Does the NFL really care about player safety? YEA: It took a while, but league’s response was thorough

Suddenly the National Football League is a lot more outraged about vicious hits than it ever was when Darryl Stingley, Drew Bledsoe and Tom Brady suffered intense injuries in past seasons. Is the NFL’s newfound awareness genuine? I say it is ? although not for the reasons you might expect.Understand this: Roger Goodell’s NFL is a bureaucracy, and like your typical bureaucracy, it isn’t inherently evil ? just inherently slow to realize when it’s doing wrong. And a tragic corollary of this rule is that all too often, the only way a bureaucracy will do the right thing is after it screws up so badly that the blinders come off and it realizes it must reform. If there is any consolation, such reforms are often done painstakingly enough to ensure they aren’t needed again (at least, not for a while).Things reached a saturation point for the NFL this past weekend. We saw one of those hits in the second quarter of Sunday’s game between the Pats and Ravens. New England safety Brandon Meriweather knocked out Baltimore receiver Todd Heap on a helmet-to-helmet collision. Heap lay on the ground and then left the game (he returned before halftime). Meanwhile, the Steelers’ James Harrison took out two Cleveland Browns receivers – Joshua Cribbs and Mohamed Massaquoi – on separate hits (he wasn’t punished for the one on Cribbs). The Falcons’ Dunta Robinson leaped headfirst into the Eagles’ DeSean Jackson ? knocking out both players.All those hits in one day were part of the reason this issue has gotten too big for the league to miss. But only part. The other half of this equation is a mounting awareness of the seriousness of concussions at all levels of sports. A few months ago, I stood in the State House and listened to former New England Patriot Ted Johnson (among others) testify to the damaging effects of hits to the head. State legislators have shown interest in making sports safer for Massachusetts student-athletes ? and professionally, numerous NFL players have decided to posthumously donate their brains to scientific research on the effects of damaging hits.In an example of “better late than never,” the league has laudably joined the list of advocates for change. Commissioner Goodell fined Meriweather, Harrison and Robinson a total of $175,000. The league is going further: hitting a player in the head or neck could result in a suspension without pay. On NFL.com you can listen to Goodell’s executive vice president of football operations, Ray Anderson, narrate the new policy. “Gentlemen, you must know player safety is our highest priority,” he says.Why did it take so long to realize the danger of vicious hits? Surely such a policy could have been drafted in the wake of Jack Tatum’s hit to Stingley in 1978 ? or Mo Lewis’ on Bledsoe in 2001 ? or Bernard Pollard’s on Brady in 2008. Sadly, I would contend that the league was like a lot of other bungling bureaucracies ? so focused on a core product that they lost sight of harmful deficiencies in their corporate philosophy.Yet once these behemoth businesses realize the extent of the damage they’ve wrought, they’re pretty thorough in making sure it doesn’t happen again. If you’ve seen ads for Toyota or BP, the company reps do sound contrite about their errors ? and they sound like they’re willing to hunker down and fix them.The NFL’s reforms sound similarly far-reaching ? although the real measure of their effectiveness will be time; how safe will the NFL be five, 10 years from now? The league could also consider what’s causing players to act so recklessly in the first place. From watching some of these games, it appears some players would rather draw a 15-yard penalty than be burned for a 15-yard touchdown catch. I’m not one to sympathize with millionaires behaving badly ? but it does seem rather easy to lose one’s job in the NFL, and maybe if players had more job security, they might not feel so much pressure to perform (or to go on strike).As for Goodell ? he’s no Florence Nightingale, “the Lad