NFL Must Save Quarterbacks

As the NFL’s 32 club owners and their staffs head for their annual convention at Palm Desert March 25-28, their league is, for the following reason, in serious trouble:

The most brutal and determined of their defensive players have taken to deliberately injuring quarterbacks--the great passers who, collectively, have made pro football the most popular American sport.

If, as yet, the owners don’t accept all that as a fact, it’s because they weren’t watching the champion Baltimore Ravens closely this winter in the playoffs.

With lawless late hits, the Ravens deliberately injured and broke down the only two quarterbacks who might have kept them out of the Super Bowl, where they assaulted another one, injuring their third quarterback in three games, and winning all three.

For the first two of these attacks, the Ravens were fined, though minusculely, by the NFL, confirming that the hits were late and unnecessarily rough. The third blow, which got Giant quarterback Kerry Collins, was not shown on TV and escaped league attention, but not Collins’.

Demonstrably, the late hits worked--and in pro football, successful tactics are always copied, particularly when they lead to Super Bowl championships.

So that’s the 2001 problem for the NFL.

Now that rival defensive coaches and players are identifying teams like the Ravens as role models, will any quarterbacks be allowed to remain upright and unwounded this year?

And if the great quarterbacks are all out of action, how many TV fans can the club owners expect, week after week, to watch Ray Lewis and their other defensive thugs?

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TWO TRENDS: Raven-type defensive football seems to appeal mainly to America’s defensive types, including most of the old pros in the broadcasting booths, where late hits are rarely condemned.

Sports fans, by contrast, prefer spectacular offense.

Verifying all this, polls show that few viewers were entranced by the record 21 punting plays in this year’s Raven-Giant Super Bowl.

Further verification comes from the ratings disaster afflicting the violence-prone, skill-free XFL.

It’s clear that the late-hit trend has little support except among the NFL’s defensive coaches and players and their allies, the broadcasters.

Spectators favor a different sort of trend--such as the one that, not long ago, brought in the West Coast offense and a lot of passing.

At that time, the NFL’s role models were the celebrated passers--Brett Favre, Troy Aikman, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Kurt Warner and, among others, John Elway--who made NFL football as important to the U.S. sports majority as it was dramatic to watch.

The most successful of these quarterbacks was Montana, but the question today is whether the world would ever have heard much about him if he’d had to begin his career against the late-hitting Ravens.

Could Montana get up and keep winning Super Bowls after Ray Lewis and Tony Siragusa had taken turns driving him into the ground?

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DEFENSIVE ERA? One problem with late hits as an NFL problem is that so few see it as a problem.

There was, for instance, no public outcry when the Ravens advanced through the playoffs on illegal plays by pass rushers Lewis and Siragusa.

In successive games, the two most famous Baltimore defensive players took turns hurting quarterbacks purposely, first picking up Tennessee’s Steve McNair and driving him into the ground--on his passing shoulder--and then squashing Oakland’s Rich Gannon into the ground on his shoulder.

The damage in each case was done long after the ball had been thrown.

McNair and Gannon were the best two quarterbacks the Ravens saw all year, and, predictably, both tried to play after the hits, but neither was thereafter effective, as each said, and as media reporters at the scene agreed.

When in the aftermath of these attacks the Ravens got small fines, they paid up cheerfully, terming the fines an investment in the Super Bowl, which was very true.

Ominously, nobody seemed to care about any of this.

The referees who failed to make the two simple calls against Lewis and Siragusa didn’t care, obviously.

The other 29 teams, none of whom made a public protest, didn’t care (in part because many of them had themselves been busily hunting quarterbacks, nine of whom were knocked out in 16 games by one team, the Raiders--Rich Gannon’s team--whose defensive players gloated about it.)

Rival quarterbacks, also fearing reprisals, didn’t seem to care.

And the media didn’t much care.

Instead, almost unanimously, media people announced that the 2000 Ravens--who played the entire year with hardly any offense--were simply taking the league into a defensive era.

That is doubtful.

How good were the defensive Ravens really?

They could only beat good quarterbacks by injuring them--as they plainly felt.

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CONTROLLED VIOLENCE: For whatever reason, NFL fines for defensive thuggery have been insufficient in recent years, when, moreover, the games haven’t all been officiated uniformly.

Into that void, some of pro football’s most successful defensive teams have intruded with a new notion: that it’s perfectly all right to slaughter quarterbacks.

This is a view that gathered steam in the 2000 season, crossing a line that must be kept clearly drawn if the game is to hold the attention of the country.

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Football is obviously a violent sport, one that only courageous men can play, and as such, it can always get out of hand.

When the violence is controlled, it balances the intelligence and skill needed to play spectacular offense, creating a game that challenges its players in more ways than any other team sport.

In football alone is there a deep-seated three-way challenge that is intellectual and emotional as well as physical--until the violence goes out of control, when the game degenerates toward irrelevance with a street-gang mind-set and a focus on gratuitous brutality.

The result can be, as it was in the NFL playoffs last January, a wasteland of skill-less offense.

Such a game, if it survives, is bound to lose many of those who have been tuning in.

For what attracts the American football fan is the skill and talent of the players as expressed courageously on a violent stage.

The superb example is the gifted passer who can with unusual bravery face down a violent pass rush and simultaneously throw an awkwardly-shaped ball accurately to a fast-moving teammate who, distant 10, 20 or even 40 yards, is also face to face with a career-threatening collision.

The violence provides the framework, the substructure, that is missing in other team sports.

The talent creates the interest.

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NFL TRADITION: To maintain a proper balance between violence and talent, the league has, over the years, repeatedly adjusted the rules of the game.

It’s a continuing story:

Head slaps, for example, were legislated away years ago.

Out-of-bounds sideline hits have also been specifically ruled out.

Thanks to a campaign by plucky Hall of Famer Lynn Swann, roundhouse blows to the head are now against the rules.

Defensive players have also been sheltered in recent years with rules that (a) forbid hitting anyone below the waist in the open field and (b) forbid chopping into the legs of a defensive man already being blocked in a scrimmage play.

These rules have saved the knees of countless linebackers--but has anyone ever heard a shocked TV analyst recommend that linebackers wear dresses?

It’s only when fair play for quarterbacks is suggested that the cry is heard: You’re treating them like sissies.

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TWO PRINCIPLES: Respecting passers, two officiating principles seem not only fair but obvious:

* Whenever the quarterback has the ball, he should be subject to the toughest of legal hits.

* Once the ball is gone--handed off or passed--the quarterback is out of the play, and, therefore, no longer subject to attack.

As a parlay, that meets the test of civilized violence--the test that sets the NFL apart.

But in recent years, some of the NFL’s best referees haven’t seen it that way.

Increasingly, they have permitted late hit after late hit on quarterbacks, thus bolstering the morale of the defensive players who understand that every solid hit reduces any football player’s game-day efficiency.

The referees have disregarded football’s plain principles despite the plain fact that whenever a quarterback is without the football, he is not only out of the play, he is usually standing defenseless.

A referee who allows a defensive player to hit the passer at that point, after the ball has been passed, is like a policeman who allows a random mugging on the street.

Put another way, if the ball is thrown before the pass rushers get there, they have failed.

They’ve been defeated by the blockers as well as the passer.

If they attack the passer anyway, and if they’re not penalized for that, they are being compensated for failing.

Does the NFL really want to reward failure?

Should it make champions of losers?

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DANCING WORSE? In psychological terms, the increasingly brutal hits on quarterbacks are just another form of learned behavior.

And behavior can be altered.

When, last year, the league decided to abolish a form of behavior it didn’t like, it fined the Rams for end-zone celebrations, hitting up several of them for $20,000 each.

By contrast, for maiming quarterbacks, the Ravens were fined $7,500 to $10,000 each.

That told the 1,500 other NFL players that a dance is worse than a late hit.

At least twice as bad, in fact.

Thus, significantly, the dancing stopped, but not the late hits.

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PERCENTAGE FINES: Accordingly, one priority now is a more realistic NFL fining schedule combined with more alert and aggressive enforcement.

That would give the referees the enhanced league-office support they want and, at the same time, address the late-hit crisis.

When injuring quarterbacks is as useful to the defense as it has lately proved to be, heavier fines are needed to eradicate that behavior--much higher than last year’s price for dancing.

While it’s true that nobody will dance for $20,000, it’s also a verified fact that defensive players have routinely risked damages of that amount to land their late haymakers on quarterbacks.

To make the fines effectively uniform in a league of widely varying wages, they should be assessed as a percentage of salary--meaning it’s time for the NFL and the NFL Players Assn. to agree that because quarterbacks are their most valuable commodity, an illegal assault on a passer rates a fine of, say, 2.5% of a man’s salary for the first hit, doubling for the second and redoubling for the third.

And to help gain Players Assn. support, while also laying blame where blame is due, defensive coordinators and head coaches should be fined similarly.

If the Ravens injured three quarterbacks in three playoff games on three late hits; if other teams could hurt nine quarterbacks in 16 games and boast about it; if quarterback muggings are on the rise, some coaches are, for sure, responsible, actively or passively, and should bear the consequences.

The effect of such an approach would be immediate, doubtless abolishing gratuitous violence against quarterbacks almost overnight.

You can be sure that 2.5% fines slapped on one or two persons--combined with the sure knowledge that it would be 5% the next time and 10% the next--would affect the behavior of all.

For disgraceful behavior on a pass rush, nobody in the league wants to pay or collect 50,000 big ones.

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NEW CRITERIA: What can the NFL do?

First, it needs an ongoing pledge by the league office--including a continuing commitment by the commissioner, Paul Tagliabue--that the NFL stands for skill, talent and courage, and against mindless violence, and that league rules barring late hits and other illegal acts against quarterbacks will be publicly discussed and enforced.

Second, because quarterback preservation is the priority responsibility of an NFL referee, the whole roster of referees should be summoned regularly to referee-only seminars, where, using game-day films, league representatives can (1) review what’s a foul and what’s not and (2) stress that every illegal hit must be flagged.

Third, NFL rules should be enforced and/or changed to fit these criteria:

* A quarterback with the ball is fair game.

* Once the ball is gone, the quarterback cannot be deliberately hit.

* The first responsibility of a pass rusher is to keep the passer standing if he can’t avoid hitting him after the ball has been passed.

* When it’s too late to keep him upright, he must release the quarterback from his grasp and roll away, refraining from landing on top of him or driving him into the ground.

* The league won’t accept the routine defensive excuse--”I didn’t know the ball was gone”--because a defensive player who rushes in with his head up can unquestionably see the ball.

That will discourage the head-down helmet attack, which, though illegal, is not always called.

Any talented defensive athlete can cope with any of this: All it takes is impulse control, which civilized persons can master.

For referees, it’s also all easy to see and call: It’s a much easier judgment call, in fact, than many pass-interference decisions.

The intention of the pass rusher is obvious on the most superficial inspection: Any old pro or any experienced referee knows whether a pass rusher is resolutely boring in or making an effort not to.

When the first big fines are reported, and the sissy-quarterback cry begins again in the usual quarters, strong and continuing leadership from the league’s bully pulpit will gain in importance.

And, plainly, the league’s future is on the line.

As the XFL has most recently shown, hardly anyone wants to watch outrageous violence combined with incompetent quarterbacks.

Reasserting civility among NFL warriors is not only the right thing to do, it’s the only way to save the game.