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Malcolm Gladwell addresses the dangers of brain damage in football in the latest edition of The New Yorker. While the issue is completely legitimate, and one that the NFL and others have been researching extensively, Gladwell sensationalizes it by likening it to dogfighting. And while the comparison to dogfighting feels like an inaccurate and unnecessary distraction, that doesn’t mean his larger point on concussions isn’t valid. Because it is.

One of of the most interesting points in this article is that even by eliminating the uber-violent plays – illegal hits, helmet-to-helmet tackles, spearing, and the wedge play – the root of the problem is the everyday contact that players suffer in practice:

Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

No big deal, right? Just get better helmets. Apparently that doesn’t work either. Gladwell interviews an expert who doesn’t think there will ever truly be a helmet-based solution. Why not? Well, the better the helmets get, the harder the players hit. And there’s the rub. No matter what you do, so long as tackling and blocking are a part of the game, players are going to get hit. And the players who are best at hitting are going to be rewarded.

So what is there to do? According to Gladwell, nothing:

There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.

And he’s right. There’s nothing we can do to completely eliminate the problem. When you design a game that involves significant physical contact, people are going to get hurt. And frankly, it’s amazing people don’t get more hurt more often. How often do we watch the sport and see a collision that looks potentially lethal (Ray Lewis’ hit against Chad Ochocino this past Sunday comes to mind)? But using seat belts is a good idea, even though they don’t keep us completely safe in every car crash.

With no suggestions whatsoever to alleviate this challenge, Gladwell’s argument ends with a wimper. Given the reality that football is not a sport that is going away because a smart guy writes an article in The New Yorker, maybe he could have come up with some recommendations instead of comparing people to dogs. He adds little to a discussion that is not new. Smart people have been writing about this issue for some time now. It has even passed into the mainstream media.

So maybe a suggestion or two wouldn’t hurt. Any long-term solution will involve radical rule changes that will fundamentally alter the way the sport is played. In the meanwhile, there are a couple of short-term changes that are simple, feasible, and would limit the damage done to players’ brains.

The first way to do this would be to up the ante on penalties. Forget fining players for late hits and cheap shots. Borrow a page from the rules of football, er soccer, and suspend players more frequently. Players want to play. And in a league where players are highly disposable, if a player is suspended for a game or two, there’s a chance that not only does he lose those games, but that he loses his job to someone else. This would drastically reduce the number of severe hits. And while it would make all the tough ex-players and coaches on TV red with rage, that’s a small price to pay for increased player safety.

Secondly, limit the number of times a player gets hit. In football, the only way to do that is to limit the number of times he plays. So cut the pre-season by two games, and put a limit on the ridiculous number of full contact practices that take place, not only within the season, but with the training camps and “voluntary” minicamps before those.

There are also more radical steps to be taken – measures that would be considered drastic within the sport – to cut down on brain damage. I’m going to name three here, but there are others. The first one, which is even mentioned in Gladwell’s article, is to remove kickoffs from the sport. One of the researchers Gladwell interviews states that: “a disproportionate number of serious head impacts happen on kickoffs.” Removing kickoffs, where men line up and run at full speed at each other like the warriors in Braveheart, would limit many of the most extreme hits in a game. An alternate rule would be to do kickoffs from a punt formation. Or even to give each team the ball at the 20. Would this change the game? Yes. Would fans really be turned away from the sport? I doubt it. How many football fans watch for the kickoffs?

Secondly, linemen seem to suffer from these types of injuries more than any other position. This is because they ram their brain against their skull time after time after time. These are not the highlight hits on Sportscenter. But according to Gladwell, they’re probably more damaging in the long run. So why not look into limiting the number of players on each line? This would turn line play into more of a speed game than one of brute strength. If there were only two or three players maximum allowed on the line, it would completely change the game. But it would still be football. And it would still be fun to watch.

A third “drastic” recommendation would be to limit the number of consecutive plays for any player, but especially linemen. This would be the football equivalent of pitch counts, but as a rule. In Gladwell’s piece, ex-Ram lineman Kyle Turley recounts the feeling after going the length of the field on an offensive drive: “Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out.” This is a change that would likely be accompanied by increased roster sizes, but it is very feasible. Coaches could rotate players in and out every five plays, or whatever interval can be agreed upon. There are already numerous substitutions within a drive, but it is usually at the skill positions. Why not mandate that linemen have to come out every few plays as well?

I’m not arguing that any of these changes would cure football of this problem. But some, or all, of them could limit the it. And while I applaud Gladwell for using his pulpit to plead for the preservation of the brains of football players, I’d be more interested if he used that big brain of his to identify some potential solutions.