Football isn't rocket science

No, I've never played football, but I've watched it for 40 years (I'm 49) and I know that football players, as a whole, aren't stupid. (Yes, occasionally there's one who is solid mahogany from the neck up, but by no means all.)

That's why we don't get players speared in every game. We don't get dirty hits in every game. Players already know what's legal and what's not, and they know how to avoid helmet to helmet contact.

(And yes, sometimes it seems like a player just has to breathe on a quarterback to get called for a roughing the passer penalty, and yes, that's a fault that should be addressed.

The solution? Remove their facemasks. (I'd also support calling for a weight limit. Nobody over 300 pounds should be allowed to play. )

Anyway, Rush was ridiculing the new rules today - or rather the new institution of fines for violation of the rules, and I really do think he's off base. Yes, it's football which is a "guy's sport" which is guy's walking off the field all the time covered in blood - either their own or other people's.

But come on. There are "dirty players" and there should be no room in the game for them.

Anyway, here's what Rush had to say.

The NFL has over-reacted, as any PC bunch of people would, with these three or four hits that happened last Sunday. So what I'm going to be looking for on Sunday is who gets fined, who gets thrown out of the game, who gets suspended from the game because of illegal hits. These things happen in split seconds, and I want to see this. I want to see how this is gonna come down. I mean, everybody from the league on down... and, in fact, the players are the only ones not on board. The people who play the game are saying, “What? You're turning us into a bunch of wusses.” Of course, the know-it-all media is saying, “Well, you don't know what's good for you. We media, we're socially conscious; we're worried about your brains.” The players are saying, “What brains? If we had any brains we wouldn't be playing!”

Now, the league has put out a video, an instructional video for every team. Every team has had to play this video to illustrate what is a legal hit and what's an illegal hit, what's going to be a fined hit, finable hit, what's going to be a hit to be thrown out of the game, get you fined and this sort of stuff. And the Minnesota Vikings have reacted to it like pretty much any other group of employees made to watch a video put together by management. They've got a little chalkboard here, or white board with ink on it, and they've got stick figures, one stick figure flying into another stick figure and another stick figure flying into another stick figure. The first stick figure, an arrow drawn to it: “QB or receiver that makes over $10 million, illegal.” “Punter or anybody else we don't give a damn about, legal.” So what the Vikings are saying, look, if you take the head off a quarterback legal or illegally we're gonna kick you out of the game. If you decapitate a punter, we don't care. A rookie, no big deal. But a quarterback or somebody making over ten million… that's how the Vikings are looking at this. And then underneath all that it says, "Remember, we at the league office are totally concerned about integrity. Seriously, no really, we totally are." (laughing) Folks, the PC crowd's gotten hold of the NFL now. There are going to be -- you watch -- there are going to be endless flags because it's all gonna come down to the refs. All eyes are going to be on the refs. Now lives are at stake. That's how they've ramped this up. Lives are at stake on every NFL gridiron, and on whose shoulders will it fall now to save lives? The refs.

Now, before this week, the NFL used to market videos of their greatest hits. ESPN used to have a video of the biggest, most crunching, deadly hits of the week. Even this week, while the NFL was fining James Harrison of the Steelers for $75,000 for two hits, they were selling pictures of those hits on their website for anywhere between $19.95 and 250 bucks until somebody pointed out, “Hey, wait a minute, you know, you're fining this guy, and you're selling the picture.” “Oh, yeah, that's right.” So they had to take down the pictures. No longer are they for sale. So that's what I'm going to be watching. To hell with who wins. I'm going to be watching to see how many players are gonna adjust the way they play versus how many refs are gonna start calling penalties on stuff that otherwise wouldn't be called.