Sports as vocation? Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, and...Frederick Buechner?

OK, this is some pretty epic God-trolling.

The Green Bay Packers defeated the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday, 27-17. This was a rematch of last season's NFC Championship game, in which Seattle won to get to the Super Bowl. After that game Russell Wilson, quarterback of the Seahawks, apparently engaged in a fairly typical bit of "jock theology" by attributing the Seahawks' victory to God.

It's pretty common to hear such utterances, and not just in sports. I didn't watch the Emmys Sunday night, but I would not be shocked if something similar were uttered once or twice there, as happens during other awards shows or ceremonies. Not every athlete does so, by any means, but plenty do.

What was unusual in this case was that another player, Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, offered a dissent to that theology. On a radio show he does in Milwaukee, a few days after that game, Rodgers took issue with Wilson's quote, and offered his own opinion: God really didn't care about the outcome of a football game. God would certainly care about the players on the field, but didn't choose sides. Wilson later doubled down on his claim, saying "I believe God cares about football. I believe God cares about everything he [sic] created." On which day of creation was that, I wonder?

Presumably the dust settled afterwards, after Wilson had to deal with the notion that apparently God wanted the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl. Then, after Sunday's rematch, Rodgers pulled out the needle. During his mandatory press availability after the game, Rodgers answered a question and then tacked on this: "And then getting help from God. I think God was a Packers fan tonight, so he [sic] was taking care of us."

Zing.

There's really no other possibility here: Rodgers, no atheist himself, was needling Wilson. I've not heard any word of a response from Wilson. Perhaps Rodgers was also nursing a reaction to the preseason injury to Packers receiver Jordy Nelson, which was declared an act of God by the Detroit Lion who delivered the hit. (Full disclosure: this blog has cited Rodgers as a sports good guy before.)

You're probably not surprised my position, though not exactly aligned with either, falls a lot closer to Rodgers's than Wilson's. God certainly cares about the players on the field, and grieves any injuries on the field as much as God grieves a cancer diagnosis or casualties of war. But God rooting for one team or the other? Seems highly unlikely. Something similar was once expressed by columnist Rick Reilly (quite possibly the only thing he ever got right), in a column framed around an unexpected return by Jesus to serve as a closer for the Cincinnati Reds. In the fictional press conference after, Jesus offers the advice what we, fans or athletes, should "please stop praying for wins. Put yourself in my position. If your kids were playing each other, who would you root for?"

But Rodgers's position--God cares about the players, not about the score--does raise some questions itself. If God really doesn't care about results, the idea of playing football (or any other sport, to be clear) for a living gets a little weird (and the whole business of collegiate athletics even stranger). Clearly we humans care, an awful lot, about who wins and who loses. We care to a degree that ginormous sums of money are spent on watching the games, either live in person or on television; millions upon millions of dollars are spent on identifying ourselves with our chosen teams by clothing or furniture or car flags or what not; millions are spent (legally or otherwise) betting on who will win or lose; billions are spent on facilities in which to play the games, billions on the rights to televise the games, billions on the right to advertise during the games.

Needless to say, those billions could do a lot of good applied elsewhere.

Add in the degree to which these games inflict harm on the human body, that thing that was (unlike football, Russell Wilson) created by God and created in the image of God, and after a certain point it's hard not to wonder: is playing sports really a good vocation?

Having introduced that word, "vocation," I now turn to an unlikely source: novelist and essayist (and Presbyterian pastor) Frederick Buechner. Buechner is one of those rare theologically-inclined writers that both evangelicals and mainliners can both appreciate, and is eminently quotable. In fact, one of his most widely quoted essays touches on the very concept of vocation, and what constitutes a real vocation, a "work a person is called to by God."* One sentence is most commonly cited, but I'd like to invoke the larger passage for the context it provides:

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren't helping your patients much either.Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.  (Originally published in Buechner's Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC)

There's a lot to unpack in this, to be sure. That last, bolded sentence is the one most people quote, and it's stellar to be sure. But taken without the previous context, I fear it loses a bit of its punch. One can talk about meeting the world's "deep hunger," but not all hungers fall into the category of need, as Buechner describes in the previous paragraph.

Where does the role of athlete fall vocationally by such a description? One presumes the athletes who participate in their respective sports take joy in doing so, or hopefully are able to walk away if not. We know, of course, that not everybody finds themselves in work that brings anything close to that kind of fulfillment, and even the most joyful vocations are also royal pains on occasion. But presumably, the athlete on some level plays for the joy of doing so.

But what about the other half of that equation? I don't believe it's all that hard to argue that there is a deep hunger for what the athlete offers. But does hunger truly equal need here? Does the world really need football, or soccer, or baseball or basketball or rugby or lacrosse or curling?

It certainly can offer good things. I still maintain there is a particular thrill, the thrill of truly not knowing how the particular drama before you will end, whether the Hail Mary pass or the long fly ball will be caught, that doesn't truly have an equal in other fields of human endeavor. Reading a new book provides the uncertainty, but it is a singular endeavor, not a communal one. A new play or a new musical work may provide that communal thrill, but frankly those don't come along that often (and after a few times you know how Henry V or Beethoven's Ninth end). Every game is new. Just because Team A has won all their games and Team B has lost all theirs doesn't prevent Team B from beating Team A. The slap-hitting shortstop can drive the ball out of the park; the backup quarterback can lead the game-winning drive.

But does this hunger rise to the level of need? And does the increasing baggage of the destruction of human bodies weigh against sports (football in particular to be sure, but all sports to some degree) as a vocation, as a meeting of the world's need?

We don't get to skirt the question.

Do we need sports?

*Of course Buechner's is not the only possible description of vocation, but other such definitions will likely raise similar questions.

Now be nice, boys...

The numbers fail to get better

This week saw the release of a report from the ongoing joint study by researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University, bringing up to date the results of its analyses of brains of former football players.  As of this report, of 91 former NFL players examined by this group, 87 were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease at the center of football's ongoing struggle with concussions and subconcussive trauma and their impact on players in (usually) their post-football lives.When expanded to include former football players at any level (high school, college, or semipro) 131 of 165 showed the telltale evidence of CTE.

(For comparison, here's the ESPN.com report on the study, which adds some interesting reactions, including a tweet from a former player and a comment from a real Maroon.)

For this occasion, simply some observations:

1) The difference between NFL and non-NFL players is striking. Doing the math suggests that 44 of 74 non-NFL former players showed CTE. That's almost 60%, which is not nothing, but falls well short of the 96% of former NFL players.

There are many possible reasons for this disparity, of course. It's always possible that the lessened exposure to those repeated head blows makes that much difference, but that's not an assumption that can safely be made from current evidence. More use of artificial turf fields in the NFL, greater size and speed of NFL players, longer seasons; these are just a few of the possibilities, and answers are going to take time, something current sufferers do not have.

2) At this state of research and understanding of football-related brain trauma, the study sample available to researchers is inevitably skewed. Despite how it may sound, we're not to the point of harvesting the brains of ex-football players. Brains are donated to this brain bank. Sometimes an ex-player can make arrangements for his brain to be donated after his (presumably, hopefully) natural death; in most cases, though, the brain is donated by the player's family after his (violent and self-inflicted, too frequently) death. In the vast, vast majority of these cases, the brains are donated precisely because of either the nature of the player's death or because of symptoms of brain trauma reported during the player's lifetime, or frequently both.

It may turn out that the non-NFL sample will be more enlightening, simply because of the greater parity of CTE and non-CTE results. It's probably not that easy to persuade former NFL players who experience no particular trauma in their retirement to donate their brains for study after their deaths, but it would probably help.

3) While this is the largest repository in this particular field, it is not the only one. It is probably the most well-funded, with a chunk of that money coming from the NFL itself. The principal researcher on the BU team, Ann McKee, is an acknowledged Cheesehead who was featured in the book League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle For Truth, the book (and accompanying PBS Frontline film) that has probably done the most to expose this condition, and the NFL's Big Tobacco-like stonewalling, to the larger public. When you follow that link, you might get a book blurb that starts with the remarkable claim by the NFL, ten years ago, that:

 “PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR BASIS.”

I guess we have to acknowledge that there has been progress.

4) At any rate such numbers (particularly among former NFL players) don't help the NFL in its ongoing litigation. It's worth relaunching the weekly reminder that even the NFL has acknowledged in a legally binding manner that one in three NFL players are likely to "develop long-term cognitive problems" and to do so at "notably younger ages" than the general population. We'll be generous and suggest that of the twenty-two players you saw on the field at any given time in the game you watched today, there's a decent likelihood that seven of them will end up with some kind of long-term debilitating condition as a result of their NFL careers. I invite you to keep that in mind tomorrow night.

And if you're looking at the numbers and thinking that eighty-seven dead former players doesn't really sound like that many, I invite you to answer this question:

What number of deaths is ethically acceptable?

Dr. Ann McKee, director of the lab running the study, presenting on her research.

Image credit: merrimack.edu

Hallowed ground

As has been alluded in early posts, the title of this blog alludes to a saying that was heard in precincts where I was born and raised (south Georgia, remember), typically spoken about football but applicable to other sports in other parts of the country. It would serve as a response to charges that folks in those parts treated football like a religion. "Football ain't a religion," would come the response. "It's way more important than that."

The saying itself belies the degree to which many of the rituals that accrue around sports have a quasi-religious nature, and are certainly performed with a fervor that surpasses the religious devotion of many if not most of the faithful. This does in fact hold true for many sports beyond football; I'd even suggest that soccer, with its supporter groups and elaborate pre-game ceremonies, might be even closer to religious ritual in its practice. Having been a couple of different times to matches as part of a visiting supporter's group for Sporting Kansas City I noticed at least two different ways in which the experience paralleled that of attending a new church for the first time: strangers bonded quickly around a common passion, and I didn't know all the songs.

It may be that the most intriguing or disturbing manifestation of this particular devotion is in the request, or occasionally the attempt, to dispose of the remains of a devoted fan on the team's playing field.

The impetus for this reflection is this feature piece from the Washington Post, reflecting on the phenomenon as it attaches to college football fields, particularly in but not limited to the Southeastern Conference. A recent example of the phenomenon is featured in the article, in which the infamous 2013 Iron Bowl, the one in which Auburn defeated Alabama on a miracle-like final play (again with the quasi-religious stuff!). In the crush after the game an unknown fan surreptitiously deposited the cremains of another (presumed) fan on the turf, near the sideline. A tweeted picture of the discolored turf can be found in the article.

And there's the rub; cremated remains aren't particularly good for athletic turf.

College football teams as a rule have rules against such a thing, for that very reason. As a turf expert at Auburn notes, the cremains burn pretty much any plant, including that lovely green turf your athletic heroes tread upon.  Obviously this doesn't stop these particularly single-minded fans, who don't seem to mind doing damage to the field they so revere.

My preacher-mind goes a few different directions here: (1) to see such devotion directed towards a very human and very flawed (to the point of corrupt, far too often) institution (as opposed to the One we are charged to proclaim, the only One truly worthy of such devotion) only points out just how far the church has fallen, and how little impression it evidently makes upon a segment of the population that is frequently presumed to be quite religious (but then, we knew that already); (2) the author of this book probably has nightmares about this sort of thing; and (3) we've all known church members like that, the type whose seeming outward devotion masked a near-maniacal urge to control or to impose their will upon the church/program. At minimum, after all, this is a kind of trespassing and (one could argue) vandalism. Why do you want to do that to your favorite team?

This article also appeared in the local paper, with an interesting super-headline: "SEC: Where Sports and Religion Meet." Now I hate to break it to you SEC partisans, but this phenomenon hardly began with you. The aforementioned sport of soccer also has enough of an issue with this practice that English clubs actually have established guidelines for the practice (if you're a fan of Blackburn Rovers you're in luck; Chelsea, not so much), and fans of the Argentinian club Boca Juniors can actually buy burial plots in a cemetery dedicated for players and fans of the team; you can be buried among your club heroes.

In the States baseball has also inspired such acts of devotion, with Wrigley Field in Chicago a particular object of such passion. It's not hard to guess why, in a way; the team is notorious for its extended championship drought and the long-suffering fans who have waited literally all their lives for a Cubs World Series win, so you can imagine those fans wanting to "be there" when it finally happens. Not surprisingly, more than a few Cubs fans have copped to scattering remains on the warning track or somewhere else in the park, occasionally without particularly trying to be sneaky about it. At least one former player was also supposedly meant to have his cremains scattered there, and a dispute has arisen over the intention of another Cubs great to be similarly scattered there (there was a quote from him many years ago, but no official documentation of such wishes in his case).

You can probably guess I find the practice a little distressing. At least in the case of Wrigley Field, though (or most of those hallowed SEC and other gridirons), there's the logic of scattering those ashes on, well, grass or dirt. I can't quite understand the thought of one devoted fan of his local team who got somebody to dump his ashes on the field of his local team, the Toronto Blue Jays, last year.

The Blue Jays play in the Rogers Centre. It used to be known as the SkyDome.

As most old domes do, that field has artificial turf.

Think about that one.

Addendum: a more detailed post on the subject and the compelling power of stadiums and such places for many devoted fans. 

The official Auburn Turf Team image of the 2013 Iron Bowl ashes (@AuburnTurf)

Waiting on science our savior, cont'd: No spear, but Magic Helmet!

One recent post covered a development in the quest for technological solutions to football's brain-trauma woes: a mobile tackling dummy designed to reduce the chances of injury in practices. Today we can look at yet another potential technological development in that quest: The Magic Helmet! (Sorry, spear not included.) (Note: go to the bottom of the article for the classic cartoon referenced here, around 2:10.)

No, it isn't really called a "magic helmet," but the hopes of its developers have a certain magical quality to them. The researchers in question are trying to develop a football helmet that will give off a visual signal that its wearer has suffered a concussion or severe blow to the brain. The idea, of course, is to be as certain as possible to get the affected player off the field before there's any opportunity for further damage. A concussion is bad enough; further injury while still under the influence of a concussion is exponentially worse.

The researchers on this project envision this technology being useful not only (perhaps not even primarily) for football players, but also for soldiers, a class of citizen that also faces severe brain trauma thanks to improvised explosive devices and other battlefield dangers. It's possible that the technology may be more useful for them; for football players, this might be at best a partial solution if it ever becomes any kind of useful tool.

To repeat: the concussion itself is not the only damage that places a football player's brain at risk.  Subconcussive blows to the head are also capable of causing both short-term and long-term damage to the brain. It isn't clear that a test geared towards major traumas is going to be much help with discerning the damage caused by more routine hits.

I'd also suggest that some of the questions raised in the previous technology blog entry (linked at the top of this article) apply here. In particular, the perils of "waiting on science our savior" most definitely apply. How many players will get damaged in the interim, even if this helmet device actually becomes viable?

Another point is worth mentioning, though. Note the source of the "magic helmet" story: an insurance website. (Another provocative story from the same website, here, is worth a read.) Here is a major player in the ongoing saga that most people don't think about.

Somebody is going to have to come with insurance for the game of football. Leagues, teams, players...somebody is going to have to pay for it.

What happens when the insurance industry says "no more"? What happens when they decide it's no longer worth the risk?

I've said before that only fans, specifically fans no longer spending money on football, could affect entities like the NFL or NCAA. A balky insurance industry might just be an exception to that claim.

Image from "Invisible Killer," 

http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2013/09/04/invisible-killer

Also, if you've never heard the song from which I'm stealing this title, you can hear it here.

Is your alma mater being honest?

Like a drunk and noisy neighbor, college football crashed into the living room this weekend. If you're like me you didn't have to watch a down of football this weekend to stay highly informed on the games being played and their results; a quick survey of your Facebook and/or Twitter feeds did the job highly effectively.

So it seems only fair to look into college football and its handling of brain trauma today.

Though no one pretends that college football players are immune from the effects of concussions and sub-concussive hits, a larger share of attention has tended to focus on the NFL (addressed numerous times in this blog) and conversely on high-school football and younger. The attention on youth sports is not at all unreasonable; severe brain injuries have occurred on that level, and players -- fourteen- to eighteen-year-old kids -- have died from them. That can't be ignored.

It has happened in college football too. And no, I'm not referring to the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

In 2010, a Penn football player committed suicide; an autopsy on Owen Thomas revealed signs of the early stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease found in a number of NFL veterans who also committed suicide, such as Mike Webster, Andre Waters, and Junior Seau. This despite Thomas never having a reported concussion.

Derek Sheely never had a chance to commit suicide. A season later, in August 2011, Sheely died six days after collapsing on the field, having been a part of an "Oklahoma drill" mandated by his coaches at Frostburg State.

Penn (an Ivy League school, for pete's sake) and Frostburg State aren't the "big boys." Ohio State is, though, and the disappearance and eventual death of Buckeye reserve lineman Kosta Karageorge did draw a great deal of attention last season. Karageorge had also been a wrestler before walking onto the Ohio State team, which might also have contributed to his condition even more than his brief football stint.

The relative lack of scrutiny over collegiate injuries compared to the NFL is cause for concern. The NCAA's response has been, in effect, "not my job." Its authority, so goes the response, is limited to academic violations and other rules infractions, which it polices so well. Therefore, responsibility for monitoring head injuries lies with each individual athletic program.

And that, in effect, means that the health and safety of college football players (or soccer players, or wrestlers, etc.) is left in the hands of the person who stands to gain most from that player's use, and who, in may cases, is prone to the kind of secrecy your average Soviet dictator craved above all else.

Take the four participants in the NCAA's college football playoff. Of those four teams, three reported either zero concussions or one concussion over the entire 2014 season. (In the case of eventual champion Ohio State, the one "reported" concussion was Kosta Karageorge, and his concussion history was reported by his family, not the school.) Alabama reported one concussion; Oregon, none. If these are in fact accurate reflections on how many concussion are suffered by players at these schools, I believe it is incumbent upon those schools to report just how they manage to protect their players so well. (The fourth, Florida State, reported seven concussions over the season, suggesting that the FSU program is at least able to be forthright about *something*. Full disclosure: I did get a graduate degree there.)

At least one other school had one concussion "reported" during the season that was "reported" only due to outside pressure. You might remember last season's contest between Michigan and Minnesota, in which quarterback Shane Morris was bounced around the field like a defective piñata while Michigan coaches dithered and actually re-inserted him into the game while he was still in La-La Land. The positive take from this, I suppose, is that fan pressure after that game probably helped dislodge the head coach, Brady Hoke, from his Michigan job (that and the fact that the game was televised to at least a regional audience). On the other hand, Hoke wasn't having success at Michigan. Urban Meyer's job is in no danger at Ohio State after Karageorge's suicide; Meyer could probably kill and eat the team's backup punter on the fifty-yard-line at halftime of the Michigan game and keep his job (exaggeration for effect, people).

As the above link notes, the number of concussions reported by the 129 FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) schools actually dropped from 2013 to 2014, and twenty more schools than the previous year did not report any concussions (again, please share how you accomplish this!). Key word: "reported." Unlike the NFL, which requires weekly injury reports, there's no such mandate for NCAA teams. And, frankly, there is precious little incentive for NCAA coaches or programs to report or acknowledge such injuries. Furthermore, even as awareness of the risks of these injuries becomes more and more known, college football players -- "jocks" -- still refrain from reporting such injuries for fear of being judged or disposed of by their coaches. Karageorge was apparently a tragic example of such an athlete.

So, folks, even more than in the NFL (which looks downright enlightened in its concussion protocols by comparison), the ultimate arbiter of your alma mater's treatment of its active athletes is ...

You.

How much do you care that your alma mater actually give a damn about the safety of its players?

Do you demand that your local fishwrap actually report such stories?

Do you even pay attention to such things?

Yeah, I'm getting personal about this, because somebody has to. Right now there is nobody holding major college football programs accountable. Nobody.

And that never leads to anything good.

Kosta Karageorge (image credit abcnews.com)

Quickie: An unexpected turn

Well, this is unexpected.

So, the governing body for the state's high school sports passed a new rule this summer. The Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA) has mandated that all athletes have to watch a video about concussions and sign a form saying they understand concussion risks. Florida schools are the first in the country to take this step, and football programs --with their big rosters and summertime practices -- are already dealing with the extra paperwork.

 Florida's is the first state association to mandate such training. It won't be a complete shock if others do so, but I'm not predicting it. Of course, I didn't predict this one either.

I'm not saying this is quite an earth-shattering development. I don't necessarily think that watching a video and signing a paper is necessarily going to change the minds of thousands of kids, or that every athlete will necessarily be honest on that form. But still, it's an unexpected step, particularly from Florida -- a state regarded as a recruiting goldmine for multiple sports, but also a state that gives the world Florida Man, the perpetuator of some of this country's most bizarre and depressing headlines. Since when does this state (the state in which I live, might I remind you?) come up with anything even as enlightened as this?

One of the coaches cited in the article makes a very good point, though; coaches are going to need help. NFL teams have extensive staffs, and crazy budgets, that can take on physicians on the sidelines. Similarly, the biggest college programs can also have plenty of medical staff. There are probably even high school programs, particularly in some of the larger cities in Florida, that keep physicians on hand for these things. But smaller colleges, and smaller and less well-off high schools, don't have that kind of capacity, and junior high school programs probably don't get that kind of consideration either.

So, a video is a step, at least, but it can't be expected to solve everything. More is going to have to be done.

Stil, this is an encouraging step for one reason: the athlete is being held accountable for his or her own health, from a early stage at that.

This blog does not seek to address questions about much of anything other than being a fan in a way that doesn't betray one's faith. I don't for the most part address athletes themselves, although the occasional athlete does draw attention for his, er, interesting viewpoint. The fan has responsibility for his or her own participation in a system that destroys the lives of any portion of its participants, and no more. The only degree to which a fan might have some say over the athlete's individual choice to play or not to play might be in the case of the fan's own son or daughter, or possibly spouse?

Athletes, in the end, have to make their own choices. One noteworthy element of the NFL's pending settlement on these brain-trauma issues (aside from its denial of the one actual condition that can't really be attributed to anything other than football, in the case of football players) is that for the most part, current players will be eligible for nothing. If you are playing now, you get nothing besides your pension.

And this is absolutely as it should be. To suggest that the examples of Mike Webster, Terry Long, Andre Waters, Dave Duerson, Junior Seau, Kevin Turner, Paul Oliver, Chris Henry, Tony Dorsett, Mark Duper, and a large number of names we will never know cannot be cavalierly dismissed. It's on you to know what you're getting into from now on. Guys in the 70s, 80s, and 90s knew that they were putting their bodies on the line by playing the game, but didn't know they were putting their brains in a blender. That ignorance is unacceptable anymore.

Also worthy is that this new rule applies to all athletes. Florida isn't necessarily overrun with high school hockey programs, but there's plenty of soccer in the state, and it's not impossible to suffer concussions or repeated blows to the head in other sports in high school (wrestling, anybody?). Anything that puts more responsibility on the kids and their parents to know what the risks are is not a worthless step.

So, we'll see how this works out, and how many other groups, if any, follow suit.

Who'da thunk? (Image via bigteams.com)

Waiting on science our savior

As the evidence for traumatic brain injury connected to football forced its way into the sporting consciousness over the 1990s and 2000s, one of the occasional yet persistent responses to the concern was to insist that technology would eventually provide a solution that would preserve football in something like the form we have come to know. In most cases this technological salvation was expected to come from improved gear for players on the field, most particularly the helmet. League of Denial, the book that has advanced the story on CTE and brain trauma in football most successfully, includes a section on a particularly egregious example of such promotion of a new helmet model, a case of unjustified hype fairly early in the course of the crisis.

A more recent development in technology against football injury, though, seeks to address other factors. A pair of engineering students at Dartmouth University developed what has been called the MVP, or "Mobile Virtual Player." The students, one a former member of the Dartmouth football team, developed the MVP, essentially a robotic tackling dummy that simulates the movements of a runner to allow a defender to practice tackling.

MVP was a response to a maverick move by Buddy Teevens, the head coach at Dartmouth. Teevens, who also had head coaching stints at Tulane and Stanford in his career, returned to Dartmouth in 2005, where he had previously coached from 1987 to 1991. Five years ago, in response to his own rising concerns about concussions and other injuries, Teevens had decided to eliminate tacking drills in Dartmouth practices. The counterintuitive move didn't seem to hurt Dartmouth's defense; as the NPR article notes, the team's rate of missed tackles dropped by half in the first full season after the protocol was implemented, and the team sits at #2 in the preseason rankings for the Ivy League, mirroring Teevens's success in turning Dartmouth around from his earlier coaching stint. Teevens, though, still perceived that the team couldn't get experience with moving targets.

While it's encouraging to see people coming up with creative solutions, there are still concerns about relying on technological advances to fix football's problems. What problems, you ask?

1) Technology doesn't come cheap. Each of the MVPs Dartmouth is now using cost about $3500 to develop. A third MVP is on order at Dartmouth, and you might guess that a well-heeled Ivy League school can afford it. That's not a number that would deter an NFL team from ordering up a whole offensive platoon of them, and your Ohio States and Alabamas would have no trouble enticing a donor to pay for them as well. For Compass-Point State College, though, that could be a steep price, and for, say, a poor rural high school, that would be prohibitive. The ethical quandries abound. Who gets to play safely, and who has to put their brains at risk in practice as well as games? The divide between rich programs and poor programs would be cemented.

2) While the use of MVPs as a practice aid seems promising so far (it certainly seems to be working just fine at Dartmouth), it's too soon to say that for certain. A hit is still a hit, after all. In theory hitting a mobile dummy that wobbles like a Weeble should be less damaging than hitting another human being. It's still necessary to keep track of just how true this turns out to be.

3) Football has its own particular culture. It is a culture that more or less routinely expects its players to do, shall we say, rash things to prove their manhood. Can a sport that so reveres the "Oklahoma drill" seriously be expected to talk away from regular tackling drills?

4) Even if the MVP does prove to be beneficial in reducing injury in practice (and all you have to do is observe NFL preseason injury rates to know that this would be no small thing), there are still games to play. And very large and very fast people are still going to run into each other over and over again, and brains are still going to slosh around in skulls. And so far technology doesn't have any answers for that.

4a) And that becomes a problem that is pretty much always in play in any crisis where those affected in the crisis look to technology for answers. Continuing efforts to find technological answers to problems have a bad habit of both leading to unintended consequences, and delaying the actions that will inevitably be necessary to bring about real change. And people continue to get hurt, while the football world is "just killing time, with our eyes to the skies/waiting on science our savior..."*

*from "Murder in the Big House," from the album Chagall Guevara.

M-V-P! M-V-P! (photo credit: AP)