Are You Ready for Some Flag Football?

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/opinion/are-you-ready-for-some-flag-football.html

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Try to imagine the Super Bowl game on Sunday without the opening kickoff’s collision of 22 bodies as the two teams race down the field at each other with spectacular but crunching abandon. That’s exactly what the authorities who oversee the sport for the nation’s youth imagined recently in recommending that all kickoffs and punts be eliminated from youth football games in the cause of children’s safety and parents’ growing alarm about brain damage.

A new format created by USA Football, the governing body for the amateur sport, aims to reduce the violence and head banging of tackle football for youngsters by shrinking the field, cutting teams to six to nine players per side, instead of 11, and avoiding big-versus-small matchups of youngsters.

The three-point stance for linemen would be eliminated to soften a play’s opening blows, and coaches would be on the field for closer monitoring. The aim is to bring the youth game closer to flag football, where there are no bell-ringing tackles at all, with a compromise version called modified tackle football.

Whether that’s good enough is an open question; some experts recommend pure flag football through junior high. But the change is an acknowledgment of the growing evidence that football violence is linked to a degenerative brain disease.

Men retired from their playing days in the National Football League have experienced dementia, memory loss and suicidal depression. Pathologists have posthumously laid bare brain lesions suffered by all-star running backs, defensive backs and offensive and defensive linemen. Last year the health and safety officer for the league, after years of minimizing the threat, finally acknowledged the link between gridiron violence and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Parents have, accordingly, paid closer attention to researchers’ warnings that the formative years leave youths particularly susceptible to brain trauma from head-snapping tackles. Participation in tackle football for boys ages 6 to 12 has dropped nearly 20 percent since 2009.

The Pop Warner youth league banned kickoffs for its 5- to 10-year-olds last season. The new USA Football format would enlarge the protections with a pilot program this year and a nationwide rollout several years in the future. A test scrimmage between seven-member youth teams found fewer pileups and less forceful tackling, but resulted in no ultimate determination about safety.

The bottom-line worry among league officials, team owners and players is the long-term viability of a popular game that yields big crowds, big salaries and big profits. The N.F.L. has given USA Football tens of millions of dollars to promote youth teams that feed the high schools that feed the colleges that feed the professional teams. “There’s concern among parents about when is the right age to start playing tackle, if at all,” conceded Mark Murphy, president of the N.F.L.’s Green Bay Packers and a board member of USA Football. This concern will be one of the less noticed but darker story lines on Sunday when the Patriots and Falcons go head-to-head.