This blogger played football in high school and college and cannot recall "getting his bell rung" that is a lovely colloquialism for a brain concussion. However, there were other injuries (both reported and unreported) and even an overnight stay in the hospital. But this blogger evaded CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) that can lead to dementia or behavior problems. Today, this blog offers a tragic account of CTE-victims and the willingness to watch football games despite all of the brain injuries. And, to offer balance, there is an exploration of the etymology of "hut" in the modern football snap-count. If this is a (fair & balanced) portrayal of the horror of modern football and the mystery of the snap-count, so be it.
PS: Look at the Directory below and click on the [bracketed number] to go to that essay; click on "Back To Directory" to return to the top of the page.
Vannevar Bush hypertext — Bracketed numerics — Directory]
[1]Super Downer — To Watch Or Not To Watch — That Is The Question
[2]Super Upper — The Arcane Element Of The Football Snap Count
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"The American Dilemma": Why Do We Still Watch Football?
By Joe Drape
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
I am a Catholic. He is a priest. It seemed natural to ask the Reverend James Martin [SJ] if it was morally wrong to enjoy watching professional football, namely the Super Bowl, on Sunday.
Martin is a Jesuit, which is the order that produced Pope Francis and provided the foundation (for better or worse) of my education. He is a writer, a thinker and an acknowledged public intellectual. But Martin, a Philadelphian, is also an unabashed Eagles fan.
“I was watching several renditions of ‘Fly, Eagles Fly’ on YouTube this morning,” he confessed when we spoke.
He, too, is uncomfortable enjoying a brutal sport that has imperiled the health of its work force. Still, Martin will meet his 86-year-old mother at his sister’s home in New Jersey on Sunday and pull hard for the Philadelphia Eagles to win their first Super Bowl title.
“I don’t think it’s a stretch to ask that question, but I’m not sure what the answer is,” Martin said. “I have watched with interest the progression of medical research. Are we using their bodies for profit? Are we using their bodies for our enjoyment?”
CTE has been found in the brain of one dead NFL player after another. Published studies have found a correlation between the total number of years one plays tackle football and the likelihood of one’s developing brain disease later in life.
Still, we shrug. Last year, 111.3 million people tuned in to CBS’s Super Bowl broadcast, according to Nielsen. Even with NFL regular-season ratings down 12 percent this season, Eagles-Patriots on Sunday will almost certainly be the most-watched television event of the year — as the previous year’s Super Bowl was.
“I’m embarrassed how much I love football,” a friend texted me recently during an afternoon of football watching.
Stories of concussions do not affect viewership of the game for 77 percent of fans, according to the annual Burson-Marsteller Super Bowl survey. Alan Schwarz, the former New York Times reporter who exposed football’s concussion crisis, said that the issue does not discourage him from watching the NFL.
“I have no problem watching the NFL — these are grown men making grown men’s decisions,” said Schwarz, whose investigative articles from 2007 to 2011 compelled new safety rules for players of all ages. “After being kept in the dark for so many years by their employers, they now know they could wind up brain-damaged. Fine. They’re professional daredevils. It wasn’t immoral to watch Evel Knievel. We watch stuntmen in movies.”
But even a football lifer like Eagles defensive end Chris Long is troubled by the danger of his chosen profession.
His father is the NFL Hall of Famer Howie Long, who now is a football analyst for Fox Sports. His brother Kyle is an offensive lineman for the Chicago Bears. Chris Long, however, sounds like parents everywhere when he says that he doesn’t want his 2-year-old son, Waylon, to play tackle football before high school. He hopes that Waylon doesn’t play the game at all.
Jelani Cobb, the New Yorker writer and educator, said he would not be watching on Sunday, but his reason had nothing to do with the game’s violence and potential for life-threatening injury. He is not watching because he believes Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, was blackballed by the NFL for protesting for social justice when he chose to take a knee for the national anthem before games.
Many Americans say they have been turned off by on-field protests during games (61 percent, according to the Burson-Marsteller survey), but most say they plan to watch the game even if there are protests. Huh?
“The cultural power of football is part of our fabric,” Cobb said, “and when something is part of tradition, people adhere to them for reasons that are not entirely rational.”
Debbie Staab understands this better than most.
We grew up together in the Midwest and I watched as her three sons excelled in the sport, each of them on a high school program that plays all comers nationally and perennially reaches national prominence. She has watched hundreds, probably thousands, of games over the years and appreciates the athleticism of the sport.
Now, she watches with an increasing amount of dread.
“When someone gets hit and they replay it in slow motion, I can see why these guys at 55 are rattled,” she said. “Nobody should get hit like that. Knowing what I do now, I would have steered my boys away from football.”
Bryan Partee is the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Marshall, TX, the town that brought us the great Y. A. Tittle as well as Dennis Partee, Bryan’s father, who was a kicker for the San Diego Chargers in the 1960s and 1970s. Two years ago, Partee and his board shut down their club’s tackle football program. They decided the potential for head trauma, the legal exposure and the high cost of running the program were no longer worth it.
Dennis Partee, 70, has Parkinson’s disease and is part of the NFL’s concussion settlement. His love for the game has been passed down through the family. Bryan Partee played football in high school; his 10-year-old son, Noah, will not. Yet they will all watch Sunday’s game together.
“Football is still a great sport, but on the tackling side, my wife and I are not going to engage,” Bryan Partee said. “I don’t want to see anyone lose their memory, or be so depressed they contemplate killing themselves.”
Soon my wife and I, like millions of other parents, will have to make a similar decision about our own football-crazy 13-year-old. We know the long-term risks now, and that makes what used to be a simple decision far more harrowing.
No priest will be able to help us. The NFL should be as worried about that as I am. # # #
[Joe Drape has been writing about the intersection of sports, culture and money since coming to The New York Times in 1998. He has pursued these lines of reporting as the author of six books. Drape received a BA (English) from Southern Methodist University (TX).]
Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company
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Hut! Hut! Hut! What?
By Bill Pennington
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Illustration by Chris Morris
It is easily the most audible word in any football game, a throaty grunt that may be the sport’s most distinguishing sound.
Hut!
It starts almost every play, and often one is not enough. And in an increasingly complex game whose signal-calling has evolved into a cacophony of furtive code words — “Black Dirt!,” “Big Belly!” “X Wiggle!” — hut, hut, hut endures as the signal to move.
But why?
“I have no idea why we say hut,” said Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, who in a Pro Bowl career of seven years has probably snapped the ball thousands of times to “hut” but still cannot explain it. “I guess because it’s better than yelling, ‘Now,’ or ‘Go.’ Some people have used ‘Go’ and that’s awful. That doesn’t sound like football.”
Baltimore Ravens tight end Benjamin Watson said: “I’ve never thought about hut except that it seems forceful. The quarterback yells a sharp sound and guys start running at each other.”
Joe Theismann, the former Washington Redskins quarterback and an all-American at Notre Dame, reckons he shouted “hut” more than 10,000 times during games and practices.
“I started when I was 12 years old and I’ve been hutting my way through football for 55 years — but I have no clue why,” Theismann said.
Although the former Giants defensive end Justin Tuck offered no insight into the source of “hut,” he was unequivocal that quarterbacks had no choice but to use it.
“Can you imagine if they said, ‘Bacon-bacon-bacon?’” Tuck told NFL Films several years ago. “Everyone on the line would be like, ‘Where, where?’”
A dig into the etymological roots of “hut” must begin at... “hike!”
That call was the brainchild of John Heisman, the pioneering coach for whom the trophy for the best college player of the year is named.
Beginning in the late 1890s, Heisman helped spread the growth of the game like a coaching Johnny Appleseed through jobs in Ohio, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Texas. A tireless innovator, Heisman, promoting the forward pass, divided the game into quarters and, in 1898, came up with “hike” as a way for an entire team to know when the ball would be snapped into the backfield.
Before then, backs used silent gestures to begin plays. Heisman, a part-time stage actor who had been trained as a lawyer, prized gifted oratory and preferred a dynamic sound that would spring his charges into action. Hike fit the bill and also aptly described what was happening: a ball hiked backward from the ground.
Quarterbacks nationwide dutifully summoned the ball with a resolute “hike” for most of the first half of the 20th century.
In time, however, like so many things in football — where there is too much time to think between game weekends — the unadorned hike became increasingly complicated.
Again, Heisman played a part. Another of his innovations was a sudden shift of backfield players before the snap, which allowed Heisman’s teams to overload one side of a formation. To augment the advantage, an element of deception was added, with code words used to signal the shift.
Then, as the forward pass became a bigger part of football in the 1910s, concealing the offense’s play call became a major imperative. Some teams even approached the line of scrimmage knowing they might change the play called in the huddle before the ball was snapped. This required much more than a single, shouted "hike." Additional coded signals were soon developed, a system now known as an audible.
A century of football evolution later, quarterbacks throughout college and the NFL regularly call plays not in the huddle, but as they wait at the line of scrimmage. Fans watching at home hear a host of seemingly disconnected terms and words, even the names of cities — who can forget Peyton Manning’s “Omaha!” — and animals.
Much of it is mumbo-jumbo, phony phrases meant to confuse the defense.
“My friends outside of football ask me, ‘What’s all that chatter at the line?’” Weston Richburg, the Giants center, said. “I tell them, ‘Ignore it, because we do.’ I mean, some of it matters. But a lot of it doesn’t.”
When it does matter, yelling a color like blue or red can be a code for the play being changed. Or, barking “Eagle 18” can be a signal that the ball will be snapped on the next sound coming from the quarterback’s mouth no matter what that sound is.
Sometimes the directive to snap the ball is not a voice command at all. Known as a silent count, it is communicated with a hand motion or when the quarterback lifts his leg off the ground.
Wide receivers, lined up far from the center of the formation, usually cannot hear the quarterback’s signals because of crowd noise. They try not to move until they see the football leave the ground.
Defensive linemen, at least most of the time, do the same thing.
“I don’t listen to anything,” Eagles defensive tackle Fletcher Cox said. “The fastest thing on the field is the football when it’s snapped. When it moves, so do I.
“Because those quarterbacks are paid to trick me. I shut them out — what are they saying anyway? Hike? Whatever.”
Still, for roughly the last 60 years, the signal has most assuredly not been hike.
“Hike is a term used by people outside football,” Spencer Long, the Redskins center, said. “Hike is too hard to say. That’s probably why they got rid of it.”
The Giants quarterback Eli Manning, referring to his father, Archie, a college and NFL quarterback in the 1960s and 1970s, said: “I don’t think even my dad said hike. I think our family has always been hut guys. But it’s a good question: Why do we say that?”
It turns out hike evolved into hut because of football’s longtime love of military terminology.
After studying “hut,” Ben Zimmer, a noted linguist and lexicographer, published findings several years ago that linked the term to the cadences used by marching soldiers. In American military settings, it was often a substitute in basic marching commands, as in “hut, two, three, four” instead of “one, two, three, four.”
And drill sergeants in the middle of the 20th century also called troops to order with, “Atten-hut!”
Many football coaches and players in the late 1940s and early 1950s had served in the armed forces during World War II. Returning to football fields after the war, they borrowed hut as a clear, concise command that could be heard by a large group of men scattered across a plain.
Theismann was happy to finally have an answer.
“With the great synergy between football and the military, it figures that it had something to do with following orders,” Theismann said. “Then again, think of the chaos and the penalties there would be if we didn’t have a word that got everyone moving together as a team.
“So that’s what it comes down to. Why do we say hut? Because it works.” # # #
[William M. (Bill) Pennington is an American journalist, sportswriter and author. A reporter for The New York Times since 1997, Pennington has become best known for his sports journalism on golf, skiing, baseball, football, and other sports. He has written three books. Pennington received a BS (journalism) from Boston University (MA).]
Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Campany
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