Today I wish to join my colleague Bob Smizik, who mentioned it in on his blog two weeks ago, in urging every football fan, every Steelers fan, and every fan of the NFL in general -- and I understand there are a few of them hereabouts -- to read Jeanne Marie Laskas' article entitled "Game Brain," which ran in the October 2009 edition of GQ magazine.

Google it, kids.

It essentially is the story of what happened to Mike Webster's brain, which is essentially the same thing that happened to Terry Long's brain, which is essentially the same thing that happened to Justin Strzelczyk's brain, and it reads like the climactic passages of a Ken Follett spy novel.

Too bad it's non-fiction.

Too sad that it's all too true.

With Laskas' story about those three former Steelers and protagonist Bennet Omalu, a groundbreaking Nigerian neurosurgeon then working for Dr. Cyril Wecht, and with a recent thorough treatment in Time Magazine regarding NFL's exploding concussions issue, there are very few plausible positions for reasonable people to take in denying what football, as we've come to know and love it, is doing to the brains of the people who play it.

Not to all of them, but way too many of them.

There's no need here to illuminate the entire breadth and depth of the bibliography, but before I get to the good news, it's also worth repeating that a 2005 University of North Carolina study concluded that the incidence of Alzheimer's is 37 percent higher in former NFL players than in the general population.

Fortunately, an opportunity exists for a dramatic if still partial solution on this matter, an opportunity I hadn't been aware of until I heard of it at the Super Bowl three weeks ago. Among the initiatives now in the discussion to reduce concussive helmet-to-helmet contact is an opportunity that should be seized immediately.

The elimination of the three-point stance.

"From a three point stance, you have a lower center of gravity, you have more spring, more power, and you can deliver a far more vigorous head butt," said Craig Wolfley, the former Steelers guard and now a sideline reporter on the club's radio network. "It's all the essence of what power offensive line play used to be. In a two-point stance, you're still gonna get contact, but you're not gonna be able to get off those cannonball shots at each other's gourds. I used to try to put my forehead right on the other guy's chin. We called that the sweet spot.

"From a two-point stance, it'd be more like dancing bears."

Much of the more recent, most sophisticated research indicates that, while helmet-to-helmet contact in the open field, where players sometimes launch themselves into opponents, sometimes with calamitous results, it is not as damaging in the long term as frequent head-to-head contact among players firing at each other from three-point stances. Fortunately, the game's evolving strategies have translated into fewer players in three-point stances (offensive tackles are often upright in obvious passing situations, and defensive lines sometimes have only one player with a hand on the ground), but for some offenses, especially in short-yardage situations, the majority of are still literally banging heads.

It's hard to estimate how many head-bangings take you to the point where tragedy can't be averted, but many players got there. In the years before he died at age 50, Webster was delusional, paranoid, homeless, amnesic. Long drank anti-freeze at age 45. Strzelczyk was killed in his car at 36 after a police chase that started with him telling a gas station attendant "the evil ones" were coming.

That's just the Steelers.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) was the name of the condition arrived at after an examination of all three brains by Omalu, which ultimately, if indirectly, led to the Sports Legacy Institute, which will continue the research with the brains of athletes who already have agreed to donate them.

In the meantime, while it is possible to coach, officiate, and legislate most helmet-to-helmet contact out of the game, it's going to take a seismic shift in the culture -- not only of football but the culture at large -- to admit that the game has to be changed dramatically.

"Eliminating the three-point stance, that just sounds crazy to me," said Tunch Ilkin, Wolfley's teammate with the Steelers and now his broadcast partner. "I couldn't have played in the NFL without being in a three-point stance. I don't know how you would coach offensive linemen. The game has become more of a passing game, and there are some zone-blocking schemes you can do from a two-point stance, based on reading the defense, but you can't be as aggressive.

"If offensive and defensive linemen can't be in a three-point stance, you may as well play electric football. I would never diminish what's happened to some players, never, but this is football, and you realize when you step on the field that something bad could happen, and then you ask the question, am I willing to take the risk? And thousands of people are."

The risk, all this says, has to be fully understood. When players are this big, this fast, this aggressive, banging their heads together for entertainment begins to seem almost psychotic (to say nothing of high school and youth football). In 500 years, a presumably advanced culture might look back on the early part of the 21st century and be fairly certain we were not well.

Buzz Bissinger, the author of "Friday Night Lights", in the conclusion to his sidebar for Time's presentation, does not like reform's chances.

"The game's violence will continue because that's exactly why we like it, our gladiatorial lust still intact 16 centuries after the Romans," he wrote. "The bigger the hit, the greater the roar."

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