Here's the part that raises the quickest chill: It is on them.

It is on the athletes, you see. They're on their own when it comes to protecting their health and, pathetically, occasionally their lives. They are the final wall of defense. Sometimes they are the only wall of defense.

They are 19 years old, or 21, or 17, or 23, and the essence of the universe to many of them is Saturday afternoon on the football field. They will do what they will do in order to ensure their place on that field. And, by and large, the rest of the sporting world will let them.

And it is on them, the price.

You can read the staggering lack of movement toward a safer college football practice atmosphere any way you wish. It can be forwarded as evidence of the absolute monster the high-stakes college game has become. It can be summoned as suggestive proof that no ship as large and ungainly as, say, Division I-A football could ever be expected to complete a turn in so short a time -- barely a year after three players died while preparing for their upcoming fall practices.

Lots of ways to go on that one, and many of them valid. But what is undeniable in any event is that the college game still expects its players to be at once their own strongest advocates and their own best consciences -- and no one, no one, will tell a kid that it's time to ratchet down.

Mississippi State strength coach, Mike Grant, offers one of the single most telling lines on the subjects of what big-time, big-money college programs expect of their players and of what they are willing to allow the players to expect of themselves. In explaining an off-season training regimen that looks like it would reduce mere mortals to tears, he says, "It's just like the Army -- they train for war during peace time."

It's a great line. Of course, this isn't war, is it? Not quite a year ago, America was reminded of that seemingly obvious fact in the darkest and most harrowing way. But the perspective on what is real and what is mere metaphor is skewed in sports, which for some people is the beauty of the thing. They can become lost in the athletic world, the same way other people go to the movies for relief. It's OK to call a long pass a "bomb" because football was partly conceived and propagated as a peacetime substitute for war, and who can really have a problem with that?

And so the war terminology continues -- harmlessly, we figure, because the fans certainly understand the difference between a few words sprinkled in a sporting conversation and the harsh reality of actual violence. But within the inner circle of those who coach and play the game at its higher levels, with scholarships and pro careers and sponsorships and ratings and million-dollar coaching salaries and athletic-department balance sheets and alumni endowments on the line. Within that circle, the difference is willfully permitted to blur.

And people sometimes die. And this is the point at which, for some of us at least, the whole war analogy begins to break down.

There are people in college football who are deeply committed to caring for their athletes, seeing to their nutritional needs, getting them up to speed on the risks associated with some of the routines and supplements the athletes will use. These people exist; it isn't some stock answer tossed out by a defensive athletic director. They exist. They just don't count.

No, what counts is that Saturday afternoon on the field -- and no longer even that, exactly. What counts now, with teams four and five players deep in substitutes and replacements and redshirts and people who want to take a player's job away, is making it to that Saturday with his name still in the lineup. If it takes a thousand hours of "voluntary" off-season training in order to increase the odds of that, then that is exactly what the football player will log. He will supplement. He will lift. He will eschew water on midsummer days in the midst of brutal workouts because, believe it or not, there still exist places on the football landscape in which taking water is a sign of weakness.

He will risk heat stroke and dehydration and whatever side effects are associated with the things he's putting in his body. He has felt sick so many times, in so many practices and workout settings, that feeling sick at some point simply becomes the norm, the occasional byproduct of getting oneself ready to compete. He will ignore sick until sick takes him down -- and the numbers say it won't. This is what he says to himself. He won't get taken down because, well, look at him.

And the thing is this: There is no one there to tell him to stop. That person does not exist. It is not the trainer. It is not the coach. It is not the nutritionist. It is not the teammate.

In the end, that is, the only one looking out for that player is himself. It may constitute the worst management ever of any industry's most significant investment, but it is what it is. It is on them, the athletes, because when it comes right down to it, there is no one else in this universe who could possibly care as much.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com