![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/files\/2012\/04\/hardtackle_300.jpg\" "\\"hardtackle_300\\"")
Going down hard during the 2006 Pro Bowl. Photo: Cpl. Michelle M. Dickson<\/p><\/div>Over the last year, I’ve written a couple of times about the deep shame of collegiate sports in America.<\/p>\n
From the plantation-style economics<\/a> of modern NCAA athletics to the broken moral compass<\/a> of programs like Penn State, there’s something rotten in a culture that was supposed to teach fitness, teamwork and healthy competition.<\/p>\n It’s hard to imagine those stories being eclipsed by behavior even more reprehensible — even more apparently criminal — but the NFL has managed to pull it off.<\/p>\n News broke weeks ago that former New Orlenas Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams allegedly paid his athletes to deliberately injure players on opposing teams.<\/p>\n An audio recording has now emerged of Williams instructing his players to target other players’ heads.\u00a0 “Kill the head and the body will die,” Gregg instructed, offering cash rewards to any player who carried out the hit-job.<\/p>\n He also instructs his players to destroy another player’s knee.\u00a0 “He becomes human when we (expletive) take out that outside ACL,” Gregg argued, according to a report in USA Today.<\/p>\n Americans have always liked our sports rough-and-tumble; and my own tastes are hardly cricket-and-croquet.\u00a0 I was a high school wrestler, I love football, and have been an on-again-off-again fan of mixed martial arts.<\/p>\n But there are moments when even a pass-time as central to our national sensibility as football warrants a good, no-holds-barred fresh look.<\/p>\n In order to clear the air, the sport needs to do three things.<\/p>\n First, the NCAA has to address the inequities in the college game, where (mostly white) coaches, administrators and media executives rake in huge bucks.<\/p>\n Meanwhile (mostly black) players are denied even the most basic professional compensation and protection, while they expose themselves to astonishing physical risk.<\/p>\n Secondly, the NFL needs to turn over all evidence of injury-for-hire schemes, like the one in New Orleans, to criminal investigators.\u00a0 This is, at long last, a job fo rthe police.<\/p>\n Last time I checked, it was illegal for anyone in the US to pay cash to a hit-man to deliberately injure or cripple someone.<\/p>\n The fact that this conspiracy allegedly occurred on a gridiron should not cause the proper authorities to hesitate in taking over this probe.<\/p>\n Finally, the medical profession needs to independently investigate growing evidence that football — at the high school, collegiate, and professional level — is severely damaging the brains of far too many athletes.<\/p>\n