Ray Anderson played football at Stanford, took a law degree at Harvard, and became a player agent and a club executive before landing on Park Avenue as Roger Goodell's executive vice president for football operations.

At 54, he has seen just about everything that can be seen in football.

And Anderson is scared.

"Well it's scary isn't it?" he asked on the phone from New York this week. "The players are bigger, faster, more and more they're training year 'round, and as a result football is so much more violent. It really has changed the game. There's no way the game was ever as violent as it is now."

This was in a week when Anderson's office sucked $32,500 in discipline out of the Steelers locker room alone ($20,000 from James Harrison for criticizing the officials, $5,000 from Hines Ward for unnecessary roughness, and $7,500 from Ryan Clark for turning himself into a late-arriving missile that targeted Jacksonville's Matt Jones Monday night in Florida). This was the week after he had fined the Jets' Eric Smith $50,000 and suspended him for one game without pay for launching himself helmetfirst into the face of Arizona wideout Anquan Boldin, who eventually walked away with only a sinus fracture.

"When you're talking about helmet-to-helmet hits," Anderson said, "it's just that the results of a bad one can be so devastating."

He ought to know. As a friend of the late Darryl Stingley, a Patriots receiver whose quadriplegia came courtesy of a similarly vicious hit from Oakland's Jack Tatum in 1978, Anderson has had many earnest talks with Commissioner Goodell to assure that such a senseless tragedy not occur in this administration.

I wondered if he thought, as I long have, that helmet-to-helmet hits are not penalized by game officials at nearly the rate they could be and should. Fact is, you don't need a full-speed, helmet-to-helmet crash to spike the chances for paralysis. A helmetfirst tackle to any targeted area severely endangers not only the tacklee, but the tackler as well.

"When you're looking at the game at full speed from field level, it's very hard to be precise and to be able to catch everything," he said. "But when you bring it back here on Monday and we look at it, we'll issue fines even if there was no flag, and all the fines we assess aren't made public. But I would not dispute any assertion that not all helmet-to-helmet hits are called on the field."

That answers the common player complaint that goes, "How can I be fined if there was no flag?" But it doesn't answer the question of why the players seem to have cranked up the mayhem a notch rather than demonstrate any recognition of the urgent Goodell memo of Sept. 17.

"You should be clear on the following point," Goodell wrote in a rhetorical helmet-to-helmet hit of his own that he required the clubs to read and issue to every player, "Any conduct that unnecessarily risks the safety of other players has no role in the game of football and will be disciplined at increased levels, including on a first offense."

That was prior to games of Week 3, prior to the Smith-Boldin collision and many others like it. and prior to the night of Sept. 29, when the Ravens and Steelers worked overtime to decide what might have been the meanest, most violent 66 minutes of this sport that I've ever seen. Is it just me, or do you get the sense sometimes that people are trying to do more than win a game out there, that they're trying to hurt each other, and that it is satisfying to some when they do?

"To the extent that that is true," Anderson said, "a player will be held to a level of accountability that he's never seen before. Probably 99 percent of players are not trying to hurt other players, and we don't want to get into intent because it's essentially irrelevant. We can't get inside these guys' heads, but there are 1,600 players, and there are always going to be a few who just kind of have that about them."

More and more, players are pointing at other players as candidates for discipline. Fines, even like the $50,000 extracted from Smith, don't phase this particular demographic. When defenders launch themselves headfirst, especially at people in defenseless positions, they have to go away for a week. A month would be better. With no pay.

Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt said he wouldn't rule out Boldin for playing against Dallas this afternoon. Smith nearly ruled out Boldin for walking this week, or any week in the future.

It's all right that you have to be a little crazy to play the game at this level. You shouldn't have to be tragic, too.