On Monday, the GHSA set limits on full contact during football practices. The new rules, effective this fall, will limit full contact to 45 minutes per day and 135 minutes per week in preseason and then only 30 minutes per day and 90 per week in the regular season. Practices with full-contact drills cannot take place over three consecutive days.
The GHSA’s new policy is almost identical to the recommendations that came out of the National Federation of State High School Association’s Concussion Summit Task Force and the fact that Georgia was one of the first states to adapt to the changes is something we should be very proud of.
Player safety is football’s biggest threat and everybody knows it. It is a matter that arose from decades of hard evidence. From the rule changes in the pros to the adaption of the often-debated targeting rule in college football, we are seeing the efforts to protect the players from these long-neglected truths. That is what the GHSA did, while taking a necessary step on Monday to limit full contact during practices.
Football is a dangerous game and during the season, our teams leave it all on the field once a week. We see the intensity and physicality at its peak, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone that has ever played football or been around it knows that football practice is the real test. Games are fun, practice is brutal. Since football’s inception, the guys that can handle the physicality and can take and deliver the hits the best are the ones that earn the playing time. Right? You can work year-around but if you cannot deliver a hit in practice, you are never going to see the field as a starter.
Plenty of coaches have already made changes to limit full contact in Georgia but it is the fact that there are guidelines in place now that I believe helps put things in perspective not only the players and coaches, but for the fans as well. The more pads are taken out of the equation at practice, the more fundamentals can be looked at when evaluating a player and building a team. I played at Walton High School before walking on at wide receiver and special teams at UGA for three years. Practice was game-day for me. I was not going to be one of the guys playing on Saturday’s so I did everything I could at practice to get my chance. I honestly cannot remember ever going full pads more than once a week, but that did not mean practice was not incredibly physical.
Every play in football requires ‘putting a hat’ on somebody. When I was blocking, the harder the force was coming at me, the harder I was going to have to return the hit to avoid getting ran over and letting my teammate get hit. I felt this everyday at practice and made sure I packed on as much size as I could to take this daily punishment. I started playing football in eighth grade and by the time I finished at UGA, my list of injuries included a cracked sternum, two torn shoulders, multiple concussions, a torn meniscus and two dislocated fingers, none of which ever happened in a game.
In fact, only my second torn shoulder even happened in ‘full pads’, but I had messed it up so many times in our ‘limited’ contact before that day that it was already in a harness heading into what turned out to be my last ever football practice.
I got hurt in practice more because games are such a small fraction of the sport. That is a simple math to understand, but it was also because I focused on trying to survive and earn playing time through physicality and not fundamentals. I did not play the game the right way. I was wrong but at times I felt I had no other choice. Some of my coaches and fans of the game over the years implanted this idea in my mind, and that is why I have began to gravitate towards the new vision under the GHSA. You can play fast and you can play fundamentally sound, but practice has to prioritize these changes in order for that to happen and Georgia has the quality of coaches to continue making strides.
I overheard a conversation between two former NFL players Monday at the Matt Ryan charity golf tournament about how they would not sign their kids up to play football unless their kid walked up to them, put his hands around their throat and demanded to play. That was a wakeup call for me and my initial views of the rule changes began to change. Some may see my support of the change as bad for the sport, but after years of denial, I see it as the only way to save it. Think of the last offseason you saw this many NFL stars in their twenties turning down millions of dollars to retire from the game.
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