Defenders Are Crossing Line Between Violence, Brutality

Troy Aikman is the player who makes the Dallas Cowboys so hard to beat.

A big, quick, steady quarterback, he’s the principal reason his team has won three of the last four Super Bowls.

These, however, are times when the NFL is allowing unwarranted and often late hits on quarterbacks, sometimes with blows to the head.

And Aikman, conceivably, is no more than one or two such hits away from the end of his season, or even his career.

As San Francisco’s Steve Young learned last Sunday, career-threatening blows can be delivered any time in this era of the NFL’s most popular defensive pastime “Let’s get the quarterback.”

With increasing frequency, the defensive guys, as they charge the quarterbacks, are crossing the line between violence and brutality. They got one last year, Ram quarterback Chris Miller.

With one more big, late hit, Young may make it two in two years.

And Aikman would make three.

No one but their doctors knows who now leads the NFL in most concussions, Young or Aikman.

My recollection is that Aikman is still one up on Young. But it could be the other way around.

In any case, as the game’s two most successful quarterbacks, they wear the two heads that in recent years have become the NFL’s two favorite targets.

This has been an unusual year so far for Aikman. Reversing the pattern of recent seasons, he has hardly been dinged.

Not that the NFL has been protecting him--or any other quarterback--he’s just been lucky.

In the event that pro football should lose Aikman at his age, 30 this month, it would be devastating to him and his team, his league, his family, his fans, and those of us who appreciate, of all things in spectator sports, the performance of a great artist.

Perhaps the biggest quick quarterback ever, Aikman, 6-feet-4 and 225 pounds, is a nearly perfect passer. He has a model fast-footed drop, he is second only to Young in the rapidity with which he sets up to pass, and then, almost immediately, with a quickness that always surprises, Aikman guns the ball with surprising efficiency and accuracy, short, middle and sometimes longer.

What’s more, to produce a touchdown in San Francisco last week, when nothing but a quarterback draw play could get the Cowboys on the scoreboard, Aikman ran it assertively.

Finally, on third and seven in overtime, he had the confidence to throw a seven-yard slant pass to his newest receiver, Deion Sanders, setting up the winning field goal. So much for predictions that Aikman wouldn’t throw to Sanders in the clutch.

This is a quarterback who, if the NFL ever opted to save its passers from illegal hits, would go far.

Civilization, theoretically, has brought with it the willingness to compete with controlled violence.

In all societies, civilized men and women find at an early age that although brutality can be attractive, even addictive, it should be left to the animals.

This is true in selected instances even in the NFL, which has in recent years taken the brutality out of out-of-bounds hits, and which has also, for a long, long time, protected kickers and punters as if they are the league’s superstars, the magnet for pro football’s millions of fans.

The real magnet is, of course, modern offensive football, which requires first of all great quarterbacking.

But unaccountably, the NFL’s rule-makers--those who own the clubs--seem unworried by late hits and concussions to their most valuable artists.

For, in NFL games, after the ball has been passed, they allow defensive players to hit passers with animal-like efficiency. Thus:

-Philadelphia quarterback Ty Detmer was assaulted last week on such a play, after which, because it was his first big hit as a pro quarterback, he could get up.

San Francisco quarterback Young absorbed his first concussion of the season early this month, when, scrambling, he was butted brutally and unnecessarily.

-Then against Dallas last Sunday, after Young had opened a 10-0 lead in the first quarter, the Cowboys made two brutal, entirely unwarranted hits to get him out of the game, after which the Cowboys won.

Think of all the sports fans whose favorite player is Young. Or Detmer. Or Aikman. What does the NFL accomplish when such talent is needlessly knocked out of Football for a week or for life?