NFL Week 14: My Three Wishes

1. I Wish I Could Believe That the NFL Was Serious about the Whole Concussion Thing

For my money, it is all very well saying that you are tightening the rules on when a player can return to the field after a head injury, imposing independent doctors to assess the risk of further injury and so on. However, until you make players wear a helmet which fits properly, all of this is largely irrelevant.

Letting players take the field with a loose-fitting helmet is, purely and simply, negligent. Even in a high impact sport like football, there is no way that we should be seeing a helmet come flying off a player's head on half a dozen occasions in every game.

Do racing bike riders have the same problem? No, because they wear the correct equipment.

You can't claim to be serious about solving a problem if you don't address the root cause of the problem. NFL players wear helmets for a reason. Any helmet that isn't on properly is adding to the head injury, because it gives the head something to rebound against.

Time to put up or shut up, Commissioner Goodell.

2. I Wish the Head Coach Merry-Go-Round Would Stop for a While

Okay, so that is a slight exaggeration. Head coaches come and head coaches go. If that were not the way, we would never find the geniuses or weed out the losers.

But to start speculating now about whether Tony Dungy or Mike Holmgren might return to coaching next season is entirely facile. At the moment, only one franchise has a confirmed vacancy. In a pinch, this might be three by the end of the month—but only if you believe that Gary Kubiak and Lovie Smith are both merely counting the days before handing in their own playbooks.

Everywhere else in the NFL, the teams doing badly either have coaches who have still actually improved on 2008's results, or have owners you would only work for if you were clinically insane. Then there's Cleveland, where no one seems to know what is going on, including the coach and owner.

To start devoting hundreds of column inches to something which may never happen is simply white noise causing unnecessary distractions at a time when the season should just be starting to get interesting.

3. I Wish the Hall of Fame Electors Would Learn Some Math

Yes, it is that time of year again, when the more elderly football journalist starts grappling with the most interesting thing he will do all season—deciding who will and will not be granted the dubious honor of enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.

The problem becomes harder every year, because no one seems to have realized that the pool of candidates for election increases by at least a dozen every year, yet the number of potential enshrinees never goes beyond seven. Therefore, every year a large number of worthy ex-players never make it, despite being better than some of those elected before, because the weight of numbers is against them.

Which makes the whole thing even more nonsensical than it was in the first place.