Football Basics: USA Football Heads-Up Tackling

Hit With Your Chest, Not Your Shoulder

How It Started

With the shotgun suicide of former Miami Dolphins MLB Junior Seau. This incident made national headlines, and prompted public interest, research, and funding into the topic of what effects concussions have on the mental condition of athletes. Seau shot himself in the chest, presumably so his brain could be studied for research into Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (the mental effects such as mood swings, depression, cognitive impairment, et cetera supposedly caused by repetitively sustaining concussions).

How It Snowballed

After research was done, questions were asked, and interest into the topic was generated, a negligence lawsuit was filed against the NFL on behalf of the NFLPA (NFL Player's Union), claiming that the NFL had not done enough to make players aware of the dangers they faced playing the game. This also served the benefit of putting some cash in the pockets of former players who had been fiscally irresponsible since their time playing in the league, regardless of whether they had suffered a concussion or not. NFL players, current and former, rallied behind the union's efforts.

How It Ended

Well, technically we do not know, mostly because the NFL settled out of court under the condition that certain evidence the NFLPA had obtained never be made public. Now, I'm always a huge fan of innocent until proven guilty, but I do know two things:

1. The NFL will carefully analyze any situation that affects their bottom line and deal with it quickly.
2. You don't just drop $765 million because something makes you look bad. You drop a couple hundred thousand in that case. The NFLPA had something that could make the NFL look REALLY BAD. 

The After-Effects and Heads-Up

The NFL wasn't stupid. They know people heard about the settlement, and they had a pretty good idea of how people felt about it. Testimonies from former players saying they would never let their sons play the game didn't help. Enter USA Football and their Heads-Up initiative.

The core idea of Heads-Up tackling is to take away any involvement of the head in tackling as much as possible, which, in its simplest form, sounds like a pretty good idea. But where the real problem lies is in how it is taught.

As an athlete from ages 5 to 22, I was taught that the proper way to tackle is to break down, try to "bite the ball", hit with the top of your shoulder, and drive through the ballcarrier. I've only had one concussion in 17 years of playing the game, and that came in my Junior year at Montclair State in a playoff game. I didn't tell the training staff I had a concussion and kept playing because there was no way I was coming out of a collegiate playoff game, and I was still aware of where I was and what I was doing. I could comprehend the coaches' calls from the sidelines and my defensive assignment, so I thought I was good. That was all, and after the game was over I threw up a little. I took a nap on the bus ride home and was feeling better by the time we got back to MSU. The point of that story is I have been playing the game the same way for 17 years straight and came away with one bell-ring. 

USA Football, however, wants to change that. As opposed to the tackling method described above, they want players to approach the ball carrier, buzz their feet, hit with the front of their shoulder (i.e. the area between your pectoralis and shoulder, club up on the carrier, and drive the feet. I'm no physics major, but if we look closer at the wording, we can tell that the old tackling form involves bending at the hips and getting your legs and lower back behind you while driving. The new form assumes that you can make just as efficient of a tackle on a ballcarrier coming straight at you if you open up your chest parallel with his and hit him upward as opposed to backward.

I don't know about other former or current athletes currently reading this post, but when a ballcarrier is coming straight at you, I know from experience he'll do one of two things: stutter-step you, or lower his shoulder right into your widely exposed chest, causing you to get plowed backward and get whiplash in your neck. I'm not taking a chance on the latter happening. 

And here you have the problem, and it has manifested itself in the NFL in the form of illegal contact to the head and targeting ("deliberately" hitting the upper part of a ballcarrier/receiver's body when there is "ample opportunity" to make a safer tackle) penalties. This also serves the purpose of making the game easier for the offense, which allows them to score more often, which makes for more people tuning into their games on Sundays, which makes for more advertising revenue.

This is a multi-faceted issue, and I cannot explain every aspect of it, but hopefully this post has shed some light on it for you.

Cheers,

JG