NFL To Suspend Players for 'Flagrant Hits'

This is a tricky subject to me. I was curious what my fellow Viking faithful thought, so I wanted to start with my thoughts and conclude with a poll.

On one side of the coin is the desire to keep the best interests of the players at heart. It's the side of me that makes my heart sink when I see a player go down and not get up, even if they are a Packer. It's the side that struggles to remember that there's so much more than a uniform and a number to these human beings, these people with families and lives that will stretch beyond the football field for years past their time on it.

Obviously we are all learning more and more about concussions and the devestating effects they can have on a person's body and mind, and that's just the 'king', if you will, of the multitude of serious injuries that players can suffer on a regular basis, even multiple times in a season. And while the glorious quarterbacks often become the focal point, leading to the changes of rules regarding how and when you can hit a passer (our own ironman Brett Favre was addicted to pain killers earlier in his career, and it's becoming a believable possibility that concussions caused Kurt Warner's odd period of unproductivity between his glory years as a Ram and Cardinal), but I've also heard countless stories from the unsung heroes and the struggles they endure; typically, these are linebackers, on either side of the line of scrimmage, often unknown of outside their team's fanbase, and quickly forgotten upon retirement. Some of these guys' stories are truly horrific. And while a professional football player, even on the bottom end of the payroll, makes far more in a year than most of us can imagine, it becomes a poor trade when they only recieve that amount for 5-10 years, and then face 20-30 years, and often more, where the medical bills annually can EQUAL what they used to make. And linebackers don't get Wrangler commercials to help pay the bills once they're done on the gridiron.

Certainly, there is a strong part of me that wants to make sure I remember these are human beings, really at the core often no different than you or I, and I don't want them to be treated like animals, tossed out to dry when their time of entertaining me once a week for 16-20 weeks out of the year comes to an end. And for this reason, part of me understands and agrees with the new rules coming out, regarding helmet-to-helmet collisions, and regarding this new rule regarding flagrant and excessive hits.

But then there's another side: the ruthless football fan side. Granted, I will NEVER be happy when a player, be they for the Vikes, Saints, or even the Packers, truly gets injured. The football fanatic inside me is not strong enough for that and I never hope it will be. But when I see a Vike LEVEL out another player, and hard, I can't help but cheer. Helmet-to-helmet never gives me much of a thrill because I end up being worried about BOTH players- it's not a nice thing on either side of that equation. But EJ Henderson just BLASTING a reciever? I LOVE it!

And it's why I love football, too! I can't stand basketball, and even much less baseball. (Sorry fans to those sports.) But I do like hockey, which is often a physical sport, I LOVE MMA (I teach it for a living so I'd better...), and above all else, I LOOOOVE football. And if football becomes a sport where players get fined/ suspended/ flagged/ ejected/ whatever for looking at each other funny, I'm going to start to lose that fanatical, inexplicable love. Probably never entirely- it's just too much a part of me, a part of my upraising, a part of my mere existence during football season. But it's going to lose a lot of its thrill when you just go too far. The players wear pads and helmets that can probably stop a bullet, and aches and pains are just going to be a part of it, as well they should be in this physical sport.

So is this rule taking it too far? In the end, it will probably be up to the refs... but I'm not a fan of that, as I see a lot of 'roughing the passer' calls that I disagree with. There are many times when a 350 lb linebacker is ONE step away from the QB when the pass is made, and hit him, and the flag is thrown. To me, you cannot expect a 350 lb machine to be able to stop on a time when going full force- then ankle injuries are going to supplant concussions as the NFL's #1 concern. Granted, too, there are also a lot of times I think the refs SHOULD have thrown the flag (see: Vikings-Saints, NFC Championship). So I hate leaving it in their hands because refs often strike me as inconsistent, and when you've got a new rule involving SUSPENSIONS, the ref's whims can make or break seasons for a team. Consider- what if we were on a make-or-break moment going into Week 17, and Week 16 EJ Henderson gets suspended for a big hit that's questionable?

All in all I'm just torn. I get that flagrant, excessive, brutal hits should somehow be controlled, and I get that fines don't really do it. Of course, let's review Erin Henderson's brilliant suggestion from the preseason to make fines based off of a player's salary... but that would be intelligent, wouldn't it? Fine a guy 10% of his pay for a big hit, and I bet he'll pay attention. And you won't screw the smaller guys in the process. But since that's daydreaming of a logical NFL hierarchy, I'll quickly return to the issue at hand. The other side of the coin is that now the NFL is risking putting team's entire seasons on the oft-questionable judgements of the refs, and for a rule that might be the start of a slippery slope down the path to a pretty soft NFL, lacking much of the spark and flavor that we all love.

So- what do YOU all think?