PRO FOOTBALL TAKES A FURTHER DOWNHILL STEP

Throughout the bygone 1946-1949 college football seasons, Notre Dame’s gallant crews achieved a seldom-matched period of invincibility. So devastating was their offensive and defensive prowess that Coach Frank Leahy sometimes felt obligated to put his third- or fourth-string unit on the field in the last quarter, just to keep the score from becoming too lopsided.

This particular humane action led a contemporary sports writer named Kyle Crichton to compose a humorous article, predicting what might happen in that particular era’s future, should the Fighting Irish lads’ indomitable thrust go unabated.

Mr. Crichton’s feeling was that handicaps would be imposed on the Notre Damers, beginning with their entire backfield crew having their legs encased in burlap bags, as though they were Sunday picnic sack race participants.

The article went on to describe how this supposed restriction would likely still fail to stop the murderous Irish onslaught, with the sack aspect being replaced by tying the left halfback’s right leg to the right halfback’s left, requiring the pair to carry the ball in three-legged race fashion.

According to Crichton’s prognostications, the constant touchdown barrage still couldn’t be held in check. The last-ditch effort would also require every Notre Dame downfield pass receiver to run his patterns while carrying an egg in a spoon, whereby allowing it to drop to the ground would cause an automatic incompletion. Again, the article’s content found the powerful South Benders not to be the least bit impeded.

The closing paragraphs described how such increasingly severe encumbrances would eventually lead to the gridiron game’s complete demise, as it gradually became reduced to a living room-staged contest, with footballs as furniture props.

Despite that article’s gross exaggeration, we can’t help but notice a somewhat similar trend in our more modern age.

The present-day game carried out on NFL fields across the land, and the extent to which rules keep being amended from year to year, evidence a demand for ever greater protection of quarterback sanctity. In fact, we find the latest doctrines extremely disquieting.

Football is a rugged game calling for rough and ready players at every position. Somehow though, the feeling seems to have developed that our signal-calling, scrambling, precision-passing quarterback gentry have been moulded in highly fragile Chinese porcelain, not the customary flesh and bone.

One of our earlier articles appearing on this blog tossed out a few disturbed comments regarding this same issue, wondering if the day might come when two hands below the waist would be sufficient to “tackle” a ball carrier, along with similar steps on the route to ultimate sissification.

Under this season’s updated rules, we can’t help but anticipate future year defensive pass rushers needing only to get close to the quarterback and shout “Boo!”, or perhaps simply look cross-eyed at him, with the result being construed as a sack.

We sincerely hope the NFL bigwigs will again come to realize that football is a man’s game, not a contest which imposes overly severe limitations, just to prevent quarterbacks from getting their elbows bruised.