TACKLE THE PROBLEM
HOW DO you fix wrong to make it right? Well, the first thing you do is try. It looked like a standard football play, at least by modern standards. That was the problem.
With 6:20 left in Sunday’s SaintsRams, Los Angeles QB Jared Goff hit tight end Tyler Higbee with a pass in the right flat. Saints safety Marcus Williams, 21-year-old rookie free safety, tackled him.
Well, he didn’t exactly tackle him. Safeties aren’t expected to tackle, anymore. They’re expected to attempt to separate opponents from the ball by separating them from their senses. That expectation was being fulfilled long before Williams was born.
In fact, I’d suggest that two NFL safeties — Rodney Harrison, now with NBC, and John Lynch, formerly with FOX and now the Niners’ general manager — were hired by TV because they were widely known for their eagerness to brutalize opponents rather than tackle them.
But Williams, his arms extended as if to literally tackle Higbee, didn’t use them. He instead leveled Higbee with a flying, head-first burst against Higbee’s left hip.
On CBS, Jim Nantz sounded impressed: “Look at that tackle by Williams!”
Nantz didn’t say what was seen next. Higbee was OK, but Williams rose slowly, and with help from a teammate.
And as Williams next was seen in a close-up, shaking his head in what appeared to be a self-inflicted daze, Nantz only said that Williams has been an impressive rookie.
It didn’t have to happen that way. Williams could have tackled Higbee by tackling him, by using his arms to bring him down, and to minimize risk — in Williams’ case, neurologi- cal — to both players.
But the game, especially at its highest levels, is no longer coached that way, thus no longer played that way.
And as the NFL continues to deal with legal cases relating to on-thejob, life-diminishing, deteriorated brain function — “playing for keeps” has never been more foreboding — it doesn’t seem interested in fixing what can be fixed, not on humanitarian grounds nor as matter of financial self-interest.
Thus, what can be fixed remains both broken and unconscionably dangerous.
But systemic neglect is seldom benign.
This big college basketball scandal with adidas payola money, the FBI sting that made big news and still does?
But influence peddling — flat-out payola to land the best “student-athletes” — occurs, unhidden, in plain sight.
In April, Missouri signed the nation’s No. 1 high school recruit, 6foot-10 swingman Michael Porter, Jr. He was injured in the season’s first game — he’s likely out for the season following back surgery — but he’s still considered NBA-bound, as early as next season.
Why Missouri? Funny you should ask.
The school hired his father as an assistant coach. And unless Porter Sr. is working for free, how can any logical human — or shrub — not conclude that Missouri paid off Senior to deliver Junior?
Any college president with an active sense of fundamental right from wrong would have told Missouri coach Cuonzo Martin, “Oh, no you don’t. We don’t buy teenagers.”
You think this would pass muster in Missouri Law School’s ethics classes? Then again, the academician who enabled the North Carolina no-show-classes scandal was fully enabled by a professor of ethics.
And how does the NCAA allow this? I don’t know, but it always has.
In 1984, Kansas coach Larry Brown landed top recruit Danny Manning by hiring Manning’s father, Ed, as an assistant. And when Danny was done at Kansas, so was his dad.
But such shamelessly Machiavellian coaches, operating under the aegis of high-minded colleges, are more likely to be copied than condemned.
Locally, Seton Hall in 2014 successfully recruited Isaiah Whitehead, now with the NBA Nets. How? Coach Kevin Willard — with the school’s blessings — hired Whitehead’s Lincoln H.S. (Brooklyn) coach, Dwayne “Tiny” Morton, an influential, AAU-connected, common denominator in the urban basketball underworld.
Morton didn’t work for free, thus simple addition tells us Seton Hall bought the kid’s coach to deliver the kid. That’s not payola?
Though TV is larded with college basketball experts and “insiders,” you rarely hear a word of this, especially come March Madness when it’s easier to play rah-rah stupid.
Thus, with a compliant, speak-noevil media, what the logical would conclude could easily be fixed remains not just broken but polluted, putrefied.