James Harrison, Josh Cribbs, Rick Reilly, and What's Probably NOT Gonna Happen

This just in from ESPN's Rick Reilly (formerly of Sports Illustrated):

a solution to all the hullaballoo surrounding James I-never-learned-tackling-technique-in-pee-wee-and-am-proud-to-let-everyone-know-about-it-Harrison and the NFL's recent show of concern for concussions (a form of brain damage about which the consensus of academic medicine has yet to understand completely, and which has lifelong effects): suspend the player for the rest of the game! Brilliant!

If we can have a rule that a player who suffers a concussion can't go in for the rest of the game, why can't we have the same rule for players who hand them out?

I don't usually like Reilly—too much of an activist (why is it that the ones who supposedly hold sacred the individual's choice of lifestyle make up the majority of activists?)—but I love his idea here.

It's a way of cutting down on concussions with a punishment that has more teeth than even a $75,000 fine (to a player who just made $20,000,000, of which 75,000 is 0.38%, in other words, like taking three dollars and four cents out of one of my paychecks. So a $75,000 fine to a James Harrison is a Starbucks cappuccino to a graduate student making a Teaching Fellow's stipend), more teeth than the fine, yet not as outrageous (to some) as a suspension, since missing the rest of the game does not entail the loss of a game check, which for Harrison would be 1/16 of his annual income (not counting bonus and endorsements) or, in my case, closer to a month's rent.

Reilly goes on to point out what we do know about these brain injuries:

We now know what these collisions can mean later in life. We know because the NFL is telling us. We know because we heard about what the battered brains of Hall of Famer Mike Webster and Terry Long looked like. Oh, yeah, they were Steelers, too, weren't they?

—but the full extent of the damage is only just being learned.

And let's not get started on Harrison himself, eh, Reilly?

Steelers coach Mike Tomlin defended Harrison, saying he's a "model" for young players to imitate. Oh, yeah, he's a peach. Fined $5,000 for slamming Vince Young into the ground. Fined $5,000 for unnecessary brutality against a Cincinnati Bengal. Had to go to anger management and undergo psychiatric counseling after being charged with assault on his girlfriend. Owned a pit bull that bit his son, the boy's mom and his masseuse. When's he running for Congress?

or how about this one, from ESPN's AFC North blogger James Walker:

"I thought Cribbs was asleep," Harrison said. "A hit like that geeks you up, especially when you find out the guy is not really hurt, he's just sleeping. He's knocked out but he's going to be OK."

—what?! Is this statement even intelligible? How, precisely, are we to understand the word "sleeping", here? Is he suggesting that Joshua Cribbs and Mohammed Massaquoi are narcoleptics?

Now Harrison wants to know if he can still play in this NFL that requires him to learn how to tackle instead of launching himself head first at people from the side.

What I want to know is, even if you are one sandwich short of a picnic basket, how to you do that to your former teammate (Harrison and Cribbs played at Kent State together), and then, when justice is served, call it a "travesty"?