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Anyone who took high school English knows that hunting humans for sport is the most dangerous game but it’s safe to say football ranks pretty high up on the list when it comes to risky activities.
Over the weekend, Andrew Luck highlighted just how much of a toll the game can take when he unexpectedly announced his retirement from the NFL while citing the number of brutal injuries he’d been forced to deal with over the course of his abbreviated career.
On Wednesday, Rob Gronkowski also shed some further light on his decision to hang up his cleats and described the agonizing pain he was in after suffering yet another setback during Super Bowl LIII, which served as the final nail in the coffin to his storied saga.
Sure, the NFL is finally doing what it can to promote player safety (after decades of denying concussions are a bad thing) but there’s only so much you can do to prevent injuries when you’re playing a game that frequently involves practically unstoppable forces meeting virtually immovable objects.
On Wednesday, former Saints wide receiver Joe Horn chimed in on the problem while talking with USA Today and came up with an interesting suggestion to make the NFL safer: turn it into a flag football league.
Here’s what he had to say:
“I think it should be flag football. I think the fans would still pay to see it. It’s hard to make it safe now. It’s hard for a guy to go full speed at you and stop in the middle of him going full speed, duck his head and not hit you with the helmet that he has on.”
Horn’s son Joe Jr. signed with the Ravens this offseason so the former Saint has a vested interest in player safety, and while he acknowledges it’d take a while for his vision to become a reality, he appears confident fans wouldn’t gravitate away from the game if the NFL made physicality an afterthought.
I can’t necessarily say I agree—after all, what’s the point of having a hulking linebacker patrolling the middle when a more agile player would do the job just as well—but I can certainly see where he’s coming from.
If the league did want to test this out, I can’t think of a better place to start than the Pro Bowl, as it might actually encourage star players to participate without having to worry about getting their shit rocked in a game almost no one—including its participants—cares about.
That one’s free, NFL. The next one will cost you.