Time To Take Stock

Across the land the computers hum and click and whiffle, and out of them come electronic answers to the critical question of what play to run on third and 18 deep in your own territory while trailing by 10 points in the eighth game of the season. And out of them comes, at the touch of another button, the best 263-pound defensive tackle who can move well to his left, read a draw and close the trap hole and is eligible for the draft.

The automation of the '70s makes for brilliant plays, executed by extraordinary players. It will also make for another superseason for the National Football League—or will it? Increasingly, it has become apparent that professional football, for all its computers and modern methods, for all its talented players and years of experience, has problems, some involving playing conditions, some involving the play itself. This probably will not be the year in which they are solved, but it may well be a season when the need for a change of some kind becomes obvious—even to the people who run the game.

To go back, 13 years ago the NFL was made up of 12 teams. Questions concerning them were handled by Bert Bell, a small, fat irascible man whose offices occupied some scruffy rooms in Bala-Cynwyd, a suburb of Philadelphia. Bell was given to quick and hard judgments, such as suspending indefinitely two New York Giant players—Frank Filchock and Merle Hapes—simply because they did not report a bribe attempt.

Today the league, blown up to 26 teams, is administered from two very plush floors in an office building on New York's Park Avenue by Alvin (Pete) Rozelle, a tall, sophisticated and mellifluous man who once suspended two players for 11 months for betting on NFL games. He has not taken strong action since against player, coach or executive, although one NFL owner was involved in a rather dicey deal with race horses within the last year. Recently the league raised from $5,000 to $25,000 the amount the commissioner could impose as a fine.

In Rozelle's defense, he handles a far more complex job than did Bell. Almost routinely he must make multimillion-dollar deals with TV people where Bell had almost no television to cope with. The players have formed a union and accused the league of violating the antitrust laws; in Bell's day, a player thought antitrust meant an uncle had the full confidence of his wife.

But in some ways the league was a better one in the old days when Bell was always available and willing to listen to players, owners, innocent bystanders and sometimes sportswriters. Once almost as accessible as Bell, Rozelle slowly but surely has backed away from the day-today commerce of running his office. Bell was the general manager; Rozelle is chairman of the board.

During the Rozelle era new stadiums have popped up all over the league like mushrooms after a rain, but inside most there has been no grass. The newest arenas are floored with synthetic underfooting, which from the viewpoint of stadium managements makes sense. It is less costly to maintain artificial turf than to hire a corps of groundkeepers to minister tenderly and lovingly to good old grass. Also, the new surfaces are playable in all weather. But there is a negative side to synthetic turf, too. Uniformly unforgiving, it has been blamed for sending many players into early retirement in a crepitation of separating shoulders, strained ligaments and torn cartilages.

Pro football is injury-prone enough without adding to the game's dangers, if indeed that is what artificial turf does. Before this new season ever began, Roger Staubach, quarterback of the world champion Dallas Cowboys—playing on grass in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum—was hit near the sideline and suffered a separated shoulder that will keep him out of the lineup until at least mid-season. The San Francisco 49ers, strong contenders in the NFC West, had no fewer than 11 starters hurt at one time or another in training season accidents, and Mike McCoy, a quality defensive tackle for Green Bay, broke a bone in his foot while playing on the hard surface of the Astrodome in Houston. The Los Angeles Rams lost Kermit Alexander (broken elbow), Linebacker Ken Geddes (broken arm) and return specialist Travis Williams (torn knee ligaments). The Detroit Lions suffered a major loss when their fine tight end, Charlie Sanders, separated a shoulder making a diving catch.

Obviously, a new surface as revolutionary as artificial turf should be thoroughly tested if there is any question that it is adding to the high injury rate of the NFL. As a matter of fact, the commissioner's office has been compiling extensive statistics on the entire topic of injuries, but it has refused to be drawn into a public controversy on the subject of artificial turf's potential danger. It does admit that NFL trainers have been asked to file extensive and detailed injury reports with New York for the past several years. So maybe those computers are being fed something besides statistics on raw recruits and soon there will be a reasonable comparison of the probability of debilitating destruction to players on natural grass and artificial surfaces.

Of course, if it develops that there are more injuries on the manufactured fields, it is not going to be all that easy returning to grass. The cost will be steep, many owners have no control over the stadiums in which their teams play—for instance, many stadiums are built to accommodate baseball as well as football—and there is always the matter of TV. Football looks better on the rug than in the mud created by a hard rain. Backs can run and cut and the TV audience can see who they are by their numbers, which was never so in the pre-artificial days, when one wondered if they were playing a game out there or whether they were just a lot of overgrown types engaging in a lively mud bath.