The Changing Face Of FootbalI have never and will never claim to be an expert on football.
I understand the game a lot more now than I ever did, and I have people like former Butler coach Bill Lynch, the late Scott Bibler, current Whitko skipper Phil Jensen, Warsaw coach Bart Curtis and all of their assistant coaches to thank for that.
And those men did that by first showing me why they love football so much.
So I happily defer to coaches on just about everything when it comes to the game and how it is played.
But I feel very confident that I am accurately assessing a trend I see unfolding in high school football: a decline in the skill of tackling.
When the National Federation of High Schools offered up changes to practice guidelines governing the amount of contact practice teams can include in their daily plans, and the IHSAA adopted those changes, the results were predictable and not all negative.
The point of the change was to put a limit on how much hitting a player gets, and gives, in any practice, and by doing that reduce his chances of being injured. It makes sense, right? If you want to reduce your chances of being in a car accident, take less trips in cars.
And while it could never eliminate practice injuries (we are still talking about football), I have no doubt it has achieved the goal it was created to achieve.
But after watching football for three months last season and the scrimmages last weekend, I am convinced that tackling is suffering. It’s also logical, right? You get good at what you practice, and the more your practice something — tackling, playing piano, fishing etc. — the better you get. Conversely, what you practice less you can’t possibly expect to be as good at as when you practiced it more.
So coaches are in a rough spot. Coaches can teach and coach tackling, but they only have so many hours a week in which to actually let their players work on it. Imagine a surgeon who took hundreds of hours of classes on how to perform complex operations on various parts of the human body, but only could spend three hours a week with a real scalpel in their hands.
It becomes more of a theory than a practice to them. And, really, there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.
Sure, coaches are trying to come with new ways to simulate tackling in practice. Like teaching linebackers to run to where a hole might open up and attack a tackling dummy (which I realized last week looks like a giant padded Weeble — you know, they wobble but they don’t fall down). But those are inanimate objects who don’t make moves and don’t lower their shoulders to initiate contact.
Playing defense is hard enough. The rules have become more and more in favor of the offense because first downs are cool and points make the fans swoon…or so I have heard.
But a coach can develop a perfect plan against a certain play the opponent runs, and his players can execute that plan to absolute perfection. But if the defender doesn’t finish off the play with a good tackle, it ruins all of that work.
And let’s be honest, we are talking about high school kids who, by definition, are not going to be as good at tackling as college or professional players.
So, what do the keepers of the game of football do?
I don’t know. I really don’t know.
I understand that the point of writing a column is to conclude with some sort of solution to a problem, or at least offer some possibilities.
But I don’t know that there is one here. Coaches will have to be more creative in teaching tackling in ways that don’t cross the line of what the sport’s governing body has established as more safe while still giving them experiences that translate to game action. Maybe that means the development of new “weebles” or something. Maybe it means that natural talent is going to become more and more important as time goes along.
Understand this: I am not a 51-year old man whining and moaning about how football is going ‘soft’ or something. Hardly. Stand on the sideline of a high school game — even a freshman or JV game — and you will get a great appreciation for the speed and power that still very much exists in this game.
In the end, safety matters more … and who can get too upset about that?
