Bruce Arians, the Arizona Cardinals head coach, says football – “the best game that’s ever been fucking invented” – is being unfairly attacked over its safety record, and singled out the mothers of football players in defending his sport from criticism.
Weeks after calling parents who did not want their children to play football “fools,” Arians, at a clinic of 130 high school coaches in Arizona, said the attacks on football had to stop, and claimed “it’s not dads, it’s moms” who are leading the charge.
“We feel like this is our sport. It’s being attacked, and we got to stop it at the grassroots,” Arians said. “It’s the best game that’s ever been fucking invented, and we got to make sure that moms get the message, because that’s who’s afraid of our game right now. It’s not dads, it’s moms.”
KNPX-TV in Arizona posted video of his comments.
The NFL has been roiled by revelations about the links between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. Researchers discovered that CTE had been found in the brains of Tyler Sash and Ken Stabler, and a string of players have retired early to prevent further damage to their health.
Last month, NFL official has acknowledged a link between football and CTE for the first time, but Arians’ remarks seemed to suggest mothers were leading some kind of co-ordinated criticism over player safety.
At the end of March, Arians told Peter King of Sports Illustrated: “It’s the greatest game in the world. I think [football] teaches people more values than any other game that you play.
“We have this fear of concussion that is real, but not all of those statistics, I think, can prove anything. There are more concussions in girls’ soccer than in football at that age. Our game is great. People who say ‘I won’t let my son play’ are fools.”
On Friday, Arians suggested rugby-style tackling should be encouraged, to avoid helmet-to-helmet collisions.
“Our job is to make sure the game is safe, at all levels,” Arians said. “The head really has no business being in the game. There’s a lot of different teachers, but when I was taught how to tackle, and block, it was on a two-man sled, and you did it with your shoulder pads. That’s still the best way to do it.
“There’s really isn’t any place for your face in the game. I would beg all of you to continue to learn more about what they’re now calling rugby style tackling.”
Many of the NFL’s most prominent names, including Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, Kurt Warner and Brett Favre, have said they would to allow their sons to play football, as have LeBron James and President Obama. “I would not let my son play pro football,” Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker in January 2014.
Arians, 63, earned a reputation as one of the NFL’s more progressive coaches when he hired Jen Welter as a training camp intern last summer, making her the first female coach in league history.
