Defense in NFL a Dirty Game

The hoodlums who play defensive football in the NFL are still throwing the punches that cripple offensive players.

During the exhibition season that ended last week, some of the sport’s worst delinquents were caught and punished for attacking quarterbacks and others who play offense.

It was a continuance of an old problem that worsened in the league’s American Conference last year when two of the three division champions were knocked out of the playoffs by opponents who assaulted and injured their quarterbacks, driving them from the field with deliberate late hits.

To be sure, not all of the NFL’s 400 defensive linemen and linebackers play the late-hit game--but too many do--and too often, no doubt, the ringleaders are on the coaching staffs.

So this is crisis time in pro ball.

When the regular season begins today, can league administrators protect and preserve the quarterbacks who, more than any other individuals, have made this the nation’s most popular sport?

If they can--if it’s possible to force defensive people to play clean football against the great passers--the Super Bowl will be won next January not by a great defensive team (as it was last winter) but by a great team.

That, in a low-injury incidence season, would most likely be the Denver Broncos, whose strength is all-around. The Broncos can run, pass, catch, block, and play defense.

But there are three other potentially great pro clubs out there now--the St. Louis Rams of the NFC and Denver’s two foremost AFC challengers, the Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens--and all three have what it takes to defeat Denver or any other team.

Nonetheless, they all join Denver in facing an uncertain future.

Pro football is so competitive now that it would be difficult for any of the top four clubs to survive the late hits that could lay out their starting quarterbacks: Brian Griese of Denver, Kurt Warner of the Rams, Steve McNair of Tennessee, or Elvis Grbac of Baltimore.

A crossroads year like this the well-being of the game demands a reexamination of the bromide that offense sells tickets but defense wins championship.

When the rules are enforced, offense both sells and wins.

In recent years, Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Brett Favre, Warner and others have proved that.

This year, will the NFL give McNair, Griese, Grbac, Warner and the others a chance?

Referees Distract

The NFL’S owners have been distracted this year by their argument with referees, although, ironically, they have much more to lose from a nationwide decline of interest in pro football than from a salary increase for game officials.

Their officials are the most competent in U.S. sports--you should compare their work with the bumbling of baseball umpires or the line-callers of tennis--but in any case, paying them what they want wouldn’t come out of the pockets of the club owners.

It would simply mean a little less money for player payrolls.

By contrast, a drastic drop in ratings and public interest could follow if the world’s best quarterbacks and wide receivers are missing because of illicit late-hitting.

It’s hard enough for passers to survive cleanhits.

Superimposing the damage from a procession of late hits could change the nature of the NFL.

How long would football fans keep turning out for pro games starring not skilled artists like quarterbacks Warner and Favre or Peyton Manning but brutish, unskilled late-hitters like linebacker Ray Lewis?

Six months ago, Lewis’ team, Baltimore, won the Super Bowl only because, earlier in the playoffs, Lewis had disposed of--knocked out--the one quarterback who could have disposed of the Ravens.

That’s McNair, the leader of a Tennessee team that looked to be the best in football until the day Lewis stormed into him after he had thrown a second-quarter pass, smashing into McNair’s throat, and driving him into the ground and out of the playoffs.

This was just one of a series of late hits by the Ravens and others last year, when the Oakland Raiders also lost a strong Super Bowl bid in the playoffs to a late hit by Lewis’ 350-pound teammate, Tony Siragusa, who laid out Oakland quarterback Rich Gannon, then squashed him into the ground.

Because the Lewis and Siragusa plays on McNair and Gannon were the big plays of the season, because they got away with it, and because the NFL is a copycat league, it figures that most of the NFL’s good quarterbacks and wide receivers will be under siege this fall and, conceivably, under assault by defensive strongmen making moves in Raven fashion.

What the league should fear most in 2001 is not that the referees might be overpaid--horrors!--but that the owners might lose most of the stars of their Sunday shows to late hitters.

The question is, what kind of league does the NFL want: one with highly skilled passers who can energize football teams and spectators alike, or one that’s a wasteland of unskilled offense?

Fine the Coaches

When the attacks by NFL defensive players on offensive players continued this summer with a continuing lack of respect for football’s rules, the owners, obviously, were looking at the referees instead.

So let me tell you about the kind of thing you missed.

At Green Bay on the evening of Aug. 20, a Packer wide receiver, Antonio Freeman, was completing a pass route when Denver defensive back Eric Brown came speeding out of nowhere, lowered his head as a weapon, and used it to smash into Freeman’s jaw, grounding Freeman with a concussion.

After the NFL fined Brown a game’s salary, Denver Coach Mike Shanahan, predictably, telephoned the league office to protest.

Accordingly, since football coaches expect--and since some of them doubtless coach--hits like Brown’s, they should also be fined a game’s salary when their players deliver.

Almost certainly there is no other way to insure that football’s rules are obeyed--the rules that keep gifted offensive players alive and available and involved in the pass offenses.

I don’t believe in suspensions for illegal hits or any other infraction.

When good players are suspended, the injured parties are the teams’ fans and the teams themselves, not the offenders, and what’s right about that?

The appropriate penalty for a wrong hit is the one the NFL has devised this year--the loss of a game’s salary--although three modifications are still needed:

* The fine should be doubled for a second such hit by the same player the same season.

* Fine the coaches too, and double their fines when any of their players are tagged to make it a second unwarranted team hit.

* All fines should be doubled during the playoffs.

They’re Intentional

In every case, the presumption has to be that late hits are intentional and most likely premeditated.

That’s the plain meaning of NFL Rule 12, Section 2, Article 11, which advises referees as follows:

“If in doubt about a roughness call or potentially dangerous tactic on the quarterback, the referee should always call roughing the passer.”

On a late hit, in other words, the player’s intent is like a pitcher’s beanball intent: You can’t prove it, so just assume it.

Great pitchers never inadvertently bean a batter.

Great pass rushers--starting at least as far back as the 1960s with Hall of Famer Deacon Jones--never inadvertently hit anyone late.

Players such as Eric Brown, who complain that they were just doing their jobs, will be reminded, when they are fined, that good defensive players don’t lower their heads to tackle anyone.

With a helmeted, lowered head, what can you see?

It’s in the coaching manuals that the proper open-field approach, whenever an offensive player is inbounds with the ball, is to smash him with one’s face mask or shoulder--preferably using a shoulder to ram his chest or shoulders or legs or arms with all the strength one can muster--in the fashion that Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott made famous when defensive role models were as unstained as Lott instead of as unclean as Ray Lewis.

In every instance, lowering one’s head when going against a quarterback--or wide receiver--is testimony that the defensive player is out to injure the opponent.

Another such indication is sacking a passer with what the NFL terms unnecessary roughness--as Pittsburgh defensive end Aaron Smith learned the other day in another exhibition game when he managed to rip off Buffalo quarterback Rob Johnson’s helmet.

The object of a pass rush is to prevent the pass, not to rip off the passer’s helmet, or bust him in the jaw, or drive him into the ground, or squash him, or roll on him to hopefully ruin his passing shoulder--all of which are NFL rule violations that pro football commissioners, from Pete Rozelle to Paul Tagliabue, have talked about for years.

But the lesson of the summer is that the defensive teams still aren’t listening.