While watching a Dallas Cowboys preseason game, I couldn't help but notice the performance of rookie wide receiver Cole Beasley.
"Too bad he's too small to make it in the NFL," I thought. "What a great game this would be if guys like Beasley could make it."And it dawned on me how to save football.Save football?Football is on a death trajectory.Columnist George Will recently documented several of the premature deaths and suicides of retired football players, almost all due to brain injury. We know the cause: the ever-bulkier weight of NFL players.Will pointed out that, in 1980, only three NFL players topped 300 pounds. In 2011, 352 did.The kinetic energy delivered by today's enormous players is more than can be compensated for, either by protective gear or through liability insurance.The NFL is facing a tidal wave of legal liability related to traumatic brain injury, and as soon as a few of those lawsuits are decided or settled, the floodgates will open.Professional football contributes about $5 billion to the economy and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. If you're an industry that generates billions in economic activity but you keep seeing your talent commit suicide or end up with dementia at age 45, and you're facing towering legal liability, you have a problem.I'm not a football expert, but I am a think-tank guy. If we know the cause of a problem, we can almost always solve it if there is a will to.And football can easily be fixed with weight limits.Weight limits would cut down on traumatic brain injury and other injuries. They would also help with the steroid/performance enhancement problem. Changing the culture of football back toward athleticism would give players less incentive to take shortcuts toward building up bulk that their own hearts can't sustain, much less the other guy's cranium.The benefits of this culture change would flow down through college and high school to youth leagues.Some will object to the idea of weight limits, but those objections are without merit. Sports are highly regulated, especially to guard the players' safety.And rules change all the time, especially in the NFL, which has been particularly willing to adjust almost every season for safety or fan enjoyment.Imposing weight limits on professional football is an easy conceptual step, but selling the idea will take time. In fairness to current players, standards should be phased in, perhaps 10 pounds per season, eventually settling on a limit of perhaps 285 pounds.The result would be a safer, faster, more athletic and more entertaining game played by people who have not spent their lives getting unnaturally large. And they will have a greater chance of living long enough to watch their sons play the game.Tom Giovanetti is president of the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), a free-market think tank in Lewisville.Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
