Illegal or Lazy?

With the recent increased notice of illegal hits in the National Football League coaches and players might want to look at why they are happening and how they can be prevented (other than fines from the league office). First what defines these “illegal hits”?  According to the NFL they consider illegal hits as a tackle to an opposing player’s head or neck, a tackle to a defenseless player, and a player using their own head or “spearing” to make a tackle. All of these criteria were met in the illegal hits weekends ago, for example we saw Brandon Meriweather get fined for having helmet-to-helmet contact with Todd Heap (leading with his head and hitting the opposing player in the head).

            So why do these kinds of tackles happen? One could say that players see it as, “Well everyone else is doing it”, that there is poor coaching, or just because of pure laziness within the players. To believe that everyone else is doing it would be crazy, there are around 1,000 players playing in the NFL on a weekend, and we only see or hear about 5 hits that are bad enough for the recent attention. Also one can’t blame poor coaching on these tackles or on the lack of informing players of the rules, these players are men, they know the rules and have been playing the game long enough to understand how to tackle. So to myself laziness has to be what is increasing these illegal and hurtful hits. If you look back a the illegal hits that have caused this explosion of attention you realize most all of them were helmet-to-helmet contact. This is a complete lack of effort by the players to perform a tackle they have done year after year. They have been taught from day one to form tackle by keeping their head up, tackling on the outside of the opposing player, and if they can under the player's armpits, and then to continue pursuit through the other player bringing them down for a tackle. When a player tackles doing this, their helmet never makes hard contact with the opposing player’s, and the opposing player rarely gets injured. If all those players from the illegal hit weekend at least tried to tackle in true form we wouldn’t have seen an issue with their hits.

            The players in the NFL need to get over their great idea of having that “big” hit through poor form tackling, because it is still possible when they tackle with good form, and we see it every weekend in the fall.  Their lackadaisical big hit tackling is sourly increasing their likelihood of paying a lot of cash for what they did, and increasing the chance of injury to their fellow athletes. So to stop them players and coaches must increase their efforts to make sure their fellow athletes aren’t gonna get lazy and put their head down and just charge at another player, but to make sure they tackle with the form they were taught to use long ago. Players should realize lazy athletes don’t last long in the NFL (Jamarcus Russell) and even if that laziness is within a hit, if they keep it up they’ll be sent packing by Mr. Goodell and the family of the player they hurt.

-CP