Game changers

There is still a magic to it, when the lights come up on a Friday night. There is still something wondrous about it, something bedrock, something American and permanent.

All those bobbing helmets moving into those circles of light that blossom along city streets and between fields of corn in the middle of nowhere, where you can see 'em for miles. Mom and Dad banging their hands together in the stands. Cheerleaders cheerleading; young boys playing their own games in the shadows behind the bleachers; wise old heads nodding along the fences,  remembering back-in-the-day Friday nights when the football was better, the dew on the grass slicker, the coaches smarter and tougher.

We love football in this country. We love it on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons and Sundays and Mondays. And these days we fear losing it, because if its cost has always been ruinous, it has never been more so now.

Football players have always been willing to sacrifice their bodies to the game, because, yes, we do love it so. But those players are bigger and faster and stronger now, absurdly so, and the game's calculus has tilted as a result. Loving the game, and the pile of money you earn for indulging that love, is no longer enough. All those foot-pounds of force being generated now destroy your quality of life far more completely than they ever have.

In short, it's just not worth it.

 And so more and more players are making what they can and then getting out. Andrew Luck is only the latest player, and so far the most prominent, to weigh that altered calculus and act accordingly. That more will follow his lead is the fear that lay back of the scorn he got from all those wannabe tough guys on the internet.

They're afraid for the game, or at least for the game they know. Which means they no doubt view with alarm what's happening in Hanover, N.H., these days, where Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens is making his own alterations on the game's calculus.

As Hallie Grossman of ESPN chronicles here, six years or so ago Teevens took the radical step of banning player-on-player tackling during practice. This seemed completely Mad Professor-ish at the time, but it has drastically reduced the number of concussions Dartmouth players incur during a given season.

Tackling  in practice now is high tech: The slide rule boys have developed a robotic tackling dummy that actually moves the way flesh-and-blood player would. And the bad news for the old-schoolers and Wannabes is, it hasn't ruined football at Dartmouth; since Teevens instituted the tackle ban, Dartmouth has scarcely missed a beat, winning 76 percent of its games.

So, yes, change is coming, and perhaps radical change. But it has ever been thus. Football in 2019 is not what it was in 1969, and football in 1969 is not what it was in 1929. And on and on, back to its primitive and long-dead origins.

Those stalwart lads from Rutgers and Princeton who played in the first college game 150 years ago, for instance, no doubt sounded exactly like the Wannabes sound now when they banished the flying wedge and introduced the first forward pass. And those players  no doubt sounded the same when the T formation replaced the single wing.

And so on. And so on. And so on.