PHILADELPHIA — In front of his locker Wednesday inside the NovaCare Complex, Brandon Graham used a gentle touch to sack a quarterback only he could see.
He was talking about the controversy that has defined the discussion around the NFL this week: two ridiculous roughing-the-passer penalties, one against the Falcons’ Grady Jarrett, one against the Chiefs’ Chris Jones, and the confusion that comes with not knowing exactly how someone is supposed to tackle a quarterback. Graham, of course, is a defensive lineman, just like Jarrett and Jones. He had watched them get penalized and their teams get punished for hits that once wouldn’t have been noteworthy but now, in the aftermath of Tua Tagovailoa’s terrifying concussion and in the name of protecting the rest of the league’s premium players, had instantly become outlawed.
So Graham decided, with a cluster of media around him, to demonstrate what he believed he might have to do to register a sack without breaking these brand new rules.
“I’m going to just stand him up and hold him like this,” Graham said, wrapping his arms gently around himself, as if he were wrapping up a quarterback, then turning his head, as if he were glancing at the referee.
“ ‘Blow the whistle.’ That’s what I think we’re getting to.”
Here comes Eagles-Cowboys on Sunday night, the biggest of the NFL’s slate of games this weekend, and everyone is wondering: Will first place in the NFC East come down to an official flagging Graham or Haason Reddick or Micah Parsons for doing his job? For delivering the measure of punishment that every player in pro football, even the star quarterbacks, accepts as par for a brutal course? Jarrett grabbed Tom Brady by the waist last Sunday and tossed him to the ground, as normal and nondescript a sack as anyone manages against the greatest quarterback of all, and referee Jerome Boger instead stuck to the script that the NFL wants all its officials to follow: No one hits Tommy too harshly. No one puts the league’s meal tickets in too much jeopardy.
So now a routine tackle is a roughing-the-passer infraction, and for all the measures that the NFL long needed to adopt to make its players safer and to show that it genuinely cared about curbing CTE and other brain trauma, it’s taking the wrong tack here. These penalties aren’t and won’t be a deterrent at all, because the purpose of a deterrent is to stop bad behavior, and neither Jarrett nor Jones had behaved badly. Neither had done anything wrong. The hits weren’t dirty or cheap or excessive. The closest that either player came to violating the rules was Jones’ body positioning when he tackled the Raiders’ Derek Carr; from one angle, it appeared that he might be landing atop Carr with all his weight. But Jones actually extended his arm to try to brace himself and Carr from slamming to the ground with all their combined force.
The Jarrett infraction was particularly galling to Graham, because he had been in that same scenario, in the most important of moments. On the final play of Super Bowl LII, Graham surged off the edge and had Brady in his sights, only to have Brady swivel his hips, shake him off, and buy enough time to heave a Hail Mary into the end zone. When Graham saw Jarrett’s sack, he remembered his near-miss of Brady, and he understood why Jarrett had taken such care to make sure Brady went down and stayed down.
“I don’t know if I should say this, but I’m going to say it,” Graham said. “They pay the quarterbacks a lot. So whatever they break, they can get it fixed by whatever the money is. Know what I’m saying? Because they’re getting paid a whole lot.”
No, Graham wasn’t being callous and soulless. He was acknowledging the reality of football in the 21st century. There have been and will yet be heartbreaking stories about former players from distant eras who suffered from CTE and dementia, who knew football was dangerous but didn’t know the full scope and severity of the damage it would wreak on their bodies and minds. It took far too long for the league to react with the right amount of caution for anyone who appeared to sustain a serious blow to the head, to start changing the he-man culture that pressured a dizzied and disoriented player to stay on the field, and to implement a concussion protocol that had even a semblance of credibility. There are plenty of reasons to be distrustful or skeptical of the NFL on this subject.
Tagovailoa’s situation exposed a major loophole in the protocol, one that the league and its players association have since tried to close, and vigilance and a willingness to hold league officials, teams, and players accountable for such failures are required at all times. But CTE is no longer a secret, no longer a surprise, and more than anything, today’s NFL players want timely, comprehensive, accurate information about the health risks of their sport so they can weigh those risks for themselves. They are grown men, with free will and agency, with livelihoods at stake, and they want to be treated and respected as such.
What they don’t want — what no one in America wants, apparently, based on the NFL’s popularity — is the nature of the sport to change. Ban football to save those who would play it from themselves? Soften it to make certain that Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Jalen Hurts never have to lie on a surgeon’s table or pass a concussion-assessment test? Good luck.
“I mean, come on,” said Reddick, who leads the Eagles in sacks this season with 4 1/2. “They signed up for the same thing everybody else did, you know? So it’s like, when it comes to so many things, what are we really talking about? This is football. This isn’t flag football. This is football, man. And every man who gets on that field, they know what they signed up for. Let us get out there on that field and play football. Just let us go out there and play football. ...
“Everybody knows what the risks are, and they continue to play football. Again, what are we talking about if this is what we signed up for? It’s a physical sport. It’s always been. CTE, whatever — it always has been. If you’re going to play this sport, you’ve got to be willing to take what comes with it, like anything else, like anything in life.”
That’s the hard truth of a hard sport. That’s the hard truth of that big game this Sunday night at Lincoln Financial Field. The Eagles and Cowboys won’t play football. They will withstand it. They will survive it. Everyone watching will love it, and woe to the referee, reaching into his pocket for a penalty flag he wouldn’t have thrown two weeks ago, who seeks to change it.
