The Rush Is on With Late Hits Now in Vogue

Pro football’s most critical game-day problem was exposed at length this month when late hits knocked three prominent young NFL quarterbacks out of exhibition play.

They were injured by pass rushers who, along with most of their peers, seem to be increasingly confused these days about the nature of America’s most violent game.

The confusion arises in the difference between violence, which is an integral part of football, and viciousness, which means a brutal late hit, a blow that is too late to affect the play, but is delivered anyhow--with intent to punish.

And because punishment is the highest priority for today’s pass rushers when they arrive too late to break up the pass, quarterbacks Kerry Collins of Carolina and Mark Brunell of Jacksonville are among the missing this week as the regular season begins.

Quarterback Kordell Stewart of Pittsburgh, another assault victim who was a bit luckier, says he’ll try to play.

All three were hurt while standing defenseless in the pocket. Each was smashed by a pass rusher who used his helmet to go for the passer’s head or knees after the ball had been released. One attacker, blocked out and down, drove in knee-high off the ground to do as much knee damage as a diving blitzer.

The penalty for such moves should be at least 5% of the offending player’s annual salary--$50,000 if you make $1 million--but the NFL is now in charge of people who love the league’s new motto, “Feel the Power.” Thus penalties were either light or absent in each case--meaning that all three assailants were rewarded.

They were rewarded for not doing their jobs.

By definition, late hits are made after the play is over for the hitters--after they have failed to keep the passers from passing.

Why reward failure?

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The model: The three hardest hitters I ever saw were Deacon Jones, Dick Butkus and Ronnie Lott, who, attacking an opponent, differed from today’s assassins in three ways:

* They didn’t go for the head.

* They didn’t go for the knees.

* If they couldn’t help but hit a passer after a pass had been thrown, they pulled up. To soften or avoid a late hit, they reined themselves in.

Before the pass was thrown, the goal, Jones once said, was to hit the passer so hard that he’d never want to pick up a ball again. That’s legitimate if you use a shoulder to hit him in the upper body--below the neck and above the knees. That’s football.

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Rule problem: Today, a completely different notion has taken hold.

A quarterback is now perceived to be not an opponent to disrupt violently--which was the Jones-Butkus-Lott perception--but an object to destroy brutally.

That’s a new sentiment in a century-old game--a new attitude toward viciousness--and it’s here as the unintended consequence of the NFL’s ill-advised, relatively new, so-called one-step rule, which is overdue for repeal.

Pass rushers--including those who hit Brunell and the other quarterbacks this summer--are taking advantage of the rule-book change to take one more big step after a pass has been released before crashing into the passer.

To this day, most of the league’s 30 club owners--who authorized the change several years ago--still don’t understand that their problem is that rule, which, if the blitzer takes no more than a step, is a license to kill.

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The insured: The protection that NFL passers need is assured today to two other groups of defenseless players--those who punt and those who, at times, carry the ball out of bounds.

The league penalizes viciousness instantly and automatically whenever a punter is attacked after the ball is gone or whenever a ballcarrier is attacked after running across a sideline.

There’s no one-step rule on sideline hits or for punt rushers.

It’s pow! and you’re flagged.

People expect that. They expect the NFL to control the violence.

Football is a game played for the amusement of a civilized race. That’s us. Uncontrolled, football is uncivilized.

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The obsessed: This year the New England Patriots are like the champion 1990 San Francisco 49ers, who, under new coach George Seifert, were motivated by an obsession to prove that they didn’t need three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh to win again.

The 1997 Patriots have heard so often that former coach Bill Parcells won the 1996 AFC title for them that they’re sick, sick, sick of it. And of him. For the first time in 20 years, the AFC will present the real Super Bowl this winter when New England plays Denver. Either can beat Green Bay.

The Patriots, in fact, would have won the Super Bowl last time if Parcells had been wise enough to sign an applicant named Desmond Howard, whose kick returns for Green Bay decided an otherwise dead-even game.