport's dangers aren't the fault of those who fail to display proper leadership, or the players who hit with their heads down, or the teams who aren't properly reporting concussions, but rather the fault of an inherently violent game.

"As stewards of the game," Goodell told his audience at the Harvard School of Public Health, "it is our responsibility to promote a culture of safety." Goodell's job, like Roosevelt's and NOCSAE's in the past, is not to promote safety. His job is to reassure us that the problem can be separated from football, that we can keep watching, and, most critically, that we can keep letting our kids play. And as Goodell reminds us, it has been done before. Football has emerged healthy from similar crises, changed culture, new terminology, and all.

Meanwhile, the bodies continue to pile up. As long as any new football culture continues to pretend the game is only unsafe when played incorrectly, or led inadequately, the bodies won't stop. We just have to decide if the excuses we're given are enough to get us to look away, yet again.