A name you probably never heard of.
He is a Pro Football Hall of Famer, 11 years with the Detroit Lions, 1967-1977.
He also has openly predicted that football will be extinct in 10-20 years, said at a football-safety camp.
And the reason he gives is the same as I've heard a number of ex-football fans, sick of the fact that they literally are watching people die.
"The game is becoming more deadly today," the Pro Football Hall of Famer said Friday. "It's a great game."
But, as Denver defensive tackle Kevin Vickerson put it:
"They're trying to make the game safer, but it's a gladiators' sport and there's only so much safety you can bring to it," Vickerson said.
The problem is simple: The players are now too big, too fast, and too powerful for their own good. Whether it's steroids, HGH, or whatever is going on, the hits are now too violent, and not just the dirty ones I chronicle most weeks in the Fine Blotter.
It comes down to Newton's Second Law: Force = Mass X Acceleration.
I saw, a number of years back, as I was at an anime convention, a high-school lineman for one of the Southern Californian high-school football factories...
He was something like 6-6, 320 pounds or some idiocy like that.
My first thought IS, obviously, that it's enhanced. Even if it isn't, though, it's too much.
Too big.
Too fast.
Too powerful.
Hence, as the ESPN article puts it:
"Bigger, stronger and faster football players are going to kill the sport.
At least that's what Lem Barney believes."
Second: And then you get to the situation in Seattle with Corrupt Pete Carroll, and why we needed a National Sports Commission years ago with the overreaching power to put shitheads like this motherfucker out of sports and into prison.
Three days ago, Carroll's current chief rival, Jim Harbaugh of the San Francisco 49ers, said the following:
"Is it a concern? I've definitely noticed it," Harbaugh said of the Seahawks. "You don't know what it is. Even when people say what it is, you don't know that that's what it is. I've heard this thrown out or that, but that's usually the agents or the players themselves saying it's, for example, Adderall. But the NFL doesn't release what it actually is, so you have no idea. You're taking somebody at their word that I don't know if you can take them at their word, understanding the circumstances."
In the last two seasons, five Seahag players (including one who will sit the first four games of this season) have been suspended for drugs, with a sixth having his suspension reversed.
Anyone who doesn't think this is indicative of a criminal/illegal pattern of behavior which goes up to Carroll is out of their minds.
And if you think Harbaugh's not serious, here's what he has to say about the PEDs in general:
""It has no place in an athlete's body. Play by the rules," Harbaugh said. "You always want to be above reproach, especially when you're good, because you don't want people to come back and say, 'They're winning because they're cheating.' That's always going to be a knee-jerk reaction in my experience, ever since I was a little kid. We want to be above reproach in everything and do everything by the rules. Because if you don't, if you cheat to win, then you've already lost, according to Bo Schembechler. And (the late Michigan coach) Bo Schembechler is about next to the word of God as you can get in my mind. It's not the word of God, but it's close.""
Not that any of this impresses one of the already-suspended Seahags, Brandon Browner.
Indicative of the attitude in Seattle and of the 12th Man (especially after The Call *cough!*), Browner said this:
Browner, who spoke to Sports Radio KJR, said he would “put his hands around” Harbaugh’s neck if Harbaugh was a player in the league.
“I don’t have anything for it,” Browner said. “At the end of the day we gotta win football games. He’s a coach. He’s never gonna be out there lined up against me. I wish he would; I’d put my hands around his neck. At the end of the day, I’m about winning football games.”Fuck you, Brandon.
So this is the attitude people give their fealty and ignore life and death for, isn't that right, you pig?
This is why friends of mine hope Lem Barney is correct.
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