Like many institutions in America, the NFL seems to be getting too soft — and Jason Whitlock is not pleased.
“I’m not real comfortable with where the NFL has gone in terms of softness,” Whitlock says.
Warren Sapp, a former defensive tackle who helped win Tampa Bay’s first Super Bowl title, agrees, joking that it should be called the “National Fluff League.”
“We play a game that you can go down, and we all take that risk going into it, you know, with our children and our moms and everything, but we got to finish this game,” Sapp adds.
Whitlock believes the NFL has been “demonizing” hard hits on other players for years, noting that Sapp himself was “demonized for a hit on an offensive lineman.”
Seth Joyner, who was a linebacker in the NFL and helped bring the Denver Broncos to a Super Bowl victory in 1998, believes it’s important to remember how the NFL got to this point.
“When a multibillion-dollar industry gets sued for $760 million,” Joyner explains, “that’s gonna have reverberations all the way down through every level of football.”
However, Joyner believes that for all the danger the game of football brings, it’s worth it.
“People were like ‘Oh I can’t believe you let your son play football.’ I’m like, I learned more from football than the college degree that I got, okay? There’s no way I wouldn’t let him play now,” he says.
“We had a rule, we talked about it. I said, you got three concussions, and then you’re done,” he adds.
Brett Favre, a famed NFL quarterback who most famously played for the Green Bay Packers, believes the rules and regulations that have been added surrounding things like concussions are a good thing.
Favre spoke to an expert who asked him how many concussions he’d had, to which Favre responded three or four where he blacked out.
“And he said how about a thousand or thousands, and I thought, this guy is crazy,” Favre recalls.
The expert told him that every time he saw stars, or his ears were ringing, those were concussions too.
“I said, ‘So when do you think it’s safe to play tackle football?’ He said, ‘Never.’”
“There’s truth in that,” Joyner responds. “The human body was not designed to be in 60-something car wrecks a game.”
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