They’re doing this because this isn’t the same football Butkus played. The quality of the athletes has changed. Players now are significantly heavier, and actually move faster than they did even 10 years ago, to say nothing of 30 years ago. Back in the 70s, the Steelers and Packers were formidable teams, but put that same team up against their 2010s counterpart, and they’d look puny. When you have a 300lb lineman who can do the 100 in under 12 seconds, he’s going to be packing a lot of kinetic energy when he hits the ball-carrier, and that raises the risk of concussion along with other injury.
This is the same kind of thing that has happened to boxing and car racing. With car racing, it was crash severity; as the cars got faster, they did things like mandate engine size and various safety devices to minimize the severity of the crashes and the resulting injuries. With boxing, the advent of the modern boxing glove greatly increased the risk of brain injury because now it doesn’t hurt so damn much to hit a guy in the head as it did with bare knuckles. Now football is getting it: the athletes are so well-suited to the game now that the safety equipment is no longer adequate to protect other players. It sucks, but it’s a foreseeable result of the drive to have better players.
Don’t worry. Give the liberal scum a few years and they will call for an outright ban on football. This is par for the course for these types - banning kickoffs and/or football is unAmerican, which is to be expected from liberal wimps.