Whether you’ve realized yet or not, professional football has entered a new era. Where there was once the dawn of the league, the AFL-NFL merger, the beginning of the modern age, there is now the concussion era.

It’s beginning – marked by the tumultuous first few weeks of the 2010-11 season when Pittsburgh’s James Harrison, Atlanta’s Dunta Robinson and New England’s Brandon Meriweather laid the wood on vulnerable players – aroused a crackdown on violent hits just as a brewing storm of research on brain injuries began to form.

And ever since, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s player safety initiative has continued. Harrison became the first player suspended for a helmet-to-helmet collision last season – sitting out one game – and kickoffs were bumped up five yards to the 35-yard line. But fines continued.

Proposals on how to make the game safer is becoming one of the more popular annual offseason topics. Recently, John Mara, owner of the New York Giants, told the team’s website the NFL Competition Committee, of which he is a member, is pinpointing player safety – and not much else, from the way it sounds.

“That’s the first, second and last thing that we’re concerned about,” Mara said of the committee, which recommends rules and policy changes and gave birth to kickoff alteration last season.

Mara has also recently voiced the idea of taking away kickoffs altogether, saying: “I could see the day in the future where that play could be taken out of the game.”

An interesting idea, no doubt. If there’s any expendable component to the game, it’s probably the kickoff or the point-after attempts, although nobody’s worried about the latter.

But getting rid of kickoffs will hardly do anything to help deflate the weighty issues the NFL has on its hands.

Of course, it’ll take some wicked technology to rid the NFL of concussions and other sorts of injuries that affect players for the rest of their lives. And however much the NFL wants to fine tune or eliminate kickoffs, injuries damning to the game like pulled hamstrings and torn ACLs will persist.

The only logical thing the NFL can do without a radical alteration in the game’s format is to learn from the game’s cousin – rugby.

Standard rugby rules define a legal tackle in a much different way than the NFL. Defenders are forbidden from hitting above the shoulder line (similar to the NFL’s helmet-to-helmet ban), but players are required to grab hold of ball-carriers as they try to bring them down.

So those hits that constantly make SportsCenter and various other NFL-glorifying video streams, in which defenders transform into projectiles by leaping from the ground and slamming a shoulder into the ball-carrier’s chest, shoulder or knee, would be illegal.

Basically, arm-tackles are in, everything else is out.

Requiring a defender to wrap up would work wonders in curtailing the sorts of hits that reduce players to pieces (what soccer players might call “reducers”).

With a wrap, players wouldn’t be able to tuck their arms and brace their shoulders for bell-ringing hits and thus wouldn’t be able to hammer into the body of another with as much force or reckless abandon.

Of course, the game would still remain dangerous. But it won’t be as easy to torpedo another player in the head or kneecaps.

And the gladiatorial appeal of the game wouldn’t be lost either. Wrapping up would force defenders into employing basic tackling techniques taught to players in high school, where a defender wraps around the thighs of the ball-carrier, lifts and slams into the ground.

Watch any rugby highlight reel and you’ll realize this kind of tackling is just as exciting to watch.

The most vicious helmet-to-helmet hits occur when one player aims to plant his shoulder on another’s chest, and this wouldn’t happen as often with a wrap-up requirement. Those defenders too often miss their target and helmets end up colliding.

A requirement to wrap up would encourage players to aim lower on the body. The first thing any football player learns in high school is not to attack the upper body and bundle up the thighs instead.

The only drawback from a rule change like this is it would make things awkward for blocking, where the use of the shoulder is important for linemen clearing a path for running backs. There’s no blocking allowed in rugby, so no use looking there. If defenders can’t use the shoulder to hit, then blockers – be it a guard or a wide receiver downfield – probably shouldn’t either. They’re equally capable of planting helmet-to-helmet strikes on another.

It’s tough to imagine run blocking with just the use of the hands, rather than bulldozing with the shoulder. Given how close offensive and defensive lines line up to each other, and the stances they launch themselves out of, it would be hard not to throw one’s shoulder into another.

But football is hardly going to get any safer unless players take a different approach to hitting one another. They can’t keep shooting themselves out of a catapult. As the storm of player safety continues to intimidate, that kind of play won’t fly.

Elliot is a senior majoring in journalism and philosophy. What do you think about an NFL full of arm tackles? Let him know at [email protected].