NFL could face thousands of lawsuits

NFL could face thousands of lawsuits from ex-players over brain damage from concussions

By 2009, the year that concussions derailed veteran Cleveland Browns running back Jamal Lewis' career, there were ample warning signs that pro football's skull-jarring impacts were permanently damaging athletes' brains.

A decade of medical research had documented the game's fearsome toll. Former NFL players who had endured multiple head blows – whether formally diagnosed with concussions or not – were suffering memory losses, concentration lapses, speech troubles, bursts of anger, bouts of depression, and unusually early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

Most worrisome of all in 2009 were the autopsy results from at least eight hard-hitting NFL veterans who had died young, often violently, and in the grip of depression or dementia. Ex-Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Terry Long killed himself at 45 by guzzling anti-freeze. Fellow Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk, 36, smashed his truck into a tractor-trailer while fleeing police. Former Cardinal defensive back Andre Waters, 44, shot himself in the head.

The exams showed all eight athletes' brains were gummed up with destructive, protein-filled neural tangles – a dementia-causing condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that many researchers believe is a consequence of being repeatedly bashed in the head.

Yet the NFL, in 2009, still allowed players with concussions to return to the same game, as long as they hadn't blacked out or shown other obvious symptoms. The league insisted to players that there was "no evidence" of long-term harm from concussions, and "no magic number for how many concussions is too many." Research that said otherwise was flawed, premature, or flat-out wrong, the NFL contended.

"I think we're doing a terrific job" managing concussions, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell testified at a congressional hearing on Oct. 28, 2009, a Wednesday. The following Sunday, the Browns' Lewis played his fifth game of the season with undiagnosed post-concussion syndrome, a condition that would force his retirement a month later.

Under pressure, the NFL has since revised its concussion policies, and has acknowledged the potential for long-term brain injuries. But its actions haven't been enough to avert a tsunami of lawsuits in the last 10 months by more than 2,200 former players, including Lewis and at least 157 other ex-Browns.

The players claim the NFL misled them about concussions' long-term risk, and conspired to suppress the truth.

"It wasn't supposed to be combat. You're not supposed to get killed," said plaintiff Reggie Rucker, 64, a wide receiver on the Browns' legendary "Kardiac Kids" squad of 1980 who now has persistent headaches, dizziness and concentration problems. "I pray that my wife won't have to lead me around and take care of me because of the sport I played. I don't want to end up not knowing who I am."

Legal experts say the players' cases face major hurdles, especially proving that the NFL intentionally deceived them, which the league vehemently denies; that brain damage from concussions isn't part of the accepted risks of football; and that the players' ailments resulted from concussions while in the NFL rather than college or high school football, or something else entirely.

(Read the full text of a lawsuit filed against the NFL by dozens of ballplayers in the DocumentCloud viewer below and other lawsuits, at right).

But like the successful lawsuits against cigarette makers in the 1990s to which they've been compared, the concussion cases could be a game-changer for the nation's favorite sport. They have the potential to further alter how football is played, how fans perceive it, and even whether parents allow their children to participate.

"Boxing used to be the most popular sport and it's been marginalized for many reasons," said Paul Haagen, co-director of Duke University's Center for Sports Law and Policy. "I'm not predicting that [with football], but it's lurking here. It's one of the things the NFL has got to be worried about."

The league has declined to discuss the lawsuits, but issued this statement: "The NFL has long made player safety a priority and continues to take steps to protect players and to advance the science and medical understanding of the management and treatment of concussions. The NFL has never misled players with respect to the risks associated with playing football. Any suggestion to the contrary has no merit."

Though there's been no confirmation yet of concussion-caused brain damage, the May 2 suicide of former NFL star Junior Seau, 43, is focusing even more attention on the football-concussion issue. Seau spent 20 years in the league as one of its toughest defensive players. An ex-teammate estimated Seau likely suffered more than 1,500 undiagnosed concussions during his pro career.

Seau shot himself in the chest, just as former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson did in February 2011. In a note, Duerson – who had memory loss and other neurological symptoms – asked that his brain be preserved for study. Researchers later confirmed Duerson had the degenerative CTE. Seau's family has not disclosed whether they will donate his brain for research.

"Watching a 43-year-old star take his own life does change the priorities," Dr. Randall Benson, a brain researcher at Michigan's Center for Neurological Studies, said of Seau's death. Benson is exploring MRI's potential to identify subtle concussion damage, and believes intervention with anti-depressants and other medications can help.

"It's ludicrous to think you can play in the NFL for one year, much less 15, at a position where you're regularly contacting other players and not come out of it with a damaged brain," Benson said. "We've got to keep these guys from blowing their heads off. It's epidemic."

Boxing provides brain-injury clues

Nearly a century ago, boxing gave doctors the first clues that repeated head blows could render lasting neurological damage.

New Jersey medical examiner Dr. Harrison Martland coined the term "punch drunk" in 1928 to describe the unsteady gait and mental fogginess common to fighters, whose brains he theorized suffered microscopic tears from the constant pummeling.

By the 1950s, researchers examining dead punch-drunk boxers' brains found severe degeneration that resembled Alzheimer's disease, though in different locations, and usually without Alzheimer's classic plaque blobs. The boxers' brains had clumps of knotted-up nerve fibers that resembled twisted tree roots.

The damage was in the frontal and temporal lobes, areas normally responsible for planning, motivation, emotional control, long-term memories, limb movements and sensory perception. That could explain the addled thinking, tremors, explosive rage and other symptoms typically seen in broken-down fighters.

Exactly how and why multiple head blows cause the neural tangles, and why the degeneration affects only some concussion victims but not others, is still unknown. A person's individual genetic makeup is one possibility.

In the 1950s, doctors began calling the boxers' concussion-induced brain damage chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

By the 1970s, researchers had collected reports of CTE dementia symptoms from participants in a variety of other high-impact sports: soccer, rugby, professional wrestling, horseracing, even skydiving. The evidence was strong enough for two prominent New Zealand head injury researchers to declare in 1975 that doctors had a duty to warn athletes and officials in concussion-prone sports that "the acceptance of concussion injury, though gallant, may be very dangerous."

Boxing was the focus of most of that medical concern, probably because that sport's explicit goal was for one athlete to inflict a knockout – by definition, a concussion – on his opponent. But lesser "sub-concussive" boxing blows, over time, also likely led to permanent brain damage, a landmark study of boxers in 1984 led by New York neurologist Dr. Ira Casson concluded.

The permanent harm boxing posed to the brain was so great, and safety reforms so disregarded or ineffectual, that in 1987, Casson – who would later emerge as a controversial figure in the NFL's management of concussions – suggested banning the sport.

In terms of the number and severity of head blows its participants endure, football probably is second only to boxing. Twenty-five percent of retired NFL players surveyed reported having three or more concussions during their career. Offensive and defensive linemen, who butt heads on practically every play, sustain as many as 1,400 sub-concussive hits per season, according to research.

As early as 1952, Dr. Augustus Thorndike, Harvard University's chief surgeon and a pioneer in sports medicine, recommended that football players with more than three concussions, or who been knocked unconscious even once, end their athletic careers. The proposal never gained widespread support.

Over the years, stories had occasionally surfaced about former players' sharp mental declines or bizarre behavior. And, beginning in the 1990s, multiple concussions and lingering symptoms forced the retirement of some high-profile players such as New York Jets receiver Al Toon, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young.

But until the mid-2000s, professional football had largely escaped the concerted research focus and public scrutiny that had been trained on boxing for decades.

One reason was cultural: fierce collisions, though not football's central purpose, were an expected, even celebrated, sidelight of the game.

The NFL – and with the advent of video sites like YouTube, fans themselves – compiled highlight reels of football's greatest hits, backed by bone-crunching music. Improved helmets bolstered a sense of invulnerability, though they couldn't damp the abrupt brain accelerations and decelerations that spawned concussions. Players steeped in the game's gladiator tradition (and acutely aware their replacement was suited up and waiting on the bench) shrugged off dizzying head blows as mere "dings."

"Oh my god, I saw stars every day in practice," recalled former Browns and Buffalo Bills offensive lineman Joe DeLamielleure, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who's among those suing the NFL because of his concussion-related injuries. "Nobody thought anything of it. We used to joke about it – 'Hey, we got dinged.'"

After one game, DeLamielleure said, "I sat on an airplane with [Bills quarterback] Joe Ferguson and Joe said, 'How'd I play? I don't remember anything.' Then you watch him on film and it looks like he's fine. Because you're like a dog – you hear the bell ring and you play."

All the while, DeLamielleure and his fellow plaintiffs contend, the NFL remained silent or actively deceived them about concussions' long-term costs.

Early warnings, NFL research in the 1990s

In an August 1994 pre-season game in Kansas City, Chicago Bears running back Merril Hoge got a concussion. Five days later, without a neurological exam, a doctor cleared him by phone to play.

On Oct. 2, in a game against the Buffalo Bills, Hoge was again flattened by a tackler. He stumbled into the training room with his second concussion in six weeks, and stopped breathing. In a hospital intensive care unit a day later, he couldn't recognize his wife, brother or baby daughter. He had to be taught to read again. Hoge, 29, never returned to football.

In the wake of that incident, and with a relative lack of data on football's long-term concussion consequences (though there were plenty of results from boxing by then), the NFL in 1994 embarked on its own research project. The goal was to determine whether Hoge's case, and Al Toon's concussion-caused retirement two years earlier, were abnormalities or were the leading edge of an unrecognized epidemic of brain-injured players.

Dr. Elliott Pellman, a rheumatologist and the Jets' team physician, was picked by NFL Commissioner Pete Tagliabue to head the league's new Committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury. It included other NFL medical personnel and several outside experts. The league would pay for the cost of the research, which was to examine how and how often football concussions occurred, their consequences, and how they should be managed.

Pellman, who acknowledged having missed Toon's worsening post-concussion symptoms as the Jets' doctor, said that most of what he and other team physicians knew about concussions came from "on-field anecdotes" passed along by athletic trainers and others who treated players. The NFL brain injury committee's research was supposed to replace that word-of-mouth, conventional-wisdom approach with solid facts.

Meanwhile, other researchers working independently of the league also were examining football-specific concussions and their aftermath.

With funding from the NFL players' union, Dr. Barry Jordan, a neurologist, and Dr. Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon, surveyed 1,090 retired pro football players, most of whom had at least one concussion during their careers. The ex-players with concussions showed significantly more CTE-like symptoms of permanent brain damage, such as confusion, memory loss and speech problems, the scientists reported in 2000.

Follow-up research involving retired NFL players found that those who'd suffered three or more concussions were far more prone to depression than ex-players with fewer or no concussions. NFL retirees with three or more concussions also were three times more likely to have significant memory problems than their non-concussed colleagues.

Three concussions appeared to be "kind of a cutoff," a threshold beyond which future mental and psychological problems are likely, said Bailes, a former Steelers team physician who co-authored the retired-player studies with Kevin Guskiewicz, director of the University of North Carolina's Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center.

The cumulative number of head blows – not just concussions, but sub-concussive ones, too – seemed to be the best predictor of who would develop CTE, Bailes said. Players' individual genetic makeup probably also was a factor.

Though disturbing, none of the survey-based studies was diagnostic; they couldn't reveal what had happened inside the brains of the retired players who were reporting mental problems. Unlike punch drunk boxers, whose neuro-tangled brains had been dissected and extensively examined for decades, there were no such results for concussed, deceased football players.

Dr. Bennet Omalu, an inquisitive Pittsburgh forensic pathologist remedied that – and unwittingly helped set the stage for concussed players' current legal onslaught against the NFL – when, in 2002, he carved up the brain of legendary Steelers center Mike Webster.

Autopsies confirm players' brain damage

The retired Hall of Famer, demented and often homeless, had died of heart failure at 50. "Iron Mike" was renowned for his toughness, playing 177 consecutive games between 1976 and 1985, despite multiple concussions and other injuries.
Mike Webster w bust at Hall of Fame.JPGView full sizeAP fileFormer Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, whose hard-hitting toughness was a hallmark of the Steelers' Super Bowl championship teams, poses with his bust after being enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997. Webster died five years later, his brain riddled with concussion-related damage.

Curious about Webster's stunning mental decline after retirement from football, Omalu, who at the time worked in the Allegheny County medical examiner's office, looked at slices of Webster's brain under a microscope and found the same neural tangles as in punch drunk boxers.

Omalu published his findings in 2005. It was the first documented instance of CTE in a football player. He couldn't say for certain that Webster's concussions caused his brain damage, but he called it a "sentinel case" that warranted more attention.

In 2006 Omalu confirmed a second football CTE case, from the brain of ex-Steelers lineman Terry Long, who'd died from drinking antifreeze. In January 2007, Omalu identified CTE in a third deceased former NFL player, Andre Waters, a Philadelphia Eagles defensive back who had shot himself in the head.

Against that backdrop, the NFL's brain injury committee began publishing its findings, nearly a decade after starting the project. Pellman, the joint doctor, co-authored all the research reports, writing frequently with Ira Casson, the physician who had verified concussion-induced brain damage in boxers back in the 1980s.

The league-sponsored research, based on five years of data that team doctors had collected from players with concussions, contained some startling conclusions. The findings contrasted sharply with what other brain-injury researchers were reporting, and with accepted concussion-management practices:

• Because a majority of concussed NFL players returned to the same game in which they were injured, concussions in professional football were "not serious injuries."

• If an NFL player's concussion symptoms went away, and if he could pass a medical exam, there was no reason he couldn't resume play in the same game he was injured. It "might be safe" for concussed high school and college players to return on the same day, too.

• Concussed NFL players who lost consciousness weren't at increased risk for another concussion, or for the lingering symptoms of post-concussion syndrome.

• The widely-used guidelines for grading a concussion's severity and determining how long a player should rest and recover were unreliable. Team doctors should use their best judgment and make case-by-case decisions rather than following an "arbitrary, rigid" concussion management system.

• NFL players with three or more concussions showed "no evidence of worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects." That included "no signs" of CTE in the active players.

Other scientists criticized the league researchers' seemingly blithe take on concussions, and how they reached those conclusions, citing data-gathering and statistical problems, potential bias and over-reaching.

For example, team doctors sometimes discounted headaches as a concussion symptom when deciding if a player could go back on the field, the NFL studies showed. That would inflate the number of concussed players able to resume play in the same game – skewing, in turn, the basis for the NFL studies' conclusion that concussions weren't a big deal.

The NFL's researchers also only looked at active players, not retirees, so it was no surprise they didn't find long-term concussion harm. "The authors cannot assume that there could not be chronic effects, especially since they have only looked at a brief window of time," Kevin Guskiewicz, the researcher who had documented depression and mental declines in retired NFL players with multiple concussions, wrote in a pointed critique. The NFL findings sent "a potentially dangerous message."

Boston University neurosurgeon and brain injury researcher Dr. Robert Cantu, writing in the same medical journal that had published the NFL-sponsored research, implored the league in 2007 to come to grips with CTE. "I believe the NFL will lift this dark cloud if they confront the problem directly and honestly," Cantu wrote.

The NFL and 'Dr. No'

But those concerns didn't stop the NFL from incorporating the results of its research into the league's new concussion guidelines.

A pamphlet the NFL distributed to players in August 2007, while urging that concussions be taken seriously, contended that research "has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly." It didn't mention the retired-player studies by Bailes and Guskiewicz that identified three or more concussions as a threshold for future depression and mental decline, or the CTE cases that Omalu had found.

Instead, the NFL concussion committee's three top members went after Omalu.

Pellman, Casson and Wayne State University biomedical engineer Dr. David Viano claimed the Pittsburgh pathologist was "completely wrong" about his diagnosis of CTE in the dead players' brains.

The damage Omalu found didn't match the classic CTE injury pattern seen in boxers' brains, the NFL researchers said. The rotational, head-spinning impacts that caused concussions in boxers and led to CTE were different than the mostly straight-line hits that football players took.

Furthermore, the NFL researchers said Omalu hadn't proved that the dead players' brain damage wasn't caused by something besides multiple concussions – perhaps alcohol, steroids or illegal drug abuse. Omalu's findings had "serious flaws," the NFL researchers wrote in a letter to the editor of the medical journal that had published the work – the same journal in which the NFL research had appeared. In an unusual move, Casson and Viano, who had taken over as co-chairs of the NFL concussion committee, and Pellman, demanded that Omalu retract his studies. Omalu refused.

The NFL researchers' attempt to stifle Omalu's findings "was a pretty strident response," said Bailes, who befriended and collaborated with Omalu on later studies that identified CTE in additional former NFL players and other dead athletes with histories of head trauma.

"It's well-known that brain trauma, especially repetitive, can lead to long-term brain damage. It's hard to imagine we're still having that argument."

Casson, in particular, adamantly and repeatedly asserted the lack of a connection between multiple head injuries and long-term brain damage in football players. His terse, one-word denials during a 2007 segment of HBO's "Real Sports" prompted critics to dub him "Dr. No." (Casson declined to be interviewed for this story, citing the pending player lawsuits.)

Casson's obstinance about football concussions' consequences seemed odd, considering his own studies linking boxing and brain damage – and ruling out alcohol or drugs as a factor – in the 1980s. A series of investigative reports by the New York Times and ESPN revealed significant problems and conflicts with the league's concussion research.

The NFL's continuing insistence that concussions were relatively benign, in the face of contradictory evidence, struck some critics as a familiar tactic.

"It sort of reminds me of the tobacco companies pre-1990s, when they kept saying there is no link between smoking and damage to your health," U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez, a labor lawyer, told NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell during a blistering two-part congressional hearing on the concussion issue in late 2009 and early 2010.

Sanchez was referring to the federal lawsuit against the major cigarette makers in 1999, which revealed a Big Tobacco agenda to sponsor medical research that downplayed the risk of smoking, and to discredit opposing studies.

Like the tobacco companies, the NFL "perfected the delay and deny process," testified Bernie Parrish, a cornerback on the Browns' 1964 NFL championship team and author of the 1971 best-seller "They Call It A Game," which accused the league of economically exploiting players.

At the Oct. 28, 2009 session of the concussion hearing, Sanchez played the HBO clip of Casson's "Dr. No" denials and had Goodell read aloud the NFL pamphlet assuring players there was no evidence that multiple concussions led to permanent harm. Wouldn't the league be better off legally, Sanchez asked Goodell, if it acknowledged the possibility of a concussion-brain damage link and sought to minimize the risk?

The commissioner wasn't buying. The league already had taken major steps to protect players, Goodell testified, and had "to a large extent driven this [concussion] issue" by sponsoring research. Casson and the other members of the NFL's brain injury committee were "tremendous professionals." There remained, he told members of Congress, a "significant medical debate" about concussions' impact on players.

Less than a month later, those positions began to crumble.

In the first of a stunning string of reversals, Casson and Viano, the co-chairs of the NFL's brain injury committee whose performance Goodell had praised, resigned. Pellman was soon ousted too, and the committee's new leaders quickly distanced themselves from the previous concussion research.

The NFL gave a $1 million, no-strings-attached donation to Boston University researchers who were studying CTE, and who, like Omalu, had confirmed the presence of concussion-related brain degeneration in football players, including retired Browns fullback Lew Carpenter.

The league barred players with any significant concussion symptoms from returning to the same game. On Dec. 21, 2009, an NFL spokesman for the first time publicly acknowledged pro football's brain-injury risk, telling the New York Times "it's quite obvious from the medical research that's been done that concussions can lead to long-term problems."

The NFL issued a much blunter warning in July 2010. In locker room posters and pamphlets, the league cautioned its players that multiple concussions could cause permanent brain damage, memory loss, personality changes, depression and dementia. Concussions, the advisories said, "can change your life and your family's life forever."

By then, though, lawyers for former players were filing the first wave of lawsuits accusing the NFL of a cover-up. The players contend the league's warnings were long overdue.

"I had no idea" of the long-term consequences, said Rucker, who had four documented concussions during his career with the Browns and other teams, and "many more" undiagnosed ones. "We knew the risks, but the risks weren't that you could get dementia, you could get depression, you could one day just end up wanting to kill yourself."

Players' lawsuits against the NFL begin

Recruited by a rash of personal-injury lawyers, former players who have signed on to the burgeoning concussion lawsuits are a cross-section of the NFL. There are superstars and Hall of Famers such as Tony Dorsett, Leroy Kelly, Bob Lilly and Lem Barney; stalwarts like Dick Schafrath and Conrad Dobler; and virtual unknowns who only competed a season or two.

Some plaintiffs are in their 70s and 80s, remnants of the NFL's early years. Others, like Tim Couch, the Browns' No. 1 draft pick in 1999, are still in their 20s and 30s, fresh from the game. A few of the plaintiffs are widows and families of players who have died, and whose autopsies have confirmed the presence of CTE.

The ex-players claim a range of symptoms of concussion-related brain injury, from lingering headaches and dizziness to confusion, depression and outright dementia.

“I think what you're going to find is that they [the NFL] have been negligent, if not worse," says Atlanta attorney Mike McGlamry, whose firm represents some of the players that have sued the league for concussion-related brain damage. "Through the years, they should have gotten on board with the fact that concussions cause long-term injury, and they should have treated these guys."

"I've got plenty of clients that haven't slept more than an hour and a half or two hours [at a time] in years," said Atlanta attorney Mike McGlamry, whose firm represents Jamal Lewis and dozens of other former players. "We've got one young guy who has really bad problems. He's only been out of football three or four years, probably played a half-dozen years. They're finding him naked in the front yard."

The former players are seeking an unspecified amount of money for damages and medical care, and for ongoing monitoring of their conditions.

Judging by the NFL's preliminary legal filings, the league will defend itself by arguing that, among other things, the concussion claims are a labor dispute covered by the NFL's collective bargaining agreement and appropriately dealt with by the grievance process, not a lawsuit. The league also calls the conspiracy allegations "threadbare," saying the plaintiffs have shown no proof that the NFL intended to collectively mislead players about long-term concussion harm.

It's possible the NFL will argue, as Casson once suggested, that steroid use caused or contributed to players' brain damage. But that could expose the league to a potentially embarrassing examination of its steroid screening practices.

Research published earlier this year casts doubt on the steroid argument. Scientists gave rats high doses of steroids, then simulated concussions using brass weights. The brain damage in the steroid-dosed rats after concussion was no worse than in the drug-free rodents. That strongly suggests steroids aren't a factor, said co-author Bailes, the co-director of suburban Chicago's NorthShore Neurological Institute, who expects to be called to testify if the concussion lawsuits go to trial.

Though a settlement would be costly, the prospect of debilitated gridiron heroes taking the stand may be more bad publicity than the NFL is prepared to take, considering what's already happened. But some experts believe the plaintiffs face a tough case.

"I think it's going to be very difficult to prove that the NFL deliberately and purposefully deceived the players," said Matthew Mitten, director of Marquette University's National Sports Law Institute. "That's a very high burden, to show that the league knew there could be permanent, long-term damage and covered that up.

"I think the case is going to turn more likely on what [the NFL] should have known," Mitten said. "As a general rule, there's no legal duty to protect against the inherent risks in a game. But you can't do anything to enhance those risks. The allegation here is that, by not disclosing information that [the league] knew or should have known regarding the long-term effects of head injuries, that effectively enhanced the risk."

Whatever the lawsuits' outcome, the heightened awareness of concussions' potentially devastating impact already has transformed football, with more change likely. In the last month, Cincinnati Bengals offensive lineman Jacob Bell, 31, and former Ohio State University linebacker Andrew Sweat, 23, who had signed a free-agent contract with the Browns, announced they were quitting football because of concussion concerns.

Goodell, the NFL's commissioner, instituted sky box injury spotters and video replays for team doctors after Browns medical personnel missed quarterback Colt McCoy's devastating concussion last December and let him continue playing.

Neurosurgeon Richard Ellenbogen, the new co-director of the league's reconstituted head injury committee, has promised additional reviews during the off-season. Head-injury experts such as Bailes, Benson and neurologist Robert Stern of Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, advocate getting rid of football's three-point crouch, having linemen instead start upright to lessen the likelihood of head blows as they collide with opponents.

For purists who rail about watering down football, Joe DeLamielleure has a message.

"You're not going to ruin the game," the Browns' Hall of Famer said. Rather than a tackler aiming his helmet at an opponent, "you're going to put your head on the ball where it's supposed to be put. When we were kids, that's how it was taught."

(source Cleveland Plain Dealer)