Football games, particularly the pro versions, are getting longer and longer. When CBS’s “60 Minutes” runs almost an hour late on Sunday, you tend to get fed up with the gridion grenadiers in a hurry, even if it’s a nail-biting San Diego-Denver shootout.

I have no statistics, but you wanna know why I think so many games are running so much longer? How many five- and 10-minute delays are there where somebody is laid out on the field while being fervently attended to. First off, they’re hoping the guy can communicate. That established, they begin wondering if he has any feeling in lower extremities and is still blessed with the use of hands and fingers.

Then increasingly there is the stretcher and the cart to ferry the victims to a dressing room or, worse, an ambulance. You don’t know how long they’ll be laid up; if they’re going to be crippled; if they’ll be addled in any way. Might they die?

It’s downright inhumane how serious injuries are proliferating in football, college included. There are countless reasons things have deteriorated to their present state. But what in the world lies ahead? How many NFL guys will give new meaning to the logo NLF: No Longer Functioning?

Guys have grown bigger, stronger, faster and more intent on mayhem; more often than not there is a kill-or-be-killed philosophy. Giants of 350 or more pounds are rested, have specialized varieties of masochism in their arsenals. What chance does a 175- or 180-pounder have when a humongous defender grabs a group of people, peels them off like a banana skin, then crumples the ball-carrier?

Two of the most famous football photos of all time show: Bare-headed New York Giant quarterback Y.A. Tittle, his bald noggin gushing blood, and kneeling in despair after a pounding from the Chicago Bears; Philadelphia’s Chuck Bednarik exhorting after dispatching New York back Frank Gifford into la-la land.

But for all the violence and pain of those olden days, such scenes were more the exception than the rule. Time was when the game had some beauty and flow and lilt. Now when you have Buccaneer Warren Sapp cheap-shotting (though legally) an unsuspecting Packer far out of an interception play, it’s run-of-the-mill, the kind of thing Bear Bryant wanted his Texas A&M Junction Boys to revert to back in 1954.

OK, call me a sissy, un-macho, a pantywaist and an old maid. Might be all of that. But I sure wish football games could run their usual course without so many players being carted off to the hospital and in some cases wrecked for life.

I have no answer. If I could press a button, I’d do away with special teams, platoon football and all the fandangles of the modern era, cut the rosters and make each person play offense, defense, kickoffs, punts :quot; you know, perform as real athletes and genuine football players instead of as hit men worthy of paychecks from The Sopranos or the Corleones.

If guys were playing 45 minutes or so, they’d be more tired and less inclined to display their latest bench-press clout or injection of an “enhancing” elixir.

I’d also help colleges balance their budgets and make a lot more good players available to other schools. I’d re-institute one-platoon football and cut the scholarship total from 85 to 50. That’d make the Title IX incursion less painful and create a lot more guys, like Ray Evans, Otto Schnellbacher, Gil Reich and such to learn about and get excited over. By the way, Gale Sayers, Curtis McClinton and Doyle Schick were fine defenders as well as offensive entities.

All this’ll never happen in my lifetime, but I hope something occurs to let those battered creatures in today’s game live in reasonable comfort until they’re at least 77 as I am.

• Still with mayhem, some of you who like blood and guts may eat up the upcoming “Junction Boys” television fare. It relates, not in pretty fashion, how the legendary Bear Bryant took 111 Texas Aggies to Junction, Tex., in the summer of 1954 (probably illegal even then), battered them to a pulp and brought back only 35. Before departing, he told his assistants: “Hug your kids goodbye, boys. We’re torchin’ the barn and killin’ the rats.” One player almost died.

Miraculous turnaround? A&M went 1-9 that fall, after which Bryant came to Lawrence to be the speaker at a Kansas football banquet for a team that had gone 0-10. He was colorful, dynamic and invigorating, but you wondered how sincere he was when he referred to the KU coach as “my good friend Charlie MAYther.” It was Chuck, as in matter. But at least that 1-9 A&M record in ’54 proved the Junction travesty didn’t work.

You want to guess how far a Bryant would get with such a death camp approach today? His brutal, bloody, no-water sessions in insufferable heat must have been like the ones Frank Kush conducted so mercilessly at Arizona State. Granted, in 1956 before going home to Alabama, the Bear had a 9-0-1 Aggie team that won a title.

Clearly Bryant, so deeply revered by ‘Bamans, had second thoughts later, even though he often walked across a lake to his office in Tuscaloosa and reportedly rented a tomb for only three days.

At the 25th reunion of the Junction Boys, he muttered in that gravelly voice: “I came here today to apologize to you all. If somebody had done that to me, I think I would have quit.”

I’m guessing that a vast majority of the 76 guys who bailed out of that camp were glad they did. Heck, Private Ryan and Audie Murphy never had it that tough!