Coffin Corner: The NFL’s Cynical 25-yard Touchback Rule

Today on Coffin Corner I want to talk about the NFL lead man’s #1 Concerns “player safety” and “concussions”. Or rather the notion that the owners and their leadership care one iota about player safety and concussions. And I want to do it through the lens of propaganda, that’s right, it’s a word that’s in the title of this website and it’s something the NFL uses to great effect.

In the interest of full disclosure, the issue of head trauma is pretty damn important to me, I wrote an episode of the medical drama “House” about repeated brain injury in professional hockey. I’ve seen its effects on normal people and it’s horrifying: anger, violent impulse control, varying degrees of early dementia; bad stuff.

To be clear, the Shield and its Dear Leader don’t care about fixing the ‘bad stuff’, they want you (and Moms) to think they care. That’s their problem, the message. And some of the recent drop-off in ratings may have something to do with this. They are currently losing the messaging war because intentional decisions that they’ve made are now part of the public record.

One of the ways that autocrats and dictators all over the world push their agendas is by muddying the waters on a particular issue. The goal is to confuse the public enough to allow their misdeeds, while giving them credit for things that they aren’t doing.

So if you, say, invade a sovereign country and the free world gets angry with you, the best way to weasel out is create confusion about what you are doing and who exactly is doing it or whether anything is even being done. So you’d, say, remove your army’s insignias and send conflicting reports to various media entities (including your own state controlled media) that are haplessly reported by a know-nothing press. The more time your adversaries debate the merits of your claims (and lies), the further seeded the lie becomes. It’s diabolical, but it’s real. This is truly the best way to understand the NFL’s information wars. For what it is, straight propaganda.

In the case of the NFL, they denied football is dangerous to its players and congress, used its “doctors” to discredit Bennett Omalu, created studies that directly contradict the science, all in an effort to brew a thick stew of nothingness to keep us all from seeing what’s really there. The NFL’s product on the field in its past and current iterations definitely causes traumatic brain injury and rather then trying to make it safer, they’d rather fight a semantic war, As we’ve seen with countless examples: Bounty, Deflategate, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Greg Hardy (odd Josh Brown only got a game, i.e. one of these things is not like the other, no?), et al, this is how the league office and its owners operate. Get their message out at whatever cost to destroy the credibility of the people it targets. (Destroyed cellphones, anyone?)

And here is the problem, the NFL treats us for knuckle-headed fools, and unless your team has been directly affected by this garbage, you believe the schlock that Roger Goodell sells. I was horrified by BountyGate only to later realize that much of the contrary evidence was ignored. The NFL wanted a headline: “Sheriff Goodell cleans up pay-to-injure scheme”. Never mind, that video evidence of Anthony Hargrove was directly misunderstood. But they got their message out to their reporters, 12 in all, Peter King called the league’s evidence “compelling” (sound familiar?)  These guys are effective. This is straight dictator-style propaganda y’all.

So let’s investigate the latest in the information war:

As Greg Bedard laid out the new #RemakeRoger campaign is underway and the head of the NFL is now saying the word “safety” as much as he possibly can. Never mind that the fans watched the reigning MVP get positively annihilated on national television on opening night with at least three deliberate helmet-to-helmet hits. Never mind that the players still launch themselves at opponents’ temples whenever they can (not defending Edelman’s hit here). Never mind that each attempt to fix the game’s injuries has no teeth. But-but-but, Roger says “safety’s important.” So it’s a wash. Yes, unnecessary violence goes undeterred, but #WeCare. In fact, they just made an announcement: $100 Million investment in research to promote ‘safety’.

Let me know when the money is in the escrow account. Maybe they actually follow through, but I’d say without equivocation that this is a $100 million investment in PR not safety. You know how I know it’s bullshit because everything the NFL does is bullshit, that’s where we are at.

Take the league’s latest rule to address safety:

Move the touchback to the 25-yard line. Okay, a Band-Aid on a bruised brain, but let’s hear them out.

The NFL had three “goals”:

1. Reduce the number of returned kick offs because they account for 23.4 percent of concussions (a number that has been reported so many times I can recite it in my sleep).
2. Preserve the onside kick.
3. Don’t completely eliminate the most exciting play in football.

As you can see, goals 1 and 3 are completely antithetical. And I’m torn. As a football fan, I like the kick off, as a human, I hate traumatic brain injury and as a Patriots fan, down by a score with less than 2 minutes, I want Gostkowski to be able to craft a gorgeous onside kick. I completely acknowledge it’s a tough problem.

But instead of taking a serious measure like moving the kick-off spot to the 40 or even 50-yard line, to diminish the impact of 22 players colliding at high velocities, and reduce that 23. 4% number (There’s that number again, never mind about the other 76.6%). The league enacted another in a series of half-measures to “protect its players”. The best way to know it’s bullshit is to listen to them tell it: Troy Vincent acknowledged the day they voted for the rule that it might backfire. Dean Blandino defended the decision saying that if we don’t like it, we’ll change it next year. (But pylon cameras need years of study, okay guys.) I mean, how transparently cynical is this? Yeah, we know it won’t work, but we can say we tried it for a year.

Jay Feely was ahead of this, but he found that NFL head coaches in the preseason were planning on using this to their advantage because that’s their job. They would kick high-arcing balls inside the goal-line, giving the coverage team time to get down and make a play. So instead of reducing the number of returns, we ended up with more forced returns, Bye Bye Goal # 1. And the nature of the high arcing kicks is that they’re essentially unreturnable because the coverage is waiting for the player inside the 10 when he makes his first move. Bye Bye Goal # 3.

In Bill Belichick’s week 1 film breakdown with Zo, he highlighted two plays where the Patriots pinned the Cardinals within the 15 as a result of the new rule. And we’ll see it again this week, the two biggest plays in the Texans game were the fumbles as a result of Belichick’s strategic playing of the new rule.

The Shield never errs on the side of caution, they err on the side of messaging: having Peter King or vested media outlets like CBS or NBC or ESPN who will continue to use the words “player safety” and “Roger Goodell” every time they reference the new kick-off rule. And next year when they definitely repeal this idiotic effort, they can say we tried, but Coach Belichick (the guy we all hate because he cheats) exploited a loophole. “The Hoodie is the reason this didn’t work, not us.” And leave with their hands in their pockets saying, “Nothing more we can do”.

If you want to impact player safety throw every player out of a game that uses his helmet as a weapon in a deliberate way (if you need to expand gamed rosters, fine).

Remember what happened to Bruins Center Marc Savard? That is MAYBE a 15-yard penalty in the NFL. Think about that. That “turn my head away, I can’t watch” cheap shot ruined his career. 15 Yards, no suspension, just a forgotten penalty and a light fine. And it’s over.

And the reason we take them at their word is because their propaganda game is high. It’s cynical, it’s wholly self-serving and it does absolutely nothing to protect the players. That’s what the NFL sanctions, every goddamned Sunday. And I watch, hoping the NFL will try to fix itself.

But I know that with Roger Goodell and the current leadership of owners, they’d rather scheme about off-field bullshit that looks like the Annexation of Crimea rather than on the field brilliance like “the Annexation of Puerto Rico”.