Maybe the message is finally getting through the NFL’s thick skull:
Kill the head of the player and the sport will die.
Maybe the suicide of Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, the concerns of Gisele Bundchen about the damage football has done to husband Tom Brady and the issues raised by the movie “Concussion” are beginning to resonate with a game that has stubbornly resisted change.
It’s tackle football. Played by real men. And loved by red-blooded Americans.
But there’s a better way to tackle. There’s a new way to mitigate the risk of head trauma. That’s why Tony Manfredi, an old-school coach who long believed sticking your nose on the football was the way tough guys played defense, stood Saturday morning in the Pat Bowlen Fieldhouse and preached: Tackle football must change.
“This is the future of football,” Manfredi told 30 youth coaches huddled around him at a clinic sponsored by USA Football. “We’re trying to change the whole culture.”
For too long, through deaths of NFL warriors from Mike Webster to Ken Stabler, football tried to ignore the ravages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease.
“We looked at Junior Seau and always thought: ‘Well, how many times did he hit somebody? Thousands of times.’ But as quarterbacks, we didn’t think it was the same for us,” Archie Manning told me in the days before Super Bowl 50. “But when Ken Stabler died, it makes you think: Hey, it’s tough stuff.”
I asked Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall, who has endured the collisions of 267 tackles during the past three seasons, if the concussion scare has changed the way he approaches his job. His answer was revealing.
Marshall discovered a smarter way to tackle before he ever arrived in the NFL, while attending the University of Nevada.
“The way I tackle is with my face up. A lot of times I try to leave my head out of it,” said Marshall, who adds his lone concussion as an NFL player occurred in 2014. “You see a lot of players come in and dive. It you do that, you’re going to get a concussion eventually.”
Yes, the new way of tackling is safety conscious. That’s cool. But it’s not as awesome as the TV highlights of a linebacker launching himself like a missile and blowing up a running back.
What convinced Marshall to stop using his helmet as a weapon was a desire to improve his performance on the field. “When I was in college, my sophomore year, I would miss a lot of tackles,” said Marshall, lowering his head to re-enact how he formerly tried to lower the boom on ball carriers. “I was getting there, but I was missing tackles and getting hurt too.”
So one day at practice, Nevada defensive coordinator Nigel Burton told Marshall to put on his helmet, buckle it up and look directly into his coach’s eyes, with head up.
“He just hit me in the face. He asked if it hurt. I said: ‘No,’ ” Marshall recalled. “He did it again and asked if it hurt. I said: ‘No!’
“He said: ‘Tackle like that.’
“I said: ‘OK, cool.’ ”
Manfredi, who won 172 games and the 1993 state championship as the longtime coach at Overland High School in Aurora, now spreads the gospel of building safer and better football players through a style of tackling inspired by rugby, a full-contact sport where the competitors don’t wear helmets. This revolutionary technique was brought to the NFL by the Seattle Seahawks, whose defense dismantled the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.
“The idea is obviously to protect the kids that play football. But it’s also to preserve the game,” said Manfredi, who was inducted this year into Colorado High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
This is how a real man tackles in 2017: In the name of brain-cell preservation, the ideal target on the ball carrier is either the side of the chest or the middle of the thigh. No smart player uses his noggin to deliver a blow, especially when the shoulders can be much more effective weapons.
“I escaped from coaching 35 years of high school football without having to deal with any of those really traumatic head injuries. And I count my lucky stars for that,” Manfredi said. “I was lucky as a player. I was lucky as a coach. I was lucky as a parent. From all those perspectives, I want to teach a better way to tackle. It’s really important.”
