The Bert Campaneris Of Football

There isn't one. Could there be? Should there be?

Dear Chuck,

First, I'd like to address your chapter on football and whether it, or any spectator sport, will long endure. 

So long as being human remains primarily a physical state, and not a virtual state of being, sport will exist in some form. You mention the link between football and the post-Civil War era. Well, the modern Olympic movement was in large part pushed by a French nobleman who saw athletics as a way for his nation to avoid getting humiliated like in the Franco-Prussian War. And in late medieval England, soccer was banned because it took away time which was supposed to be spent practicing archery. Unless humanity does become more machine-like than machines themselves, sport will exist.

Getting back to American football: in my opinion, the best thing you ever said about football was a throwaway remark on a B.S. Report podcast. You brought up the question, Which NFL players could have played all eleven positions on offense or defense? You mentioned Walter Payton and Nolan Cromwell. Good choices. And it made me think about 1) your football essay in Dinosaur, and 2) baseball. Yes, football is a progressive game and baseball is a conservative one. But when it comes to the players, the converse is true.

Baseball players, even superstars, are expected to change positions even at the major league level. Ernie Banks and Robin Yount were shortstops who got moved to first base and center field, respectively. Yogi Berra went from catcher to left field. That doesn't happen in football much. Other than Ronnie Lott going from cornerback to safety, or Randy Cross moving from center to guard, it's rare. The way football has gotten so specialized, switching positions has become almost impossible. In addition, the size differentials between positions makes it too ridiculous to ponder. Right now, there could not be a Bert Campaneris or Cesar Tovar of football.

That got me thinking: what it football was changed such that all the players were more or less the same size, and players moved back and forth between positions such that the pounding could be evenly distributed? Or being that the game is now pass-dominated, what if all levels of the game went nine players on a side? Either might make the game less violent.

I was at the Rutgers-Army game where Eric LeGrand got paralyzed. For ten minutes MetLife Stadium was so quiet I could hear fans in the front rows muttering, and I was in the upper deck. Three years later I was at the Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium. After Rutgers lost to Notre Dame 29-16 LeGrand came out. The whole crowd was cheering. I held up five fingers on my left hand and two on my right, making a "52" in honor of LeGrand's number. Other fans started doing the same.

This is the New York-New Jersey area, mind you. No state is as safety-obsessed as New Jersey. I should know, it's the only one I've ever lived in and I know what I can't do that denizens of the other forty-nine can do. No alcohol sold in supermarkets, the toughest gun laws around, and the anti-chid-predator law against which all others are measured. And yet football is as popular here as it is anywhere else. From August to February, every Garden Stater devotes themselves to the Giants, Jets or Eagles, depending on their county. 

My worst-case "prediction:" No U.S. President would seek to criminalize the game federally, but given enough tragedies New Jersey would be the first to ban tackle football at the state level. And it wouldn't be Bill Simmons or Cris Collinsworth refusing to announce games anymore in a Cosellian epiphany. It would have to be LeGrand or some former NFLer coming out in favor of banning football. The Giants relocate to San Antonio and the Jets to Birmingham.

Other states follow suits. NCAA Division I football is down to five conferences: the ACC, the SEC, the Big Ten, the Big Twelve and the Pac Twelve. They operate semi-pro. All other conferences and divisions are strictly of the student-athlete kind. No scholarships, no bowl games, no aspirations beyond the days of Walter Camp and Amos Alonzo Stagg. The NFL is down to sixteen teams. But the game of football remains the national sport. 

Best,

Dan