I was always under the impression that football is a full contact sport. I guess offering incentives for doing your job well doesn't jibe with what the league evidently figures is more a money making entertainment type of sport than anything else. Might as well move the commisioners office to Hollywood and put flags on the players instead of pads.
just my $.02
There is a difference between doing your job well and going out to intentionally injure someone enough so they are knocked out of the game. Because with the kind of hits we are talking about. Such as the one on Favre in the Championship game Or as someone mentioned the one on Hasselbeck where you are going for the knee. Your not just knocking them out of the game. But potentially ending their careers. Going at the knees has been considered dirty pool even back when was a teenager and I played. Hell even when we got together to play what we called "Blood Ball" we didnt go after anyones knees.
Nobody. Even the players themselves want to see the hard hits go away. But there are certain things you just dont do. Such as that, and clothes lining.
Rules being installed for the sately of the players is almost as old as the game itself. The reason why many of the rules we have in football since it infancy were for safety purposes because none other then Teddy Roosevelt got involved and threatened to abolish the game by way of executive order if they could not find a way to make it less brutal.
It is why they no longer use the Flying wedge and other mass formations. Why there is a line of scrimmage and neutral zone. Why a certain number of men have to be on the line of scrimmage. Why you go 10 yards for a first down. and why there is a forward pass. Why the game is 1 hour and played in 2 halves.
All these rules came about in an effort to make the game safer because people were actually dying.
http://symonsez.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/when-a-president-threatened-to-abolish-football-in-the-united-states/
