Why CFL has its head in the sand
Friday was the day Jeffrey Orridge earned his salary as commissioner of the Canadian Football League.
It was his annual Grey Cup week state-of-the-league address, always a no- win day, but in this case it was the day when he had to stand up in front of the assembled media people — a surprising number of whom are not idiots — and take one for the team: declaring the CFL’s position on the link between football and concussions.
“The league’s position is that there is no conclusive evidence at this point,” said Orridge, dancing around the fact that a senior National Football League official last year admitted to that very link in front of a Congressional committee.
“I can’t speculate or comment on what the NFL’s f i ndings have been and what led them to that conclusion,” Orridge said. “But at this point, you know, it’s still... last I heard, it’s still a subject of debate in the medical and scientific community.”
Does he believe this? One certainly hopes not.
But in Orridge’s defence (and believe me, this may be the first time) he was only doing what he must.
Surely we are intelligent enough to surmise that there is a “best practices” song sheet for sports league officials in dealing with the concussion question, and that every one of these commissioners is watching the others like a hawk to make sure no one deviates from the lyrics.
One slip of the tongue and they could all go down.
The issue hangs like the sword of Damocles over every sport in which violent head contact is possible, let alone a given.
Gary Bettman is in official denial on behalf of hockey owners, for exponentially higher s t akes. He refuses to be cornered. The stakes for NFL’s Roger Goodell are even higher than that.
It just happens that in football, it is pretty much The Question.
Answer it truthfully, and the probability is that the court damages that would follow from lawsuits would deal a serious blow even to the seemingly bulletproof NFL, but they might well bankrupt its Canadian cousin.
The NFL can afford to play the long game, paying lawyers to keep the ball in the air for years, decades even, while plaintiffs run out of money. The CFL has no such deep pockets. Right now, there is a $ 200- million class- action suit filed against the CFL, and if the league ever had to pay that, it would have to cease operations.
The commissioner talked about the league- appointed injury spotters communicating 700 incidents of suspected concussion to the sidelines during the season. And in the next breath, or the one before, said there were only 40 concussions suffered in the league in 2016. (Pause here for laughter.) Look, this isn’t an attack on football — the CFL game is the team sport closest to my heart — but rather an explanation of realities. One of them is that head injuries and brain trauma in football are inevitable. Period.
The human body is not made to block or tackle without the head being somewhat involved.
Defenders of the faith will say: “But we’re making it safer all the time.”
It will never be safe. Linemen butt heads on virtually every play. Running backs lower their helmets to drive tacklers backwards at the point of impact, and tacklers lower theirs so as not to give ground. If they didn’t, they would never advance out of the game’s lower echelons.
How long has the debate been raging over the use of the helmet as a weapon, not a piece of protective equipment? Yet it’s still a weapon at the game’s highest levels. Any suggestion that it isn’t is a fantasy propagated by stakeholders worried about losing their livelihoods.
Orridge said instant replay and officiating are global issues?
Sure they are, but only as points of argument, not as threats to their very existence, the way concussions are to football.
One of these days, perhaps, English Premier League football will face a similar crisis over the effects of lifelong heading of the soccer ball.
Rugby, Aussie rules football, boxing, UFC … any sport that charges admission and pays players to engage in potentially brain- damaging activity is vulnerable, and rightly so.
But that day has already arrived, for football.
Eventually it may come down to lawyers drafting release forms, which any football player at any level from peewee onward will be required to sign, or have signed by a parent or guardian, before being issued a helmet.
The form will acknowledge the possibility of brain damage from playing the sport, and agree not to sue teams, leagues or their medical personnel for the costs of such damage.
The chilling effect that would have on moms and dads almost certainly would cause youth participation numbers to nosedive, the f eeder systems of t hese leagues would dry up and all the measurable revenue sources — from corporate sponsors to television to fans — would be in free-fall.
That is why Jeffrey Orridge dances.