These days, improvising on a football field gets you fired. But a shortened play clock would require it. Coaches would still control the basic strategy, but the players would control its application, communicating with one another more and engaging their otherwise static athletic minds, familiar mostly with obeying orders.

A shortened play clock might also make obese linemen lose weight, since there’d be less standing around and more hustling. And since all players would be more tired, they would have less strength when delivering hits. Blows would become less deadly.

The quickened pace would also make concussed players easier to spot, and less able to conceal their symptoms, which they now do at all costs. The rest of us might consider the concussion debate a step in the right direction, but the players see it differently. Their career window to play in the N.F.L. is small. You fall in line. You don’t bring attention to yourself. You follow instructions. Landing yourself in the concussion protocol, which can keep you off the field indefinitely, is a good way to lose your job, like it or not.

The N.F.L. train is dragged along by short bursts of manic energy: six seconds from the players and 40 for everyone else to pull up a seat and bang on the table. Every play is now viewed and reviewed and re-reviewed. Maniacal adherence to nearly indecipherable rules by aging men in heated booths causes mistakes to run in slow-motion loops. Outrage floods the wires. The game needs to speed up, for all of our sakes.

The threat that concussions pose to football is really a threat to its promoters. The game will live on despite them, and will morph to meet the sensibilities of an ever-changing national conscience. Forty seconds isn’t what it used to be. These days, it’s giving the delicate fingers too much time to dictate the action, too much time to steer players into oncoming traffic.

Football players are known to struggle with life after football. Some of this is because of injuries sustained while playing, but much of it is psychological. What do I do with myself in the real world? There’s no huddle for me out here. We are making a generation of tough boys; it is true. But what good is toughness without brains?