We asked the Cornell football team how they feel about tackle ban

In college sports news, there is a lot of buzz surrounding the Ivy League decision to ban tackling during football practice. According to an article by Timothy Bella, there have been 501 publicly reported concussions during the last three seasons of major college football. Concussions pose a major issue in collegiate athletics, and this decision by the Ivy League has been made in order to keep the players safe and minimize the risk of injuries.

Despite the decision being made in the best interest of the players and their safety, questions have arisen about how this will impact the competitive edge of teams, as well as the nature of the game itself.

We asked a few Cornell football players for their thoughts on the new measure.

Luke Hagy, senior

I am indifferent on the new rule because I am not sure how much it will affect the game. The past few years we didn’t do much live tackling and most of it took place during camp and at the beginning of the year. I think it will hurt younger guys and people battling for spots because it is hard to evaluate how someone will be without seeing them play live – especially for defense because you won’t be sure about how well someone can tackle. They may be in the right position every time but that doesn’t mean they are good tacklers. Young guys usually use live periods to show that they can play at this level because often times they only have highlight clips from high school, but it is a much different game.

I can understand why they implemented this rule because of all of the attention on concussions and injuries and I don’t think it will have a huge impact on Cornell football or the Ivy League in general because I think live tackling was already very limited.

Jarrod Watson-Lewis, senior

I don’t think that this is a very significant change for Ivy league football players. In my 4-year experience as a Cornell Football player, we rarely tackled once regular season games started. After this point in the season, most of our tackling drills were very technique driven and less contact focused. We didn’t do any live tackling or high speed tackling drills. From that standpoint, practices won’t be very different for the Football programs.

From the standpoint of injury and concussions, I have seen little to no injuries in football practices from live tackling. Rather, I have seen many more injuries in regular football drills and typical non-tackling segments. Overall, I think that by eliminating tackling from practices might help minimize the small amount of injuries that occur in practices, but might increase the chances of injury in games due to lack of tackling practice and tackling experience.

Jeremiah Shaw, sophomore

The ban really isn’t going to impact us much. All it is saying is that we can’t have any live tackling periods during the season. My high school didn’t even have live tackling in season.

Sean Scullen, sophomore

 It doesn’t really make a difference for anything because it’s just banning live tackling during the season, and very few if any teams in the country go live tackling during the season. We will still be able to tackle during spring ball and the pre season.