Football, football, football. It’s mid-fall and my brain is still full of football. Soon, basketball, and hockey will creep in. Once in a while, a blip of tennis or soccer or volleyball pops up, but for the most part, it’s football, football, football. The sports media is equally obsessed and luckily for all of us, its producing a ton of great stories about football. Here are three from the past week that I want to share with you because of their great writing and impressive subjects.
Odell Beckham Jr.’s Catch Was A Culmination: A Former WR Explains
by Nate Jackson for Deadspin
Nate Jackson is a retired NFL player and the author of an insightful book about life in the NFL called Slow Getting Up
But you can’t just play catch and call yourself a receiver. You have to get open. To get open on a route, you tell a lie with your body. This is harder than it seems. You may think you are leaning one way, but you’re not. To pretend to go one way when you really plan to go another way is counterintuitive. To do so at top speed requires a full-scale deception perpetrated against yourself. Every muscle, every bone, every ligament must be in on the lie, lest the defensive back see through you, and crush you.
But let’s think about something here, for one moment. ODB, a man with the football skills we just witnessed, is not allowed to trust his football instinct UNTIL the ball is in flight. He must stick to the PLAN until the ball is let go. …in the NFL, the freedom to improvise exists only for the quarterback. And even for him, it is rare. Our finest football players, men who would make Batman blush, must adhere to the small-minded tactics of a bygone era. And the arbiters of that era, uncoincidentally, are the men who also cannot conceive of such a catch being made in the first place.
Real Life or Fantasy?
by Joe Posnanski for NBC SportsWorld
It’s probably worth noting that Odell Beckham, the player who made the amazing catch described in the first article, didn’t finish the game he made it in. He left the game hurt although he did play in the next game. That’s the life of an NFL player — play, get hurt, play, get hurt. Rinse, repeat, until it’s time to retire. This is the story of a player who, in his day, scored more touchdowns and took more hits than almost anyone else and what his life is like now.
Housewives wrote thank you notes to him. Office workers built desk shrines to him. People around America would spend more time in the fall thinking about Priest Holmes than they would about their families. They named their fantasy teams after him – “Holmes Wreckers” and “Judas Priests” and “The High Priest of Touchdowns” – and they moved their lineups around him and they spent their Sundays shrugging when opponents took a big lead because nothing mattered, nothing at all, until Priest Holmes stepped on the field and began his weekly fantasy football scoring spree.
The greatest fantasy football player of them all looks for cracks in the ground when he walks now. “Cracks,” he says. “Divots. Unlevel ground. A shift in the pavement. A crack in the hall.”
He looks for these things because the tiniest variation in elevation can throw his body now. If he hits one of those cracks just a little bit wrong, his ankle turns. His hip jolts. “I can blow out a knee,” he says. The body that once bounced off the ground after the most savage crash went dark now teeters with the slightest incline or dip.
Each week took a terrible toll on him. He would remember Friday nights when he still wasn’t sure if he could play. That’s because: The feeling happened every Friday night. “Something would happen between Friday night and Saturday night,” he says. “I guess it was the mental training of it, I’d just done it so many times that my body would come together. “But I would know that the minute that game ended on Sunday, I wasn’t going to be healthy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. It would be back to Friday, and me saying: ‘Come on body, I need you one more time.’”
Concussions, by the New Book
by Bill Pennington for The New York Times
Times have changed in the NFL since Priest Holmes played. Sure, his career would have been ended by the knee and hip injuries that ended his career anyway, but perhaps, thanks to a new comprehensive policy on head injuries, the mood swings and scary loss of feeling that Holmes suffers from may have been lessened or prevented. There is some hope.
Once, the treatment of players with head injuries varied from team to team and could be haphazard. Beginning last season, all players suspected of having a head injury — should they lose consciousness from a collision or experience symptoms like a headache, dizziness or disorientation — were required to go through the concussion protocol system. It features a broad cast: a head-injury spotter in the press box, athletic trainers on the bench, doctors and neuro-trauma specialists on the sideline and experts in neuro-cognitive testing in the locker room.
Each doctor interviewed for this article said a consensus in the “Go or No Go” moment is usually reached easily and without disagreements. No one recalled discord. “Ninety percent of the time, it’s pretty obvious,” Kinderknecht said. “It’s not a whole lot different than talking to somebody who is intoxicated. You can tell.”
It is becoming more commonplace for players to self-report a head injury… Players are also policing one another, tipping off the trainers that a teammate acted oddly in the huddle. Gossett said he had seen game officials alerting medical personnel as well.