Safety Should Be Top Priority In Sports

Football is a violent game and as technology becomes greater and players become bigger and faster keeping the game safe becomes more difficult.  There is  plenty of evidence that as we learn more rules are changed to protect.  The helmet is obvious today in every sport.  Baseball players never had helmets until a player for the Boston Red Sox Tony Conignario was beaned and he tried to play but never recovered from the hit.  When hockey went to helmets it started out the older player did not have to wear helmets but it was required for rookies and over 15 years or so every player now wears helmets. Football started out with the rubber helmet, then a helmet with a single bar across you nose and now days they wear visors making you look like you were in the movie Star Wars.

Back in the 60's they started putting warnings on cigarettes, seat belts in cars, all of them as we began to learn more about safety had a place to improve life.  So football has tried to come up with rules to make the game as safe as possible.  Just recently they have come up with a rule called Targeting.  The NFL say over the last five years have fined players who hit players that were defenseless for going for the head.  That  of  course is for defensive players tackling the ball carrier but it is no penalty if the ball carrier lowers his head while trying to run over you.  That ball carrier can get hurt that way too.

Everyday most of us get up and either go to school or go to work and just about every one of us fudges on the speed limit up to the point where we will not get a speeding ticket.   There is of course that gray area about what's legal and what's not.  Last weekend one of our local college football players Houshun Gaines  from Nash Central received a penalty for Targeting while blocking on a punt return for Virginia Tech.

Everyone may remember the Catfishing incident that Gaines had while he was being recruited in college.  He has been suspended from the Tech football team since his arrival in Blacksburg.  I am sure if you did not watch the game and saw the block live on TV you probably have been on Utube and seen it.

If there is any penalty in football and when the ref announces that the play is under review and it takes three or four minutes to decide looking at 1000 replays then that play is one that you can not call Targeting.  One replay should show you the answer.  Having been taught light years ago how to block and all the replays that I have seen this was a perfect block.

Gaines led with his shoulder and hit the chaser on defense perfectly.  Yes it caught the kid as he was turning as they say from the blind side. Those blocks like this one when they crowd sees it sends a AHHHH through the crowd.  I don't know how he could block any better.

Because the hit was in the shoulder area of the player being blocked and after an extended time reviewing the play targeting was called and Gaines was tossed out of the game which still had eight minutes to play. 

There is a fine line between perfect and illegal in this case.  I know all of the sports world is running scared these days because of concussions and there are times that the law has to go too far to protect the innocent. 

Football because of all types of injury and because of the high cost of insurance coverage will one day be  the flag football variety because insurance is going to be the death nail to football.  I predict within 50 years soccer will be number one in this country but lookout soccer.  Helmets are on the way.