“UNTIL YOU JUST POUND THEM INTO THE TURF….UNTIL THEIR HEAD HURTS”.

“UNTIL YOU JUST POUND THEM INTO THE TURF….UNTIL THEIR HEAD HURTS”. With the information that has come out about head injuries in football, I find it hard to watch professional football any more. I have watched only one NFL game this year out of the first seven weeks of the season. This article by Mark W Sanchez in the New York Post (October 29) is a fresh reminder of why I have been breaking a lifelong habit.

Sanchez quotes Brian Baldinger, a former NFL player who is now an announcer for the NFL Network—bear in mind that Baldinger works for the National Football League, as Sanchez points out. Baldinger called for the Philadelphia Eagles to injure Ezekiel Elliott, the star Dallas running back in this weekend’s game. Baldinger said that players like Elliott do well: “…Until you just pound them into the turf. Until you just drill ’em. Until their head hurts. So that bumble bee is flying around in their helmet, so he just didn’t know how hard he just got blasted….This is the guy that we gotta hurt… This is the guy that we gotta take out of the game. There’s gotta be 10 guys that want to hurt him every single play. In fact, we may even put a little bounty on Ezekiel Elliott.”

Mark Sanchez comments at the end of the article that: “In a Twitter response, Baldinger called his remark “mostly tongue in cheek’”.