The injury quandary

 Look, Tom Brady isn't wrong when he says the NFL creeps closer to flag football every day. He just sounds ridiculous saying it, being that he's Tom Brady.

After all, he can't credibly say the game has gotten soft when no one -- no one -- was treated more softly than he was during his long and momentous career.

Don't Touch Tom wasn't just a meme during all that time; it was practically a league edict. Even last year, during his final season, an Atlanta Falcons pass rusher named Grady Jarrett was flagged for ... well, for sacking Brady with a routine tackle that was frankly pretty gentle.

Referee Jerome Boger immediately dinged Garret for, as Boger put it, "unnecessarily throwing (the quarterback) to the ground." Which in most sane precincts just means the dude tackled him.

And yet now it's Brady lamenting that the game has gotten too soft? Tom freakin' Brady?

Puh-leeze.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, again, he's not wrong. And the hell of it is, I don't know what the NFL can do about that, because guys keep getting hurt anyway.

Recently the league has decided it might ban something called "a hip drop tackle," which is basically just tackling a guy from behind. This is because they increase the risk of injury 25 times the rate of a standard tackle, whatever that is now.

Dallas running back Tony Pollard broke his fibula on one. Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith had to leave the game Sunday after being injured on one. And so on.

Meanwhile, the "hip-drop" didn't have anything to do with Anthony Richardson's season-ending shoulder injury, or Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson's shoulder injury, or the sore shoulder Bills quarterback Josh Allen is nursing, or the sore knee Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence is nursing.

In other words, guys keep getting hurt no matter what the NFL does. It's tackle football. Guys get hurt playing it, and always will -- especially in the NFL, where players are bigger, stronger, faster and generate more foot-pounds of force than they ever have.

So what's the solution, other than, well, flag football?

Already defenders are prohibited from tackling guys high, and tackling them low, and tackling them when they're not looking, and even tackling them too hard if the officials rule the tackle-ee was "defenseless." Now they're about to be told they can't tackle them from behind unless they stay on their feet and, I don't know, kinda water-ski behind them.

And, listen, I don't want to come off like one of those foo-ball knuckle-draggers who still mourn the days when Chuck Bednarik could knock Frank Gifford colder than a marble slab and then dance over him in glee. No one but the knuckle-draggers want to go back to those days.

First of all, there's way too many dollars at stake now to keep putting your stars on the sideline. On the other hand, flag football wouldn't exactly make it rain Benjamins, either.

It's a quandary for sure. And one for which I'm not sure there will ever be a satisfactory answer.