After years of activists criticizing the National Football League for its safety violations, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is saying that football is now safer than ever.
Kraft and Hall of Fame running back Jerome Bettis are on a tour of Israel sponsored by a neurotechnology company that is working on ways to improve the study and diagnoses of concussions, NBC Sports reported.
Bettis thinks that the NFL is still working against the interest of player safety, but Kraft feels the NFL has vastly improved in the area.
“I really think that may be overdone a little bit. I mean, I don’t think the game has ever been safer than it is now,” Kraft said according to the Associated Press.
Kraft continued to praise the moves that the NFL has made to improve player safety.
“I mean we have independent doctors at the stadiums that can take a player out, and when I started in the league the head coach was really making certain decisions,” Kraft concluded. “So I think we have made great strides moving ahead in terms of the health of the game.”
Indeed, just last year the NFL launched a $100 million initiative to improve player safety.
Last September, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that the newest effort “builds on what we’ve done the last few years but it takes it to another level in a variety of areas.”
Players and their representatives, though, still insist that there is some distance to travel to improve player safety.
One new NFL safety rule made ostensibly for player safety was criticized as insufficient.
In May the league announced new rules to shorten overtime to ten minutes, purportedly to make the extra time less wearing on the players. But ESPN’s Kevin Seifert criticized the move as practically meaningless, at least as a measure to improve player safety.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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