Oliver Luck made his NFL reputation in the 1980s as a heady quarterback for the Houston Oilers. He was calm and reasoned when he got on the field.
Luck, now the athletic director at the University of West Virginia, brings that same demeanor to the business world -- and to his dealings with football as he participates in the NFL Foundation-USA Football Youth Summit this week in Canton, Ohio.
His son, Andrew, is the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, so if any father has concerns about the game being safe, it would be Luck.
"The game is safe. Listen, every contact sport, be it lacrosse or hockey or even soccer with the ball coming at 30 miles, 40 miles an hour and doing a header, every sport has the risk of injury. Football is no different," said Luck, who is the Heads Up Football Player Ambassador for the state of West Virginia. "But I can tell you that the NFL and USA Football are working very closely, investing tens of millions of dollars to make the game safer and I would certainly allow, and I have allowed, my son to play football. My younger son played football as well at a Pop Warner program.
"So I think it's a very safe game because there's always going to be some risk of injury no matter what sport a young man is doing. In fact, more kids end up getting concussions from falling off a bike than they do from playing football, so I think to a certain degree it's a little bit of a red herring."
Luck's work as a USA Football Ambassador has involved spreading the word that the Heads Up Football program is trying to make the game safer.
"It's a tremendous program which is designed to make the game at the youth level much more fun and much safer," he said Wednesday while talking to NFL Network. "With all the discussion about concussions and potential injuries to young players, I think it's very important that USA Football put this program together.
"They've got a couple hundred youth football commissioners, various ambassadors like me for their respective states, who will be spreading the message about USA Football. But they're doing some tremendous work, making the game safer, making the game enjoyable."
Luck said it's important to him to see the game grow and stay alive, personally and professionally.
"It's a marvelous game, certainly at the professional level," he said. "I'm involved as an athletic director, of course, at the college level. And when you get into the high school and the youth level, there's being some very good attention paid to how we can improve the game and make it safer.
"(There is) lots of good information about concussion management programs, about proper hydration for kids, particularly as the summer heats up and summer practice begins, so I tip my hat to both the NFL, the NFL Foundation as well as USA Football for putting this program together. Very impressive work, and ultimately we'd like to have all youth football coaches be involved in this because there's so many good things for them to learn."
