Kendrell Bell laying off the painkillers

Football is a brutal sport. Yeah, we know that. But we too quickly forget about the bodily damage even healthy players suffer. Jim Wexell reports that Kendrell Bell will lay off the Advil this season:

"I figured out I really need to start taking care of my body," Bell said. "And that's eating right and not taking so many painkillers. It kind of makes you soft if you can't deal with the pain. Football is pain and if you continue to take medication like that, it becomes a way of getting by."

Back in 1996, Bones and I made up a fantasy game and played it with our older sister. I'm not proud of this, by the way, but the story is edifying so I'll share it.

We called it "The Maim Game." We each made up a roster of NFL players. No player could be on more than one roster and we had players at every position. We didn't have a draft or spend a lot of time making up our rosters; we all made one up off the top of our head and made sure we didn't share players by talking about them as we made them. The rules were simple. If one of our players was injured and lost for a game, we won a beer from the other two players in the league. If one of our players was injured and lost for the season, we won a pitcher of beer from the other two players in the league. The injuries had to be documented as "out" on the injury report.

Anyway, two or three weeks into the season we solemnly stopped playing, stopped talking about it, and felt pretty awful for thinking it would have been a source of amusement. It really opened my eyes to the everyday damage and the everyday risk of life-long crippling injuries all players endure. It's not just the superstars who are at risk. I'll never look at kickoffs, for example, the same way. Big-ass men in full pads and crash helmets get a thirty-yard running start and then slam into each other. It's barbaric. A lot of people think that the pads and helmets made the collisions less dangerous but the opposite is true. It's the same way with boxing, which is much more brutal now that the players wear gloves. The protective equipment enables one player to hit another player with greater frequency, less risk of injury (for the attacking player), and more momentum (the equipment adds mass, weight to the blow). If the defenders didn't have pads and helmets, they'd have to tackle ball carriers with greater agility and technique if they wanted to have a long career.

The Wigginton-Hill collision would have been pretty run-of-the-mill in the NFL. I'm not saying baseball is better than football because of that - I don't feel that way at all - but they are very different games.