Many Sundays ago, Lawrence Taylor was captured on videotape prowling the Giants sidelines before a game, imploring his teammates to "go out there like a bunch of crazed dogs." The video perfectly encapsulates Taylor's raw intensity and borderline - complete? - insanity, and it gives me chills every time I see it. Today, the clip is storied, cherished and sampled regularly around the league, all to preserve the legacy of an historically great player and maintain the memory of a callous, merciless NFL era.
There is irony in that last statement. Lots of it. Although Taylor is still celebrated as one of the greatest defensive players ever, and although coaches around the country still ask young linebackers to emulate his highlight tapes, the simple fact is that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is trying desperately to erase that time period from NFL history, along with the breed of players it spawned. It is an aspiration that I doubt L.T. would accept.
Actually if their careers overlapped, I'd bet that Lawrence Taylor would have found himself in Roger Goodell's office astoundingly often, simply because every single week that he put his pads on, Taylor heeded his own advice and went out on the football field like a crazed dog. He would careen from sideline to sideline with reckless abandon, his eyes portraying the gaze of a man within whom there was no soul. He would converge on the man with the ball, the man who just had the ball, might soon have the ball, or looked like he could possibly have wanted the ball, with blinding speed and unparalleled athletic ability. When he got the opportunity to hit someone - that sweet, sweet opportunity - he made it count. There was no thought process involved, no deliberation and no debate. There were no questions asked.
That last part would have irked Goodell the most. For years, football, especially defense, has been built around the principle that all thinking is done before the snap - you assess the play that was called, read the opposing team's formation, worry about the snap count, about pre-snap penalties, audibles, matchups, hot-routes, line shifts, coverage shifts, blocking schemes and on and on and on. But as soon as the ball is hiked, all of that thinking immediately ceases, and you essentially become Pavlov's dog. Stimulus, reaction, repeat. The offense has the ball, you want the ball, so you go and get the ball - think Jon Favreau's character in "The Replacements." Pretty simple, right?
Not so fast.
One day not too long ago, Czar Goodell decided to flip the script on more than a century's worth of football history, proclaiming that if all that thinking can happen before the snap then it can happen after it as well. In case there wasn't enough information for football players to think about already, he fundamentally altered the sport to include more.
In football, when the opportunity for contact arises, you hit first and ask questions later, if at all. Goodell wants it to be a sport where, when the opportunity for contact arises, you ask questions, analyze them from every angle, deliberate possible implications and ponder potential ramifications first, and you hit later, if at all. But as much as he tries to make it so, as much as he shouts and yells, fines and decrees, it will never happen. It's simply not feasible.
How can you force 250-pound men, running full tilt at speeds that top out near 20 miles per hour and attempting to react to any number of possible scenarios, to debate the only basic, primordial element of their sport? When a defensive player is in position to make a hit, he is going to deliver it as quickly, forcefully and effectively as he can. If he hesitates for a mere moment, he will be chastised by his coach, ostracized by his teammates and thought less of as a player by absolutely everyone. That's just football.
Yes, sometimes people are going to get injured because of this, and yes, sometimes these are going to be terrible, gruesome injuries. Unless Goodell decides to outlaw the sport entirely, that will never change. We've always known football as a sport predicated on violence, but now that science and medicine accurately reflect this as well, there has been a public outcry to rectify it.
I'll be the first to say that concussions are serious. Extremely serious. Throwing a flag, however, for unnecessary roughness whenever a safety hits a "defenseless receiver" who, no more than two tenths of a second ago, was inches away from catching the ball, will do nothing to remedy the problem. Fining players thousands of dollars each week because their hit landed mere inches above what Emperor Goodell deemed is legally allowed, is a piss-poor attempt to make the NFL any safer. It is merely a fa
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