Two generations ago, the Rooney men were boxers. They are now lawyers and diplomats, the civic paragons of Pittsburgh, and also of the N.F.L. They epitomize what family-run businesses can mean to a place, because of the implied trust and moral responsibility involved. The so-called Rooney rule, under which N.F.L. teams are required to interview at least one minority candidate for all head coaching and G.M. jobs, is named after Art’s father, Dan, the team’s chairman emeritus and also our Ambassador to Ireland. (His public endorsement of Barack Obama, during the most recent Presidential campaign, was a major event in coal country.) Here was a man who is revered by progressive, charitably minded people, not your typical asbestos-plant manager. The Steelers had been the first team to keep a neurosurgeon with them on the sidelines, and the first to introduce any kind of objective measurement of cognitive function. It wasn’t enough, and the norms of polite society were shifting underneath Rooney.

In the month following Black and Blue Sunday, the Steelers found it more useful to view themselves as victims of a different kind of culture war, between the suits on Park Avenue and the grunts in Pittsburgh. Their coach, Mike Tomlin, had objected to efforts by the league to demonstrate that Harrison was changing his behavior to comply with the new mandate. The previous week, against New England, the Steelers’ captain, Hines Ward, had left the game with what the team at first described as a neck injury, which would allow reëntry at the player’s discretion, instead of a concussion, which, as of last year, forbids it. But a concussion it was. “It’s my body,” Ward complained afterward. “I feel like if I want to go back out there I should have the right.”

“Hines would go back in the game with a broken leg, so that’s just the kind of player he is,” Rooney said. “I do think that there’s been a connection between our team and our region, let’s say, that is based on a blue-collar-work-ethic-type approach to life, and certainly people that grew up working in the mill were tough people that had to work hard and had to work tough jobs. And so I think the reason football became so popular here in western Pennsylvania was because of that—because the area was populated by people who were accustomed to and appreciated hard work and tough work, and wanted their football team to reflect that.” He mentioned that Harrison, a man who earns several million dollars a year for his toughness, had been receiving unsolicited donations from Steelers fans to help pay his fines. “So I think our fans want to see our players continue to play football the way they understand football should be played,” he said.

The robust debate over how football should be played is further complicated by a contentious labor situation that threatens to result in the cancellation of the 2011 season. The league and the owners would prefer an eighteen-game schedule. The players, naturally, have tried to characterize this as hypocrisy: if the game has become disturbingly dangerous, why play more? They doubt that anyone has ever really had their long-term interests in mind, and maintain a deeply felt sense that fans and owners can’t begin to appreciate how hard football is, and how tenuous the line is between fearlessness and vulnerability.

“I don’t think there’s enough of them up there that have actually played the game,” James Harrison said, of the league executives in Manhattan, when I visited the Pittsburgh locker room after a big win against the Oakland Raiders, late in the season. “You got Merton Hanks that, you know, played the game so many years ago. I mean no disrespect, but the game’s a lot faster than it was when he played. When we’re right there, and it’s bang-bang, you don’t have time to adjust.” Hanks, who is the N.F.L.’s director of game operations, was an All-Pro safety for the San Francisco 49ers. He retired in 1999, which hardly seems like that many years ago, but twelve years is four times the average length of a professional football career.

Up in the press box, I’d noticed a casual disdain for the initial efforts to sanitize the game as the referees tossed yellow flag after yellow flag. “Apparently, you can’t tackle the quarterback now,” one writer mused, after one of Harrison’s fellow-linebackers was called for roughing the passer. “Unbelievable!” another said, after a personal foul on Harrison—who had landed with the full force of his body weight on the QB—negated a Steelers interception. The Steelers had wound up with more penalty yards in this game than in any previous game, and the writers saw this as an opportunity to highlight the differences between the league and the team.

When I brought up the call for change with the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu, an All-Pro safety who plays with brilliant abandon, and mentioned that the sport’s popularity seemed to be unflagging, he cut me off. “Is that your opinion? That it doesn’t need to be changed?” He later added, “This game’s on the verge of getting out of hand,” and defended the refs, who, he said, were “just trying to protect it.” This from a guy who, a few weeks earlier, had complained that there was “a paranoia that is unneeded,” and that if people wanted to watch soccer they could and would.

“In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players,” Polamalu said. “I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone coverages. You know, there’s more space between these big hits, so there’s more opportunity for these big hits.” The Times, in 1906, celebrated the dawn of the forward-passing era as an opportunity to “open up the game,” and to showcase speed and skill instead of mere brute strength. Bill Walsh, the late 49ers coach, and the man most often credited with popularizing the passing-dominated approach to offense that Polamalu was describing, was committed to changing the sport’s militaristic culture. “Too many high-school coaches, in his opinion, were veterans who viewed football like preparing for combat,” Paul Tagliabue recalled.

Troy Polamalu is about as dynamic an athlete as I have ever seen, and as soft-spoken in person as anyone I have ever met. He is football’s Dalai Lama. He has had at least seven concussions. “Honestly, it hurts both players, you know, and, whenever you see those big hits, it’s not just offensive guys lying on the ground,” he said. The statistics bear this out: defensive backs were the most extensively concussed group of players on the field this N.F.L. season, followed by wide receivers. Contact ballet can kill.

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The fastest running on a football field often occurs during kickoffs and punts, when some members of the defending team are able to build up forty or more yards of head-on steam before a possible point of impact. (The forty-yard dash, the standard measurement for judging the speed of potential draft picks, is so named because it was thought to be the distance a player would have to sprint to catch up with a punt.) One proposed reform that I’ve heard about would involve removing this element from the game, through automatic fair catches, or at least neutering it, by shortening the distance travelled by the kicking team. The most frequent head-butting on a football field, meanwhile, occurs at the line of scrimmage, where linemen often begin in what’s known as a three-point stance: crouching and leaning forward on one hand, and then exploding upward in a meeting of crowns. Another suggestion: banning the stance and requiring linemen to squat, sumo style. And then, more important, there’s simply teaching proper tackling technique. As one recently retired player put it to me, “Instead of telling a kid to knock the snot out, you say, ‘Knock the wind out of him.’ ”

“The reality is you’re going to need about twenty fixes that reduce risk by a couple of percentage points each,” Chris Nowinski said. “There’s still going to be four downs. Still going to be a football. Still going to be eleven guys on the field—and touchdowns. Other than that, everything’s in play.”

Technology, naturally, is another big component of the discussion. The agenda for the Head, Neck, and Spine meeting was dauntingly ambitious and impressive, with presentations on subjects like “Finite element modelling in determining concussion thresholds” and “On-field testing of impact biomechanics.” Telemetric feedback from accelerometers may soon give trainers on the sidelines a more objective, real-time perspective on the abuse that each player is suffering, which could prove valuable in quickly diagnosing concussions. Yet, in the absence of a concussion-proof helmet, which is not looming, and will likely never arrive, there is perhaps as much to be gained from using technology to help address the necessary abstraction that allows fans to view their football heroes as characters rather than as people with families. (Ironhead Heyward led a troubled life off the field, with alcohol-abuse issues and sporadic run-ins with the police; the news accounts somehow only made me more fascinated.) Markus Koch, a defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins in the nineteen-eighties, asked me whether it might not be more valuable to communicate real-time information about the physicality of the game to the people at home on their sofas, happily consuming Budweiser and buffalo wings. “So maybe you’d have a mouth guard that registers the impact they’re getting on the field, and at certain g-forces the helmet shell would crack and explode and leak gray matter and blood,” Koch said, only half kidding. “Or what about a whole pneumatic suit that a fan could step into, and that would be telemetrically linked to a player on the field, at seventy per cent or fifty per cent—you could adjust the dial to your liking—and actually have the fan experience what the player is going through?” Koch broke his lumbar vertebrae in his third season, and, because he was otherwise in such good shape, continued to play for three more years. He now suffers from depression, and is sometimes unable to get out of bed for extended periods. His legs go numb if he stands for too long.

Two weeks after Black and Blue Sunday, on October 28th, an honor student in Spring Hill, Kansas, returned to the sidelines after making an interception at his high school’s homecoming game and told his coach that his head was hurting. Soon afterward, he fell to the ground, suffered a subdural hematoma, and died. The next week, Jim McMahon, the ex-quarterback, confessed at a twenty-fifth reunion of the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears that his memory is “pretty much gone,” and that he often walks into a room without knowing why. “It’s unfortunate what the game does to you,” he said. I was reading about McMahon during a commercial break in the “Monday Night Football” game between the Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals—a commercial break that included a surprising Toyota promotion involving football. It began with a woman discussing her worries, as a mother, about her son playing the sport: “Which is why I’m really excited, because Toyota developed this software that can simulate head injuries in an accident. . . . So, you know, I can feel a bit better about my son playing football.”

A few days later, a Cleveland Browns linebacker collapsed at his locker-room stall, after practice, in the presence of reporters, and was taken to the hospital. Shortly after that, two high-school players died on the same day—one on the field, in Massachusetts, of a heart stoppage, and the other, in North Carolina, by suicide, five weeks after suffering a season-ending concussion. The same week, two Division I college players announced their retirement, out of concerns relating to concussions, and team doctors at the University of Utah “medically disqualified” a sophomore from continuing his career.

This kind of anecdotal momentum is inherently distorting, of course. Jim McMahon added that he has no regrets, and that football “beats the hell out of a regular job.” (The fallen Brown later attributed his condition to anxiety over the impending birth of his son.) But I didn’t exactly have to go digging for it. “Now, with the Internet, we’re all talking to each other, and this is the league’s worst nightmare,” Dave Pear, the ex-Buccaneer, told me. Pear publishes a blog for “independent football veterans,” where, in addition to railing against the N.F.L.’s treatment of retired players, he tracks the sport’s latest gloomy news. I’ve also begun reading the Concussion Blog, which is written by a high-school athletic trainer in Illinois named Dustin Fink, who was moved to devote his life to the cause of player safety and awareness after suffering depression that he attributes to “many” concussions. From Fink’s research, for instance, I know that the rate of reported concussions in the N.F.L. did not decline after the stern warnings in October; it increased. Some of this may be attributable to greater conscientiousness on the part of players and medical staffs, which is a good thing, but the “disturbing” hits, as the league’s Ray Anderson called them, were just as prevalent, if not more so, as the season wore on. When I called Fink, he told me about a friend of his who plays in the N.F.L., a longtime taxi-squad member who had finally caught on as a starter. Earlier this season, the friend showed up in the concussion database that Fink compiles from news reports and other sources. “I texted him and asked how it happened,” he said. “He texted back, ‘I’m always concussed, they just caught me this week.’ ”

Fink was an offensive lineman in high school, but his own injury history clouds the picture somewhat. “I trace my first one back to fourth grade, in 1986,” he said. “I hit my head on one of the basketball uprights while playing touch football in the recess yard.” He got another one in a fight with a classmate, in eighth grade, and still another as a high-school sophomore, when he was struck by a batted baseball while standing on the pitcher’s mound. “My most recent one was in 2006,” he said. “While I was helping out at basketball practice, I fell back and hit my head pretty hard.” His depression set in late in 2008. Only one of his concussions, as far as he knows, came from playing tackle football. So what do we blame, other than bad luck and a larger society that was slow to recognize the fragility of the human head?

In fact, reading the Concussion Blog exposes you to a steady drip of news that is not so good for your anterior insula, the part of the brain associated with worry. Rugby, lacrosse, baseball: concussions are seemingly epidemic everywhere. The problem with having access to better information about the risks we all take is that most leisure pursuits start to seem inherently irresponsible. What are we to do about skiing, bicycling, sledding?

“Hockey, by the way, has a higher incidence of concussions than football,” Dr. Maroon told me. This is true of women’s college hockey, at least, which doesn’t even allow body-checking. (Women, in general, seem substantially more prone to concussions, and explanations vary, from weaker necks to a greater honesty in self-diagnosis.) And in December, 2009, Reggie Fleming, a New York Rangers defenseman in the nineteen-sixties who was known more for his fighting than for his scoring, became the first pro hockey player to be given a diagnosis of C.T.E. Hockey may now have a concussion crisis on its hands, with the N.H.L.’s best and most marketable player, Sidney Crosby, having been blindsided during the sport’s annual Winter Classic; attempting to play again, four days later, he was drilled into the boards, and he hasn’t played since. I play hockey twice a week myself, and was once concussed, or so I now believe, while skating outside, on a frozen pond, without a helmet.