If the dominant motivation wasn't to make the big games more interesting, I don't know what it would be! Although "evil laundering" is definitely something that we have to watch out for, it isn't always practical to hold people responsible for their entire supply chains when we could otherwise go straight to the actual problem-causers.
As you said, more hits and blows draw more viewers. Ad sales increase. Until violence becomes less popular, I'm not convinced that companies will start pulling their ads.
Ultimately, the audience is responsible. The NFL is merely delivering what people want to see. And the audience are the people who are paying for this, either directly by buying tickets or broadcasts or indirectly by buying products that are advertised. Everyone else is just following the money, and they have no incentive to stop.
>And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.
It's a shared responsibility. The NFL has devoted a lot of effort to hiding the reality of what the audience is watching. Now that we know fully how dangerous it is, it's our responsibility to stop watching it.
Also a high rate of insulin resistance. You can't stay on an NFL diet after you retire. The NFL should get retirees a free pre-made meal plan and gym membership.
Especially when many professional players have long-term health consequences that make physical activity harder.
Diet control can also cause long-term metabolic changes. Keeping body fat low and fluctuating weight, as often happens with seasonal sports, are both associated with long-term obesity and health problems.
Seems like some of them are doing that, but not universally. "Waffles", "pasta and chicken for lunch, double-portion on the pasta" "lasagna with some more chicken for dinner. In between, he’ll put away a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or two" certainly doesn't sound like a diet low in simple carbs.
You can maintain that size and eat cleanly. Their requirements wouldn't be too much different than a professional body builder or strong man from a nutritional perspective.
Linemen obviously will want to cut after they stop, but many athletes could maintain their diet as long as they stayed very active.
An Army professor and former college football athlete described combat to our class once as “Football with guns”. It’s a gross reduction I’m sure but probably some truth to it.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
n football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
I often hear people say you have to 'coach how to hit properly' as if hitting with your head is just a bad habit, but when you watch the top pros they spear people with their heads, even high speed hits. This is built into the game, and the equipment enables it.
I have not seen any meaningful change from the NFL (or CFL, haha) to specifically combat this risk. I think they know the game is exciting because of these brutal impacts, and they're afraid to water it down and risk profits just to protect the (expendible) players.
So every running back and lineman that lead with their head every play all get ejected for targeting on the first play of the game? Or do you recognize that targeting is applied very subjectively and usually involves someone defenseless on the receiving end.
Yes, it involves a defenseless player. Why don't you elaborate on the rule rather than being smug? Perhaps a dissertation for everyone, since I obviously didn't explain it fully and thoroughly enough to your satisfaction.
I don't think it takes a medical diagnosis to use common sense and think if I hit my brain a bunch there will be lasting impressions. (Boxing, soccer, football to name a few.)
Boxing head injuries have been well documented as have head injuries from brain trauma in soccer players. Its not a far stretch to extrapolate that and wonder if football might have similar problems with my head.
Well, since you knew something no one else did until recently, you probably should have said something. Think of all the people you could have saved. :)
The snark is a bit unwarranted in my opinion because it isn't entirely that cut and dry. The pads provide the illusion of safety - the hits honestly don't feel, or look, as bad. Well now we're starting to find out that the pads don't protect against this sort of long term damage, they only protect against visceral short term damage. It wasn't unreasonable to think that a contact sport like football could be played safely with pads because that's what appeared to be the case - on the outside.
The health aspects of this are the most urgent, but I'd argue that as coaches and analysts have developed algorithms to optimize very particular strategies, they've also squeezed much of the fun out of the game. I wrote about this elsewhere:
----------------------
Watching professional sports has become less fun over the last 50 years, due to athletes improving while the rules of most games have gone largely unchanged. Basketball players are taller, on average, than 60 years ago, yet the height of the basket has not been raised. Tennis players have learned to optimize techniques for smashing serves, which often leads to boring games where everything is decided by the strength of a player's serve -- obviously tennis is more fun to watch when there is a long and dramatic volley. American football has seen a relative improvement in defense, such that some games are just 3 attempts at 10 yards, then punt, followed by 3 attempts at 10 yards, then punt, followed 3 attempts at 10 yards, then punt. I'm not exaggerating, I actually saw a game in December where there was something like 5 punts in 5 minutes of play action. Who wants to watch that? In the specific case of American football, an obvious change that could be made is to allow 5 or 6 attempts to get 10 yards, instead of 4. That would be fun, I love watching the pass or run plays, much more than the punts. I learned to love football when I was a little kid, because my older brother loved football and I liked to watch the games with him. Back then I remember many long, dramatic passes, of a type that have become rare as defense has gotten relatively better at stopping exactly that strategy. But whenever I explain to people that the rules of sports need to be often updated to keep up with changes in equipment and training regimes, I'm told that any change would render historical comparisons invalid. Obviously that is true, but what is more important, that we are able to compare today's game to a game in 1956, or that the game is fun?
I know this is a snarky comment at football players for not seeing the obvious, and it really isn't worth a reply, BUT let's walk through this.
I played football all through middle school and high school, and was fairly good. When you are playing as a kid, unless you are extremely elite, you aren't thinking about the NFL and potentially hitting your head hundreds of times into NFL sized players. You are just having fun and playing a sport. Then maybe you start getting good and someone tells you if you get a bit bigger and faster you might be able to go to college for FREE! You think, "no one in my family has ever been able to go to college!" Suddenly that sport-for-fun becomes just a means to an end that you never thought was possible.
So you work your ass off, get really good and college recruiters start showing up to games. You know they are there and this is your chance to shine. So you run extra fast, hit extra hard, you aren't showing any mercy to your opponents and you certainly aren't thinking about your brain at age 40. Maybe you get hit a bit hard and feel like you need to throw up. Your coach knows about the recruiters also, so he helps you hide the fact that you threw up. He stands in front of you pretending to talk to you while you bend slightly and puke in a water cup. You aren't thinking about brain injury, you are thinking about not showing weakness in front of these people.
Now MAYBE you are the ~1% that gets a full ride scholarship. You are playing college ball on a scholarship and you know the only reason you can stay in school and finish a degree is if you stay on the starting squad. You aren't staying on that squad as a linebacker unless you are ignoring your own personal safety.
MAYBE you are again the ~1% that make it the four years and are maybe good enough for the NFL. You can either say "nah, I'm good with my accounting degree" or you can see the potential to make more money on one signing day than your entire family has made in all of their lives combined!
I can keep going, but I hope people get the point. When millions of kids start playing football in 6th grade (12 years old), them and their parents weren't thinking about the potential they'd ever be "mashing your head into the helmet of a 300lb person" in the future.
As a parent now, me and my friends are thinking about that now. For some players (like the one in the article) it is 30 years too late.
Well in Texas, the evidence of people in other states/countries is not good enough for them, so they have to do their own study with people in state before they will take action to change how high school athletes play football.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/munro-cullum-concussio...
> the evidence of people in other states/countries is not good enough for them, so they have to [...]
Did you make that reasoning up? Guess we should only have one study for anything, because any successive studiers means the first one wasn't good enough for them.
The only reason to keep asking for more studies is to stall so they can make money off of high school athletes, high school football in Texas in a racket as documented in the book Friday Night Lights (not the movie or TV show). Also, if you don't believe that book, James Michener wrote a book 20 years earlier called Sports in America that documents the same phenomena across America in all amateur athletics.
Also I grew up in Texas and no matter how podunk the town was, they spent bank on high school football stadiums then and tens of millions now. You wouldn't understand this if you dont know this.
I am also Texan and I agree with everything you wrote in this comment. It's that you made a guess that the reason the study was commissioned was because the other ones weren't good enough for them. Which I have not seen anywhere. This new study "won't be good enough them" either. We can demonize the state handling of the issue while also praising any commissioning of studies in the area.
I'm surprised that American football doesn't come with a prop-65 like warning in CA. Seems like it should now that the link with CTE is confirmed. Maybe if it was labeled as what it is (slow suicide for the sake of random people watching), it would start to finally lose popularity
Honest question - football helmets have not changed that much in what, 25 years? Are there any efforts underway to use technology to improve the protection provided by helmets? What about a softer layer outside the hard plastic. What about crumple zones for lack of a better term - that means helmets are designed to absorb one large hit, then be replaced. I am sure there are studies underway, but seems like an area ripe for "disruption"...
The NFL is testing a few different helmet types and devices designed to reduce head injuries this year. Some of the quarterbacks have different looking helmets, and a few players have a neck brace like thing too.
The problem is, CTE is not caused by "one large hit"; it is caused by repeated, sub-concussive blows. If you had something collapse on the blows that cause it, you'd be changing helmets after just about every tackle.
There are newer helmet technologies that are supposed to absorb more of the impact, and in particular allow some slippage of the shell to reduce rotation, which can be one of the most harmful types of movement:
This is the most recent one I’ve seen: https://vicis.com/. Has some big name players on board, Russell Wilson I believe. I’m surprised the NFL isn’t highlighting this effort more. I imagine it has something to do with existing equipment agreements.
My understanding is the brain slams against the inside of the skull due to stopping fast. Wouldn't a crumple zone (again for lack of better term) allow for a slower transition and thus less rattling around in the skull?
>the brain slams against the inside of the skull due to stopping fast
Yes, that's the inertia change I referenced.
A crumple zone is unlikely to mitigate the problem in any meaningful way. The problem is that in a hard collision, the head still stops in an instant, but the brain continues to travel at the same rate of speed until it slams into the skull. Effectively slowing the distance over which the head comes to a stop by a few millimeters or so won't meaningfully offset that impact. The brain is still traveling too fast.
The kind of design you're referencing works in vehicles because its purpose is to dissipate the energy of the collision around the zones instead of through the vehicle. But, the goal here is to avoid damaging the vehicle so extensively that the damage intrudes upon the cabin (and its occupant).
However, the vehicle's deceleration itself is not altered in any meaningful way by crumple zones. So, this system really only works if the driver is restrained (e.g. by a seat-belt). Otherwise, the driver would still bear the force of the sudden deceleration when she collided with whatever was on the other side of the empty space in front of her.
Similarly, if the brain could be restrained in its skull, then helmets might have at least some value in protecting it.
I think this may be the most obvious solution path, but probably not the right one to be thinking about.
I think it may be better to actually provide less protection and/or reduce designs that mitigate or otherwise disguise the immediate physical consequences of doing things like spearing another player head first.
There are a lot of efforts underway [1], but the problem is really one of physics. To make a substantially better helmet, the duration of the impact must be increased. The helmet cannot just become softer internally, but it must become larger, perhaps unfeasibly larger. Becoming softer alone means that the padding would crumple until the outer (impact-spreading) shell hits the player's skull.
It is my impression that helmets have been heavily engineered over the past decades; it is just the outer appearance that remains constant.
Regarding "crumple zones" (a very appropriate suggestion): football linemen take a great many hits in every game-- replacement probably isn't feasible.
Helmets have changed. They have better exterior material, the inside is inflatable to customize to individuals, the shell has flex like car panels, etc.
But CTE is about repeated impact, so most CTE cases now are from previous poor helmet designs, not from modern helmets.
Also because of the repeated nature, single impact helmets aren't the important ones. Linemen have the biggest problems and they aren't the ones getting laid out from thunderous impacts like a receiver.
To protect against those, modern helmets have stronger face masks and wider field of vision so a ball carrier can see it coming better. It is those blind hits that hurt.
I hope to see modern CTE rates come down from improved helmets but it will take a decade plus to see the results in the pros.
I'm skeptical. Many harmful impacts on the line happen with the facemask, and I see no changes there to reduce impacts.
The NFL has a long history of pointing to new technology that promises to make the game safer, but I have yet to see that manifest in reduced concussions. I'm also skeptical that increased cushioning wouldn't just let players hit each other at higher speeds.
>Honest question - football helmets have not changed that much in what, 25 years? Are there any efforts underway to use technology to improve the protection provided by helmets? What about a softer layer outside the hard plastic. What about crumple zones for lack of a better term - that means helmets are designed to absorb one large hit, then be replaced. I am sure there are studies underway, but seems like an area ripe for "disruption"...
The very existence of hard plastic helmets is what has caused the issue in the first place. It creates enough protection that people are able to hit much, much harder than normal, which causes concussion/CTE. You can fix the game by getting rid of the pads.
Prior to pads players were dying. The problem is not the pads that make trauma survivable: the problem is that the sport is designed to inflict trauma when played as designed.
The problem is the human neck. Any amount of force and deceleration is still being born by the head, and the only way it can dissipate force is the relatively-fragile human neck.
This is probably the origins of the grand bascinet, where a knight's outer helmet were strapped to his chest: so the force could be dissipated. But they severely restricted movement and athleticism: you wouldn't be able to turn your head in a different direction than you are running to look for the ball, for example.
Excessive locality of solution is an engineering bad practice.
Think of the crash like a train... if the locomotive can't get traction to go fast, the passenger cars can't fly thru the air at 100 MPH in a derailment, can they? So eliminate shoe cleats. Maybe eliminate shoes and play barefoot on grass. If your feet literally can't accelerate you to 15 mph in one meters length, then you can't hit someone's head at 15 mph when you eventually get there.
There are other interesting rule peculiarities that have nothing to do with equipment. There seems no reason other than sheer display of aerobic conditioning to require wide receivers to line up on one side of a line an dash 50 yards downfield to get smashed into and killed by another guy dashing 50 yards as fast as he can trying to stop him. So change the rules so they don't run as fast as they can? Just let pass receivers stand around downfield, or let defensive backs line up there if they want. If you have to run 25 yards in three seconds to hit a guy catching a ball, someone is going to get killed. If you're lined up a foot away from the catcher, you don't need to kill him to get there in time. Sometimes the best improvement to equipment is to make it not used, in this manner.
Another strange rule change is you have to try to kill the wide receiver because running yards made after a catch count, although trying to kill the receiver before the pass is pass interference with a free down, so an interesting compromise is no running yards after a pass along with any tackling of a receiver an automatic pass interference 1st down or half the distance to the goal. Where the receiver's feet are located when the pass is complete is where the play ends, not where the receiver was tackled after an attempt at a run. This would tend to make the game immensely more exciting because there will be even more aerobic running downfield and more exciting interceptions, vs a tendency to tempt the defensive line into an illegal tackle via short passes.
Another strange rule is offensive and defensive lines symbolically fighting and pushing each other is acceptable, leading to a lot of physical damage. A rule as simple as you touch an opposing player you're both out of the play would be interesting to see. You don't have to hit a guy hard enough to kill him to get him out of the play, just merely touch him. Its easy to kill someone by trying to charge into them so hard you literally flip them over, but hard to kill someone by high-five-ing them as you pass by. I imagine you'd see some amazing dodgeball like madness as players try to remain untouched as late as possible in the play.
Or how about this. You can't move if you're holding the ball, and opposing players can't touch each other, ever. Instead of a tackle, count down a 10 second timer for the offense advancing the play.
Since we just made the whole game about passing without contact, 4 downs seems a bit too generous. Change possession whenever the offense fails to advance for whatever reason.
And 22 players on the field at once is just a bit much. So many variables. So cut that down to 7 players on each team.
And maybe to promote skillful passing, ditch that weird oblong ball and replace it with a flat plastic disk.
50 years ago when there was only had a small leather helmet, players wouldn't go head first into each other. I thought this is an overlooked point worth mentioning. Without a doubt the level of roughness has increased in 50 years and so has the methods of diagnosis for injuries.
Indeed. I played rugby and found that players are much more concerned with not injuring themselves. There were not any spear-tackles or leading with the head. Mostly cause you'll literally get knocked unconscious (or break your neck) if you try it.
Additionally, in rugby it's illegal to lift a player off both feet, and high tackles are much more heavily enforced, which forces players to use proper wrapping tackles instead of just smashing into each other trying to knock the ball-carrier down.
However, at the high level, spinal injuries are more common and actually a lot of players have been paralyzed. Especially in scrums.
Just wanted to compare football and rugby in this context. I think both sports are dangerous but, generally, I agree that the increasing protections provided by helmets and gear enables football players to take much bigger risks and hits. It's definitely a factor in the increase of CTE instances.
Tackling in rugby involves wrapping the legs and immobilizing the player rather than slamming into them as hard as possible. (Maybe inaccurate but that's how I was taught to do it).
> Summary of Accidents on Gridiron During This Season Shows Death Reaped a Harvest Among Players Nearly a Score Killed and 137 Injured.— Universities Begin Agitation to End Brutality Permitted by Present Rules.
New York.
Nearly 20 deaths in a single season. That's horrifying.
> The New York University, through its venerable chancellor, Henry M. McCracken, and the University of Pennsylvania, stand as a unit committed to the elimination of the brutal tactics of the gridiron, even if it means the abolition of football as a college sport.
On one hand you have institutions that use the world "scholarship" in a prominent place in their mission statements, and on the other hand they profit from their students to hitting each other in the head often and hard. The paradox is beyond me. I'm disheartened that we have been having this debate for over 100 years.
The NFL can do what they like, but it's very hypocritical for high-schools/universities to sponsor football programs.
To be fair, NYU has not had a football program since 1952.
I still assert if you take away all (or most) of the armor that modern players have the injuries would go down. All of the spearing, head leading etc would no longer happen.
While we see these sorts of chronic problems and a rise in repetitive injuries, the number of deaths dropped dramatically with the introduction of helmets. "Between rule changes and the 1973 creation of NOCSAE, the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, head-injury fatalities in high school football declined by three-quarters.": http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/May-2012/...
Anecdotal evidence, I played rugby in college. We'd send at least one person to the hospital every game. But few head injuries. A friend of mine who played football played rugby the spring of his senior year, and promptly broke his neck by leading with his head when tackling as he was used to. Fortunately he didn't sever anything, no permanent damage.
Personally I think a lot of our injuries were because we had a lot of former football players who were used to a different sport. It takes time to adjust. My "career" (fun hobby) ended from a ridiculous move from an overzealous opponent that destroyed my shoulder. If we were wearing football gear everything would have been fine. I wonder if rugby players in the US get injured more frequently than in other countries because of our legacy of American football.
Take the pads and helmets off and make it flag football. Therein, the game will be transformed into both athleticism and grace and would probably attract females into a womens league as well.
Interestingly, my kid's flag football league cites stats that there are more concussions in flag football than in tackle, at least in that age group.
I am not sure that I totally believe those stats, but the larger point is that any concussion in flag football would be due to an incidental collision. However, in tackle football collisions are built into the game, so every play is an opportunity for a sub-concussive blow, the accumulation of which has been found to be more damaging than the one-off full concussion.
As I come from the UK and am not familiar with NFL, what moves specific to this sport cause this? This issue is not prevalent at all in Rugby, which is arguably more dangerous (no pads or helmets)
Players tackle harder and in more dangerous manners (head first) because the pads lessen the apparent impact. They make it not hurt, but they don't actually prevent damage.
Something I was told when I was new to training in martial arts is that lighter gloves used in MMA and, for example, traditional karate dojos (simple cotton gloves with light padding -- same design as many MMA gloves, just different materials) simply protect your hands, not the other person's face.
Boxing gloves, by contrast, can and do cause the same sort of faulty reasoning as football helmets when education isn't properly included: there's padding, therefore I can hit harder. Except, no, it (clearly) doesn't work that way. Certainly not when mass is a variable in the equation.
There isn’t a lot of long term evidence that suggests the hitting in UFC is less damaging than the hitting in boxing.
It is just as likely that the brain trauma differences are due to the dramatically less number of hits taken. This has more to do with the rules than the gloves.
We can be reasonably sure of that because boxing could change the glove types trivially and haven’t even in places that have changed other rules for safety (youth & Olympic boxing).
> This has more to do with the rules than the gloves.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? It's fairly well established that boxing gloves have dramatically increased both number of punches to the head as well as the force of the punch. You don't bare-knuckle punch someone in the skull much, it hurts the person doing the punch not just the one being punched. Gloves change that dramatically, resulting in not just more punches to the head but also harder punches to the head (more weight behind the punch from the gloves themselves if nothing else).
Boxing hasn't changed back to bare-knuckle because it would make the sport more gruesome visually even though it would almost certainly be safer for the participants.
I arrived at it simply by looking at the evidence. There is virtually none that indicates that given the same number of punches, glove size matters much.
any change that would bring the head punch count down to ufc levels would likely have similar safety improvements.
The evidence is really sketchy but early research indicates Thai boxing has a bigger incidence of brain trauma than western boxing than ufc and boxing do. The glove is essentially the same.
After I started riding a motorcycle, hearing this explanation started to get a serious eyebrow raise out of me. Not the explanation itself, but the thought process behind those who accept it.
The last thing I want to do is just let my helmet do its job. I'd rather do almost anything else to prevent that if I can, because there's a point when I realized that it simply keeps me alive. It doesn't save me from everything. A broken bone heals, road rash heals, CTE does not heal. If my options are to go head first into a car or lay down and take a slide, I'll take the slide every time.
I treat my helmet as just another line of defense, one of many that includes e.g. body gear, situational awareness, keeping up on riding ability, and things like that.
In case it's not clear to anyone reading, yes, I wear a helmet and gear when I ride. I'm not arguing against wearing helmets, only the incorrect assumptions made about them.
Football players purposely spear other players with their helmets with full force. They had to make rules against doing this, and it still happens, although with less frequency. They are not using their helmets as a last line of defense like your motorcycle helmet. They use them as weapons.
Disagree, it happens all the time. Its a 'major penalty' in that you get fined many thousands of dollars, but I'm pretty sure the team pays it anyway, and that is a drop in the bucket.
And furthermore, in that article Gronkowski is quoted as even preferring to take dangerous hits in the head like that, instead of risking re-injuring a bad knee. Not a great policy.
The fact there are no pads or helmets actually makes Rugby safer. In American Football people rush into each other at almost full speed, which can lead to serious brain damage. In Rugby, if you were to rush into each other at that sort of speed you would become seriously injured, so brain damage isn't as prevalent.
Worse - you get hurt irreversibly, sometimes mortally, very slowly over time. A broken leg is often the least of your problems compared to multiple concussions or the cumulative effects of CTE.
Removing helmets in football without removing almost all forms of contact will likely lead to deaths, which would hard to describe as "much less serious" than brain damage.
>> The fact there are no pads or helmets actually makes Rugby safer.
This is oft-cited but before helmets, NFL players were dying at a pretty rapid pace [0], and this is before advanced strength and conditioning.
NFL players rush into each other at full speed knowing the risks. Why would that change if you removed protective padding that has been proven to do very little?
Yes, Teddy Roosevelt is credited for saving football. In 1904, there were 18 deaths in college football alone, and there weren't that many colleges and not that many games.
"In American Football people rush into each other at almost full speed"
300lbs, running 5seconds for 40 yard, 2% bodyfat -- straight at you -- head down -- helmet first. Oh yeah. They trained on smashing into bags for this for 10 years.
It's true that NFL players suffer enormous head injuries, but let's not be hyperbolic. No one in the NFL is anywhere near 2% body fat; people are not trying to spear other people head first (there are rules explicitly banning this as well as any intentional helmet to helmet contact); most players are well under 300 lbs; most hits aren't occurring anywhere near full speed etc.
Many of the more serious impacts occur at high speeds, some at full speed. Special teams (kickoff, punt return, etc) are particularly bad for this. There are players on the payroll that are kept for just this purpose.
Player positions with more high speed impacts aren't necessarily linked to greater lifetime CTE risks because they might have fewer total impacts during their career. Linemen might even be worse off with many more "lesser" impacts. The big high speed hits from a safety draw attention, but they're pretty infrequent. A lineman is pretty much guaranteed a consistent head impact every play.
All of these points ignore the fact that the main source of the issue is the repeated, small blows to the head. Larger blows have a higher tendency to be noticed and treated. Smaller, continuous blows happen dozens of times a game for a lineman.
It happens and some people are malicious, but he was penalized and it was considered a dirty hit. The point is that is the only hit of it's type that was seen during the game which contained thousands of collisions.
You can't really live at 2% bodyfat. Even top bodybuilders "only" get down to like 4-5% for competitions. Plus you'll be weak and small. I wouldn't be surprised if 300 lb football players are more like 20%.
Do NFL athletes really have 2% bodyfat? That's elite bodybuilding physique, and only sustained temporarily for competition. I find it hard to believe that football players can compete with so little fat.
I heard that in early boxing (no gloves) fighters very rarely knocked down opponents, because you don't want to attack head without gloves. Only after introduction of gloves deaths on the ring became an issue.
I played rugby for a few years in high school (not exactly stellar credentials but bear with me).
The first thing we were all taught to do was tackle. The technique was to wrap your arms around the opponents legs, particularly below the knee as that would guarantee their stoppage. This was a simple but very effective technique. We never tried to go for the head, or lower our heads and hit them.
I never played football so I can't say if this technique would work there but it's at least one reason no one on my team suffered a concussion in two seasons.
The single biggest difference between rugby and American football tackles is that (typically) in rugby you put your head behind the the runner while in American football you put it in front, i.e., across the body of the runner. The latter technique is only really possible without frequent facial injury when you're wearing a helmet and is used because it is more reliable (harder for the runner to run through). It also leads to more head, and especially head-to-head, contact.
Modern research is showing that sub-concussive hits play a bigger role in CTE than we expected, so it isn't enough to just show that Rugby concussions are as prevalent as football concussions if Rugby has far fewer(or maybe far more) sub-concussive hits.
Starting contact football at a young age, repeated low impact hits with head contact or sharp movement of head, since rugby players don't wear helmets, players take care to not impact their heads. That said, there is still evidence of smaller CTE problem with rugby and soccer.
Some players will be forced to retire due to injury, so I'm not sure of the actual statistics, but it's not abnormal to find players well into their 30s.
If it helps, here's the current squads for a few of the northern hemisphere teams with their ages listed. Lots in their 20s but a few current players have passed 30.
Along with what others have said about the pads possible being part of the problem allowing you to hit harder, there are other factors that contribute to the danger.
The American football is played in a series of short plays with long stretches of non-action between plays. This allows plays to be more explosive allowing players run at faster speeds for shorter distances. Also some of the rules lead to greater specialization, which favors some players become much larger (offensive linemen in particular) than rugby players. So the combination of greater mass and greater speed can lead to more dangerous play.
IANASportsFan, but... isn't football a bit more play-by-play than rugby? seems like there's more time to get ready for the next iterative sprint-smash in football than in rugby. maybe I'm remembering Aussie-rules.
I guess one main factor is that in rugby you tackle the guy with the ball, in NFL they hit/tackle players without the ball so you are much more likely to be hit in every play, in rugby you are not.
I've never really understood the appeal of football (or sports in general) myself - can it be made to be safer without removing whatever it is that appeals to the people that it appeals to?
Out of the major, popular sports, racquet sports (tennis, badminton, table tennis) and golf are the only ones that don't carry significant risk of horrific injuries (head injury or compound fractures). Most contact sports and non-contact sports using hard balls (e.g. baseball, cricket) have some amount of risk, and removing the risk factors would change those sports fundamentally. Strength and power are significant factors in even highly technical contact sports such as soccer or basketball - reducing them would probably reduce the appeal of those sports in my opinion.
A lot of comments here talk about the defense padding, and that's certainly part of it when it comes to long-term, low level concussive hits to the head. The idea is also mentioned in other comments that the problem is not sufficiently realized in rugby: that is also probably true.
There are also other factors. The forward pass often puts receivers in dangerous positions, as they often have to turn and track the ball when it isn't thrown perfectly. Also, the stop and start nature combined with the spread in position that the threat of the forward pass creates more high speed head-on collisions. Extreme specialization among the positions also mean that there are a lot of very large, very fast people out there whose job is just to hit as hard as possible.
Those game mechanics also combine negatively with the amount of money at stake due to the extreme commercialization. A lot of these players grew up in high school or younger programs being told that if they want to go pro and make the big money, they have to be out there hitting the hardest, or there's always someone to take their spot. That isn't really incorrect, but it leads to poor outcomes.
Other high collision football codes are not immune to concussion.
In Australian football, AFL not rugby, we have recently seen a change in the rules where dangerous contact to the head is to be avoided and tightening medical governence on diagnosis of concussion during games. The initial reaction from fans was that making the game less rough bordered on pedantic but there's now an acceptance that degenerative brain injuries as mentioned in the article are a huge concern.
I disagree with the notion of lack of padding that makes rugby safer. I think it's the structure of the game.
In football, once the receiver or running back has the ball, he is going to take a hit - likely from a defender who has been in full sprint for a good distance. Once he has the ball, he has 11 other players containing/funneling him and focused on crushing him.
In rugby, the ball carrier can pass or kick. That makes the game more one-on-one because the opposing team has to cover their guy. The width of the field needs to be considered. As a defender, you can't be reckless, you have to make sure you make the tackle. This means you go lower, you tackle the waist and slide down the legs of the runner.
I played at a decent level of rugby when I was younger... rugby players are not afraid of getting hurt. They do not ease up on a tackle because "i'm not wearing a helmet".
The NFL could limit some of the injuries to receivers and DB's by allowing illegal contact (less space = less speed prior to contact), but it'd hurt the offenses, and the league doesn't want low-scoring games. They could also limit the amount of zone that teams are allowed to play, but at that point, the sport begins to look very different.
They could counteract the disadvantage to offenses by allowing holding by the offense in the tackle box. This would have the extra benefit of protecting backs better from being blindsided.
It's hard to gauge the effects of these kinds of changes without letting them play out, but I for one would love to see the NFL try this combination for a year.
There is a link and a problem between Rugby and CTE, but nothing like football because heavy head-first hits aren't a feature of rugby.
One feature that makes a difference is the American football system of downs: the next play begins where the last play ended, to the inch, and on many plays there is a nonlinear point. One inch short of a first down is vastly better for the defenders than just making it. In rugby someone taking another foot or two to go down isn't going to hurt the outcome the way it can in football. The goal in football is to stop the person in as little space as possible, which means maximizing the deceleration and thus the impact to the brain.
With the NFL, they also spent a decade and a half purposefully covering the link up and publishing biased science trying to obscure the link, so there is scandal on top of the horrors of the physical consequences.
I was under the impression that the issue stems from sub-concussive blows which occur every snap between offensive and defensive lines as they rush toward each other. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense for CTE to appear in defensive/offensive linemen, as they are rarely the ones taking/making big hits, but rather taking/making small hits far more frequently throughout a career, even just a game.
> Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense for CTE to appear in defensive/offensive linemen, as they are rarely the ones taking/making big hits
Uh... what?
Lots of big hits happen on the line, both associated with tackles and not (a “pulling” offensive lineman hitting a defensive lineman or linebacker coming through an apparently open lane being a prime place big, non-tackle hits occur.)
Now, it may be true that because linemen are—compared to, e.g., wide recievers—built like tanks they visibly respond differently to the impacts (but that just means that something cumulatively bad for the brain won't be as likely to be limited by other more acute injuries), and it's definitely true that a lot of those impacts happen off the ball or as the play goes by, and so aren't as much a focus of attention and camera priority.
Fair enough, I misspoke, I meant to say they are rarely the ones coming off the field due to concussions. The bigger, concussive hits are usually taken by the receiving corp and defensive backfield.
Concussions are the most common injury in the England professional rugby league so I would be surprised if Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is not an issue. CTE injuries in American Football are more common because because defensive players (primarily) use their helmet as projectiles when making tackles either intentionally or by accident.
NFL players are at least well compensated and are adults making decisions for themselves.
My problem is at the high school and college level. The kids are playing with great intensity for nothing more than love of the game and maybe the opportunity to move up. The long term risks seem way too high.
I'd say the same thing about kids playing soccer. I don't think heading the ball should be allowed in high school or college play. I was relieved when my daughter quit soccer.
They're not actually protected in any way, because NFL contracts aren't guaranteed. Imagine what you would do if your doctor worked for your boss, and when your doctor asked if you were injured, telling the truth would allow your boss to fire you on the spot with zero compensation. Every time the subject comes up there's lots of whining by the NFL, but somehow the NBA, NHL, and MLB survived with essentially guaranteed contracts.
NFL players also don't actually have options. Scholarships are a joke and most of them learn virtually nothing. They started down the path to the NFL well before they were adults capable of making decisions, and by the time they're eligible for an NFL career, they typically don't have the academics to do much else. (Obviously there are exceptions, but Richard Sherman is not your average NFL player.)
Are you making the argument that a $million+/year is not "well compensated"? You can play for 2-3 years and never work again if you're smart with your money.
1 - many players are not making millions a year. eg in 2017, two rookie quarterbacks in the playoffs were making $450k, the league minimum. All those average salary facts include eg Tom Brady.
2 - even at $1m/year, you may collect $550k after tax. Three years of that is not never work again money.
The median salary is $700,000. The average career lasts 3 years. Therefore you could say a typical player makes around $2 million playing football. That's gross. The net is probably about half of that. To most of America that will make an order of magnitude less than that in the same time, that sounds pretty good.
Most players make closer to the league minimum ($500k) for just 2-3 years. After taxes that’s about $500-750k. Even if you’re smart about your money, you’re saving maybe $350-500k. That’s not “never work again” money.
$500k/yr for 3 years is "never work again" money for me. That's $1.5 Million. If you pull out what many financial advisors recommend, 4%, that's $60k/yr for the rest of your life. That's above the US median household income.
$60k/year won't get you very far in 20 years, and even today won't get you far at all if you have to pay medical expenses on the damage you received playing the game.
The 4% rate is chosen specifically because it's low enough for your retirement savings to continue to grow with inflation.
I don't really see your point about $60k not getting you far at all since it's more than half the country makes. I understand you might have a more privileged view of what kind of lifestyle you expect to live, but you'd be doing better than half the country. You'll be fine.
You're a NFL player. By definition you're among the, what, best 1% of players in college. You, of course, go in planning to have a short career, because you're young and invincible and the best.
So of course after 3 years of living like a monk you have $1.5 million stashed away...contrary to all rational expectations.
Well, less, because after income taxes and because as a young, invincible man among the best to play sports you spend money, maybe you have $300k left. If you're lucky.
But you're now unemployed, so you need healthcare. And the mortgage on your house is at least half that $60k/year because you're a young invincible sports hero.
You've been earning a half million dollars up to this point, so it's a safe bet it'll be very hard to scale your expenses down to $60k/year.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, except that your expectations of what an NFL player can/will do after being physically tortured for several years (high school, college, NFL) with hidden mental damage and having been a young, invincible man told you're the best of the best and surrounded by people eager to piggyback on your success...may be optimistic.
Yeah, I certainly won't argue that there are huge cultural problems that will impede any person's ability to make sound personal finance decisions. And those cultural problems are magnified for someone like an NFL player. But I still think it's important to have rational discussions where were acknowledge that we could choose to live a different way. We could choose to think about money differently.
If you don't pay taxes on that $1.5M, your living expenses (in jail) could also be quite low... but you won't magically end up with all the money. With half the money gone to taxes living on $30k/yr (non-inflation adjusted) doesn't sound so fun.
That's true, I hadn't considered taxes. I'd be very surprised to find out that NFL players are getting a W-2. Most likely they're all incorporated so they can claim all sorts of stuff as business expenses which would get their tax rate way below 50%. But you're right, it's probably more like $45-50k instead of $60k.
Still though, the median household income is in the $50ks. The 4% withdrawal rate means the base amount still grows with inflation, and so does your yearly withdrawal.
In other words, you can live a middle class life without ever working again. I would probably prefer to live a better lifestyle if that were an option. Sure, $1+ million isn't "fuck you" money, but it is "don't have to work ever again" money.
Players are employees of the teams they play for. It’s very hard even for high income employees to reduce their tax liability. Even Tim Cook pays about 50% taxes on his bonuses.
The median household income thing is also misleading. People earn much more with age. $30k is a good income for a 25-year old. It's in the bottom third for people above age 35. (It's even worse if you consider only college graduates, which NFL players almost all are.)
It's a little harder perhaps for Tim Cook to finagle his state of residency compared to a person that travels for a living. Most of these people are not paying NYC income tax. In fact, I'd be surprised if they couldn't establish residency in states without an income tax at all. This 'pro sports tax advice' site specifically and vaguely hints at controlling your state of residency. http://www.prosportstax.com/Images/Attachments/rn4b61f78e0a8...
Also worth noting the NFL has a 2:1 match up to $10k/yr. So every year you put $10k into your NFL 401k the NFL gives you $20k in tax free income.
A quick google search didn't give me a good indication of what the royalties are to low end pro athletes. I would not be surprised if the after tax on those is greater than the taxes on their traditional income.
It's worth noting that when athletes travel for games they have to pay state (and sometimes city) taxes for the cities they travel to which means their state of residency matters less than you might think.
Achieving this goal usually requires you to avoid serious brain damage. Repeated concussions and wisely living off the wealth you acquired in a few short years while still very young by managing it extraordinarily well for decades to come are probably mutually exclusive.
Don't forget the medical bills after football, which your former team(s) will not cover. I haven't verified the stat, but one of the 30-for-30 shorts said that something like 75% of NFL players are broke within 5 years of retirement.
The pool at my aunt and uncle's house has a huge Raiders mural in it, because they guy who owned it before them was a player for the Raiders until he went broke and they got it in a foreclosure sale.
Many former actors, lotto winners are also broke afterwards. Maybe a lot of millionaires go broke after the cash dries up and they continue their millionaire life style. The relation to medical bills seems unproven
Yes. In fact, two thirds of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years.
Still, medical coverage in the US generally sucks and I would hate to be saddled with medical bills following being a career athlete and no longer having the big NFL salary. I can't imagine it's happy fun times.
Probably true. But I wasn't positing an explanation for why they go broke. I was only suggesting that brain damage is a de facto barrier to successfully making that money last a lifetime, which most of them fail to do. The argument that, hypothetically, this is enough money to live on for life is rather specious since few of them actually do so. Being an NFL player for a few short years is not a well known path to permanent financial security and ability to cavalierly choose to not bother to work ever again.
> The argument that, hypothetically, this is enough money to live on for life is rather specious since few of them actually do so.
But this is not because they don't get enough money and more money would fix it (well, it it could be $trillions then maybe but it is never going to be that). It's because they don't have the right tools (widely understood) to manage their money properly, and their income structure is unlike income structure of many regular people (huge sums for very short period, then nothing - as opposed to much smaller sums over much longer period) and it requires very unobvious actions to make it work. If you have literally millions of dollars in your account, it's very hard not to buy some nice expensive things - even if you know you'd need those millions for decades to come, your brain doesn't really work this way. Some people manage it properly and create brands and side businesses for themselves or just live with reasonable expenses and are ok. Some spend too much and end up broke.
I never suggested more money would fix it. Just that multiple concussions are likely a serious handicap for being able to accomplish something most people can't pull off to begin with.
I don't think the damage there is as immediate as NFL players being basically legally incompetent and unable to take conscious decisions. It's probably more likely that they have no experience of managing a budget, saving for long term and planning their future - a trait shared by many people who never ever put a foot on a football field. And when you get $ton-of-money and have no experience in managing your finances, pretty soon you're broke. Look up the statistics of the gold rushes - a lot of people coming into sudden wealth got broke pretty soon, and didn't need any hitting on the head for that to happen. The percentage of people that got wealthy and were able to keep it long term is depressingly low.
Every person I know who got wealthy is still wealthy except one (stocks). None of them blew any significant part of their money on consumption. I assume this holds in general, too, if you count all people who get rich, not just lottery winners, athletes, etc.
This "no experience managing a budget" stuff is hilarious, you don't need special knowledge not to blow millions. It is not hard. Let's call it what it is for most people - being trash, living extravagantly, and not thinking about the future. It's far more about character than about financial knowledge.
That's a worthless post without sources. I don't believe statistics would prove that, I am guessing they would prove the opposite, that most wealthy people don't blow their money.
The average lifetime earnings of a programmer are higher than professional athletes: http://www.businessinsider.com/better-to-be-a-software-engin... And my job doesn't expect me to sacrifice my mental and physical health, setting me up for a shortened lifetime of degenerative neurological disease in exchange for that cash.
Many (most?) NFL players walk away with horrific brain damage and extreme physical injuries. Sitting still for 9h/day certainly isn't great for your health, but there are things you can do to counteract it - go to the gym, for example. NFL players can't avoid those injuries.
Part of it is also reward for risk - you have to train very hard for years before you can get to NFL. There is opportunity cost (to learn something else for example) with very low chance of getting in.
Compare it to programmers who are pretty sure to get job once they finish school, have plenty of time for activities outside of programming and have much lower pressure on them either at the job (NFL equivalent) or while preparing for it.
This is one of the key points to me - NFL actively hid the fact from their own fans and players for years. That should have been a much bigger deal I think, criminal negligence.
Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco).
I think it's a playbook. They string out the lies over a long period, then let the suspicion trickle out slowly. So, there are moments of muted outrage along the way, but by the time the full story comes out the pressure build-up has already been relieved. Beyond that, the finally-admitted truth is something we already knew for so long that our outrage has waned.
Big tobacco did the same but many people reasoned that inhaling burnt leaves multiple times a day was probably not a smart idea even if lacking full clinical research saying so.
It's bad that they hid it, no doubt. But couldn't people reason that taking thousands of blows to the head over a career was not a smart idea?
it's not just that the tobacco companies covered up reports, they literally put out ads with actors dressed as doctors saying "smoking is good for you".
Even if you were able to "reason" that smoking was bad, there was a whole dedicated culture jamming operation to push the message "you're wrong and foolish if you think smoking is bad" and it worked very well.
Every NFL team had (has?) a bunch of doctors telling players that they can shrug off concussions and other serious injuries, and a deeply-engrained (and specifically engineered) culture to back up that message.
Hell, when I was growing up (not that long ago!) the NFL used to produce and tout official videos of the biggest / hardest hits in a season.
Looking at them now, you can literally see the stiff arms sticking in the air that is a symptom of brain trauma, and people getting up concussed as fuck.
It's all true and very bad, I agree. My greater point though is that, throughout all time, people live in a society where someone is trying to take advantage/lie/cheat/steal basically they don't care about what is best for you. People need to learn to think independently.
Hell, science still can't agree on if an egg is healthy or not. I eat them because I enjoy them and their are no obvious downsides. If there were some correlation that was known and proved unhealthy I might stop eating them. For example, while big tobacco was doing their thing... people knew their family members smoking were unhealthy, coughing like crazy, getting cancer/sick, so their was some clues in society telling you that you're probably being lied to. I have memories of this as a kid, "Joe died at 55 but, you know, he smoked 2 packs a day" was a valid way of thinking. So the health effects were widely known, just not in a measurable & undisputed scientific way.
The same thing goes for tobacco, NFL, climate change, ... all kinds of stuff. The anecdotal information around you says one thing, but the scientist can't agree and some of them are biased/being paid to say something regardless of truth. Years later the anecdotal information turns out to be true and people claim they were victims when really they could have just exercised some common sense.
You can't really leave it at that though. Most learning that people do is not independently driven, it is learning that complements teaching... which is never independent. Very rarely do people come to intelligent conclusions independently.
Frankly, as an observer (which I am) or as a potential employee of the NFL (which I am not), I would consider the question "does playing football cause massive brain damage?" a much bigger issue than "has the NFL tried to cover up evidence that playing football causes massive brain damage?"
Well, the difference is culpability. "Does football cause brain damage" is an important question for current and future players, but "did the NFL conceal this fact" can be interpreted as the NFL murdered its own players through criminal negligence. Players were not given the chance at informed consent. If I put poison in food and offer you millions to eat the food but don't tell you about the poison, what am I?
"Did the NFL stage a coverup" is only relevant to discussions of whether and how much to punish the NFL.
"Does football cause brain damage" is relevant to discussions of whether I should play football, whether my friends or family should play football, whether anyone should play football, whether it's ethical to watch football, whether it's more fun to watch football than golf, whether it's appropriate for educational institutions to promote or participate in football...
I'll also suggest that if it turned out that football promoted the better functioning of your brain, outrage at the NFL for covering up research suggesting the opposite would be pretty muted. If you believe that, you should also believe that what everyone sees as "the big issue" is the brain damage, not the coverup.
I've always thought of the brain damage as a given; concussions will cause damage, the brain's a little "iffy" on the healing front, and severe concussions are basically unavoidable in football. If you care about whether you get hurt: Don't play, don't let your kids play, and so on.
It was much more interesting to hear how much the NFL had covered up, and the degree to which they directly lied about the evidence of the effects of playing the game.
The cover-up is the scandalous part, so of course that's the part that people are going to focus on.
I think everybody always suspected there could be long term consequences from frequent concussions. I think the eye opening part is research that suggests that it's actually the smaller, non-concussive hits that are doing long term damage.
It's possible that you can't play football (or soccer) at a professional level without accepting that risk.
> NFL players are at least well compensated and are adults making decisions for themselves.
One of the arguments in the article is that not even for NFL players, at the highest level, are the consequences made obvious. Here's the last paragraph:
> But when all those big hits happened and the fans cheered, did they cheer in spite of knowing a man just greatly increased his risk for dementia? Was anyone worried about an A.L.S. diagnosis or a C.T.E.-related suicide at 40 after their favorite player suffered repeated blows to the head on the field? No, they cheered and they celebrated because they didn’t know. And neither did we.
Less and less kids play football and parents dont support it nearly as much as before. It seems that people who did not sacrificed whole life to the game yet are leaving it.
Correct. Which is why my argument is, if we're going to keep having blood sports, let them use the drugs to improve their muscle mass to hopefully protect them slightly better from this stuff, improve recovery/rebuild time, and make the game more exciting, surely.
But that would also allow them to hit harder.. and there are no muscles around the brain to protect it from impacts or prevent it from moving. I don't see how that would make brain damage less likely.
Richard Sherman, one of the top NFL players and also a Stanford grad, is very outspoken about this, and agrees with you: https://www.si.com/2013/10/23/richard-sherman-seahawks-concu.... His argument is that at this point, everyone playing the game knows the risks, and is taking that into account when making their decision to play.
To your second point, there's a recent push to ban tackling at levels below high school football (and play flag football instead). The current theory is that it's not the big hits that cause brain damage, but all the smaller "sub-concussive" hits that happen on every play. Eliminating those until high school would hopefully limit the long-term damage of football, especially for kids who only play through high school or college. I don't think banning tackling at either of those levels is feasible, though; college football is a huge business itself, and a change as dramatic as eliminating tackling there would completely change the sport.
In flag football, you generally don't have linemen in the traditional sense; there's no blocking allowed, and the quarterback is protected by a count instead of his blockers.
The American Flag Football League is one of the organizations trying to take over this space (they recently played a game in Levi's Stadium with Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, among others). Here are the full rules if you're interested! https://www.americanflag.football/official-rules/.
I am unable to locate a source, but I recall a quote by an NFL official that all it would take is for 10% of the parents to believe football is dangerous to kill the sport. Moving to flag football would confirm this notion, setting aside the idea that flag football will probably not have the spectator draw that the current football has.
The argument could be made that high school and college football compensates players with social and sexual capital. It is an extremely effective way to become popular.
Define well compensated? The average NFL player makes less than any of the other three major american sports, is unlikely to have a wealth of other marketable skills, and may be permanently disabled after what is likely to be a short (average 3.3 yrs) career.
You're one of the few people who seem to actually understand this.
By comparison, a 4-year degree is probably worth more in the long-term than those NFL earnings. So the players are actually being better compensated in college than the NFL.
Edit:
The median salary for an NFL player is about $770K and most players are out of the league in under 3 years.
It looks like the average 4-year degree is worth less than the average NFL earnings - the two figures I found Googling were $2.1M for lifetime earnings from a 4-year degree, and $4M for career earnings for an NFL player.
On the other hand, engineering degrees tended to hover around $4M for average lifetime earnings, and some engineering fields (petroleum engineer, SV software engineer) averaged ~$6.5M in lifetime earnings.
In my opinion, the set of players should be inclusive of all football players. By limiting it to the most successful outliers in a power law distribution, we limit ourselves to the players with the best possible outcome. Players don't really get to choose whether they belong in this set; they choose to play highly competitive football.
In short, I think we should define the group by factors that result from choice, not outcome.
NFL players make a median salary of $770,000 (the average is $1.9 million). Short average career or not, that's good money. That's more than ten times the median household salary in the US (granted they probably get taxed at an obscene rate compared to the median household).
It's not like they're incapable of working once they're out of the NFL. Most of them will be qualified for coaching jobs at the college or high school level. Also, most of them will have college degrees (or be a year away from a college degree), so job finding wont be nearly as difficult as if they hadn't played football.
The reason we have OSHA is because when workplace safety is the responsibility of each individual to negotiate it becomes non-existent. Putting the responsibility on individuals leads to a race to the bottom: every job can be horribly dangerous as long as the alternative jobs are too.
Totally agree. Another aspect of this is that the decision they're making is one that humans are very bad at: prioritizing their future over their present. "Ok maybe I have headaches when I'm in my 50s but today I get paid way more than everyone I know." Knowing that humans have an unbelievable penchant for putting their present well-being over their future well-being, I think it behooves us (society) to protect these people from making these decision that will in many cases destroy their lives.
That logic is garbage. We should ban cigarettes? Smoking marijuana should not be legalized (risk factor for lung cancer)? Why not alcohol too? Where else can we stretch that? Maybe we should perform evaluations on people to determine what career paths they should follow to protect their best interests! Society should behoove itself to mind its own business.
Nowhere, but the grandparent comment literally contains the phrase "workplace safety" and talks about OSHA. This entire comment chain is about people having agency to choose a highly dangerous profession in exchange for good compensation.
Yes, exactly, and I think the grandparent OSHA argument has merit, however, the parent comment completely distorted it into a case for big brother - which I do not believe has any merit.
This is the business of society. It is the only business of society. There's no point in having a government that doesn't look out for the welfare of its people.
The business of society is ensuring that nobody else f$%^s with my business - not telling me what to do with it. The only gray area is when I'm doing something that affects others.
Look up the meaning of "govern." It almost literally means "telling people what to do." You're a person. The government will tell you what to do with your business. That's it's only job. It's the sole reason it exists.
Shall we automatically turn off televisions and restrict the pounds per person garbage food sold each month to protect people from themselves as well? Oh, I know, let's have a new tax-funded agency that is constantly going in and out of people's homes ensuring that only those couples financially capable of raising a child are having unprotected sex.
> I think it behooves us (society) to protect these people from making these decision that will in many cases destroy their lives.
OK. Where's the limit? That kind of protecting people from making their own decisions (including objectively bad ones) has always struck me as dystopian.
I think it's a good idea to educate people on the costs of their actions, and that we should find ways to impress on an emotional level how present actions will affect someone's future. I think it's a bad idea for society to make the decision for them, though.
I think it's a bad idea for society to make the decision for them, though.
It's not just a bad idea, it's totally immoral and unacceptable. Denying a person their agency is denying the very essence of what makes them human. It's no different than slavery in principle. Either you have self-ownership or not, there is no middle ground.
I disagree. e.g. Doping in sports. Should we allow everything? Then people will start using all kings of drugs for money and fame. This will encourage everyone in the future to use them. Also, athletes who want to participate without drugs, will have no choice. Things will go downhill fast. And it's not just about the individuals. Their whole family will have to suffer.
A single person without any family, can do everything he wants in their personal space. That will not harm anyone else. If they do that, earn a living and get famous, that will hurt their family and future generations too. That's why we need law and regulations.
"My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins". The idea of having laws to regulate behavior is so that one person, through exercise of their own agency, doesn't deny someone else the exercise of theirs.
Taking your example of sports: An organized league is something that an athlete joins by choice. The athlete agrees to abide by certain rules as a condition of participating in that league; they aren't being forced to give up their right to choice, they're choosing to.
The comment you responded to isn't arguing against laws and regulations, it's arguing against laws that take away agency for some reason besides protecting equal rights (e.g. someone's swinging fists aren't going to hit anyone else, but "we" don't like that, so we'll prohibit them from swinging their fists, because we feel it's for their own good).
Society shouldn't dictate what's good for the individual; the individual must.
Of course, any time you have a so-called negotiation between partied with severely different bargaining power, it will be a race to the bottom to the detriment of the powerless party. This is why we need regulations, OSHA, unions, consumer protection laws, product safety rules, etc.
Surely you wouldn't characterize NFL players as being on the bottom? For most of the recent kneeling-during-the-anthem controversy, people are ripping on the players because they are in such a privileged position. The characterization is that they are at the top of everything.
Without looking anything up, I would guess that most NFL players played football in high school and/or college first. If so, you are saying that these already brain damaged people are free to make these decisions because they are past a certain age, never mind that their ability to analyse it all was impaired before they reached the age of majority.
Your argument might hold water if most NFL players took up football after reaching adulthood. This seems highly unlikely to me.
I'm not sure. The studies were specifically about long-term effects, so I'd not be sure if a brief stint in school or college sport or occasional matches were already that harmful.
If this is true, maybe an alternative to making the game more "safe" were to think about whether practically living for the sport for 20 years as part of a professional career makes sense.
If pre-NFL players are brain-damaged, are they even capable of understanding the risks such that they can give informed consent to play professionally?
+1 for soccer. My teenager plays it with his senior school friends, but I always discourage him. Tell him he can pick up any sport, in which he doesn't have to physically directly engage with other persons.
I played field hockey in school & college. And once was involved in a head on collision with a friend, who suffered a bloody nose/face and was taken to hospital. And I was shit scared, until I knew he was safe, very luckily for me.
I have come to hate all sports like boxing/wrestling/soccer etc. for this reason. There are plenty of athletics and sports where you display your individual skill at a distance from another person to choose from.
I think, these sports are simply not probability friendly. When many people play, somebody is bound to get seriously injured.
He destroyed his mind and got paid well for it. There are many dangerous jobs out there and usually the pay reflects it. The player union and company needs to invest in solutions. If there are none apparent it might cost less to up salaries then invest in R and D. The owners dont want players to get long term damage. Mining orgs dont want miners to get black lung.
Tech solutions are a great place for this but its not a moral issue. He chose to play pro football. Its not footballs fault. And not every player gets brain damage so lets hear some numbers on that. What was this guys diet? Some people get brain damage that dont play football.
Why would you think player pay has anything to do with risk of injury? There are very few occupations where this is true, and celebrity sports are close to the last place to assume that is happening.
My concern is that changing Football will be difficult, if not impossible. It would be like asking them to change the Bill of Rights because some of it is outdated. It's a religion to many Americans.
It will be a slow process, but you hear parents now saying they would never let their children play, while when I was growing up, parents encouraged their children to play.
College is a feeder to the NFL. High school is a feeder to College, etc. Once you limit the source of nourishment, it will die in it's current state, but it will take a while.
College donors can also have an impact here. Right now, football makes colleges money. There's been recent controversy over Wesleyan, for example, focusing on football because of the money it makes: https://slate.com/culture/2017/12/wesleyan-university-footba... If donors stopped giving in response to football and started demanding accountability for the long-term effects of the sport, it could have a major effect.
It may also require coordinated action, since no one wants to be the first college to give up the cash cow. This is where action by the NCAA or even legislation would be helpful.
It won't change quickly enough, people will simply stop playing it, and eventually stop watching it as well. I've already stopped watching NFL football (mostly, it's hard to completely cut off from a team I've followed since childhood), as it just makes me too uncomfortable to watch. The big hits don't feel exciting anymore, just gruesome now that I know the reality of how unsafe it is. And I don't plan to let my children play it. Many people are of the same mind, and I think the tide will turn eventually.
Let's keep this in mind next time there is a domestic abuse scandal involving an NFL player. Perhaps shaming the NFL into booting the player and cutting off his benefits isn't a appropriate solution for someone whose behavior may partially be the result of brain damage accrued while providing us with entertainment.
>But who these men have become is not who they are, and I write that with conviction. The symptoms they display are beyond their control and occur through no fault of their own. These men chose football, but they didn’t choose brain damage.
Completely true, and the previous generation of players rightly deserves compensation for being lied to by the NFL. They didn't know the devil's bargain they were striking. But the next generation? The ones who do now know?
Muhammand Ali was suffering from severe brain damage as early as 29, but kept boxing anyway because he was addicted to the fame and the glory. He'd come out of a match slurring his words and struggling to maintain a normal stride, yet would still deny any possibility of his brain being damaged by all the fighting. He was too tough, he was too fast, he was too macho. Until he wasn't, and then it was too late. This all coming after nearly a century of research showing the degenerative effects of boxing on the human mind.
Some jobs simply carry with them the understanding you are going to be "used up" by participating. Wrestlers, boxers, hockey players, and now footballers. Some men are willing to destroy themselves in pursuit of wealth and fame, and it's difficult to say it's our job as a society to overrule their choices about their own bodies.
However, I do think pop culture should try to stop downplaying the effects of this kind of stuff. Super heroes, for example, send the message to kids that you can engage in violence altercations for decades, and the only negative impacts will be physical (if they exist at all). I laughed out loud during TKDR when Batman's only injury from all his fighting is a bum knee and a few scars - his brain should be mush, are you kidding me?
> Some jobs simply carry with them the understanding you are going to be "used up" by participating. Wrestlers, boxers, hockey players, and now footballers. Some men are willing to destroy themselves in pursuit of wealth and fame, and it's difficult to say it's our job as a society to overrule their choices about their own bodies.
I think one of the more interesting comparisons starts when you look past professions that promise fame and fortune, and start looking at jobs like firefighting, police work, and military service. I would argue that there is a similar progression of personnel (as evidenced by earlier retirement and pension ages for these professions) but the pot of gold at the end of rainbow is less celebrity and more a consistent job and service to one's community. Where do those professions stand on the spectrum?
That's all true, but I'm not sure you can even blame current generations. Yes, the knowledge that football or boxing cause heavy brain damage is pretty widespread, but nobody is telling participants that when they get into the sports. A youth football program isn't going to emphasize how dangerous it is when kids get older, and you'll see even less discussion about that among players and administration as they get older. I doubt that a newly drafted college player will be asked by the coach "hey you know you'll get concussions regularly, right?"
So is it really their own fault? Or is it an institutional issue?
I suspect over the next decade, and especially as we develop better diagnostic tools, we will find more details about which sports have significant links and be able to effectively modify the rules (banning heading the ball, for example) or steer children towards the sports that don't.
Sports you wouldn't necessarily expect, like ice skating, have problems with concussions.
NFL player and mathematics doctoral student John Urschel retired last summer because he was afraid of possible brain damage. He'd had a concussion and found that for some weeks after his ability to think about math was impaired.
But there are all sorts of dangerous jobs. Deep sea fishermen, coal miners, oil riggers, heck even long haul truckers are high risk due to how dangerous highway travel is. People are allowed to make decisions on their own about the trade-offs and run their own lives.
If you want a job that is less risky, study hard and go to college. Then you can get an office job and all of the things that come with that (obesity, diabetes, and heart disease).
Sure, but most people aren't sending their 13 year olds to training camps for coal mining or oil rigging, whereas football is figuratively and literally drilled into the heads of a huge swath of young men in our country from the time they are born.
It is also fine to talk about danger of being fishermen, coal miner, oil rigger or haul trucker. It is very ok to warn kids and parents about consequences before they commit their whole life to training it.
You are not arguing for people making trade-offs. You are implying that there is something wrong with telling people convincingly about risks and consequences before they make the choice.
I think it may be a little unfair that the NFL has to pay out for damage that was done in aggregate over an entire lifetime (starting at Pee-Wee and moving on through primary school and Uni).
I thought this was an interesting read after reading the headline. It is an article about a person who struggles to regain his mind after concussions after concussions.
There’s a lot of discussion on whether players are compensated for the risk. I’ll add that the career average earnings should include all the players who aspired to an NFL contract but did not succeed.
What aspect of playing a contact sport causes brain damage, is it the sudden stop from a tackle or falling and hitting your head on the grass or ...? Can it be mitigated
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadI mean the NFL had an incentive to increase the hits and blows to make it more entertaining, to draw more people, to sell ads.
I do see a future, where, unless the sport changes, companies will start pulling their ads from football games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Davey_Moore
- Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
If you're a professional athlete, odds are you know a fair amount about (sports) nutrition, and you've spent much of your life in some kind of gym.
Given the severity of the brain related symptoms described here, I don't think these are on par at all.
Eating a lot.
> And why would one stay on it after you're done the intense training?
Habit.
Many players struggle with adjusting their diet when the intense physical activity drops off after they stop playing.
Diet control can also cause long-term metabolic changes. Keeping body fat low and fluctuating weight, as often happens with seasonal sports, are both associated with long-term obesity and health problems.
https://www.bonappetit.com/people/article/nfl-players-diet
Linemen obviously will want to cut after they stop, but many athletes could maintain their diet as long as they stayed very active.
The majority of NFL players are African-American, which might explain this.
/apologies for reddit style
This however, is one of them. I really do think it's that simple. The sport itself is flawed in design.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
n football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
I have not seen any meaningful change from the NFL (or CFL, haha) to specifically combat this risk. I think they know the game is exciting because of these brutal impacts, and they're afraid to water it down and risk profits just to protect the (expendible) players.
Wow this place is turning into WaPo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When I was playing years ago, it was called, "getting your bell rung." It was a temporary problem like getting a muscle cramp or something.
I call BS on your clairvoyance.
The health aspects of this are the most urgent, but I'd argue that as coaches and analysts have developed algorithms to optimize very particular strategies, they've also squeezed much of the fun out of the game. I wrote about this elsewhere:
----------------------
Watching professional sports has become less fun over the last 50 years, due to athletes improving while the rules of most games have gone largely unchanged. Basketball players are taller, on average, than 60 years ago, yet the height of the basket has not been raised. Tennis players have learned to optimize techniques for smashing serves, which often leads to boring games where everything is decided by the strength of a player's serve -- obviously tennis is more fun to watch when there is a long and dramatic volley. American football has seen a relative improvement in defense, such that some games are just 3 attempts at 10 yards, then punt, followed by 3 attempts at 10 yards, then punt, followed 3 attempts at 10 yards, then punt. I'm not exaggerating, I actually saw a game in December where there was something like 5 punts in 5 minutes of play action. Who wants to watch that? In the specific case of American football, an obvious change that could be made is to allow 5 or 6 attempts to get 10 yards, instead of 4. That would be fun, I love watching the pass or run plays, much more than the punts. I learned to love football when I was a little kid, because my older brother loved football and I liked to watch the games with him. Back then I remember many long, dramatic passes, of a type that have become rare as defense has gotten relatively better at stopping exactly that strategy. But whenever I explain to people that the rules of sports need to be often updated to keep up with changes in equipment and training regimes, I'm told that any change would render historical comparisons invalid. Obviously that is true, but what is more important, that we are able to compare today's game to a game in 1956, or that the game is fun?
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/am-i-completely-insan...
I played football all through middle school and high school, and was fairly good. When you are playing as a kid, unless you are extremely elite, you aren't thinking about the NFL and potentially hitting your head hundreds of times into NFL sized players. You are just having fun and playing a sport. Then maybe you start getting good and someone tells you if you get a bit bigger and faster you might be able to go to college for FREE! You think, "no one in my family has ever been able to go to college!" Suddenly that sport-for-fun becomes just a means to an end that you never thought was possible.
So you work your ass off, get really good and college recruiters start showing up to games. You know they are there and this is your chance to shine. So you run extra fast, hit extra hard, you aren't showing any mercy to your opponents and you certainly aren't thinking about your brain at age 40. Maybe you get hit a bit hard and feel like you need to throw up. Your coach knows about the recruiters also, so he helps you hide the fact that you threw up. He stands in front of you pretending to talk to you while you bend slightly and puke in a water cup. You aren't thinking about brain injury, you are thinking about not showing weakness in front of these people.
Now MAYBE you are the ~1% that gets a full ride scholarship. You are playing college ball on a scholarship and you know the only reason you can stay in school and finish a degree is if you stay on the starting squad. You aren't staying on that squad as a linebacker unless you are ignoring your own personal safety.
MAYBE you are again the ~1% that make it the four years and are maybe good enough for the NFL. You can either say "nah, I'm good with my accounting degree" or you can see the potential to make more money on one signing day than your entire family has made in all of their lives combined!
I can keep going, but I hope people get the point. When millions of kids start playing football in 6th grade (12 years old), them and their parents weren't thinking about the potential they'd ever be "mashing your head into the helmet of a 300lb person" in the future.
As a parent now, me and my friends are thinking about that now. For some players (like the one in the article) it is 30 years too late.
Did you make that reasoning up? Guess we should only have one study for anything, because any successive studiers means the first one wasn't good enough for them.
There's already been studies that showed repeated low impact hits on the head (ala soccer) create a deficit in cognitive ability in young people - http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/14/health/brain-damage-dementia-c...
The only reason to keep asking for more studies is to stall so they can make money off of high school athletes, high school football in Texas in a racket as documented in the book Friday Night Lights (not the movie or TV show). Also, if you don't believe that book, James Michener wrote a book 20 years earlier called Sports in America that documents the same phenomena across America in all amateur athletics.
Also I grew up in Texas and no matter how podunk the town was, they spent bank on high school football stadiums then and tens of millions now. You wouldn't understand this if you dont know this.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/01/nfl-concussion-super-bow...
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/08/08/revolutionary-new-zer...
The helmets would need frequent changing, or else they might look like demolition derby cars by halftime.
There are newer helmet technologies that are supposed to absorb more of the impact, and in particular allow some slippage of the shell to reduce rotation, which can be one of the most harmful types of movement:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/news/a2797...
Whether these will be effective at preventing CTE, or only preventing concussions, is hard to say without a lot more data.
The brain suffers damage from slamming against the inside of the skull due to inertia changes during collisions that are inherent to the sport.
There is literally no way to protect the brain as the sport is played today.
Yes, that's the inertia change I referenced.
A crumple zone is unlikely to mitigate the problem in any meaningful way. The problem is that in a hard collision, the head still stops in an instant, but the brain continues to travel at the same rate of speed until it slams into the skull. Effectively slowing the distance over which the head comes to a stop by a few millimeters or so won't meaningfully offset that impact. The brain is still traveling too fast.
The kind of design you're referencing works in vehicles because its purpose is to dissipate the energy of the collision around the zones instead of through the vehicle. But, the goal here is to avoid damaging the vehicle so extensively that the damage intrudes upon the cabin (and its occupant).
However, the vehicle's deceleration itself is not altered in any meaningful way by crumple zones. So, this system really only works if the driver is restrained (e.g. by a seat-belt). Otherwise, the driver would still bear the force of the sudden deceleration when she collided with whatever was on the other side of the empty space in front of her.
Similarly, if the brain could be restrained in its skull, then helmets might have at least some value in protecting it.
I think it may be better to actually provide less protection and/or reduce designs that mitigate or otherwise disguise the immediate physical consequences of doing things like spearing another player head first.
It is my impression that helmets have been heavily engineered over the past decades; it is just the outer appearance that remains constant.
Regarding "crumple zones" (a very appropriate suggestion): football linemen take a great many hits in every game-- replacement probably isn't feasible.
[1] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=improved+football+helmets
But CTE is about repeated impact, so most CTE cases now are from previous poor helmet designs, not from modern helmets.
Also because of the repeated nature, single impact helmets aren't the important ones. Linemen have the biggest problems and they aren't the ones getting laid out from thunderous impacts like a receiver.
To protect against those, modern helmets have stronger face masks and wider field of vision so a ball carrier can see it coming better. It is those blind hits that hurt.
I hope to see modern CTE rates come down from improved helmets but it will take a decade plus to see the results in the pros.
The NFL has a long history of pointing to new technology that promises to make the game safer, but I have yet to see that manifest in reduced concussions. I'm also skeptical that increased cushioning wouldn't just let players hit each other at higher speeds.
The very existence of hard plastic helmets is what has caused the issue in the first place. It creates enough protection that people are able to hit much, much harder than normal, which causes concussion/CTE. You can fix the game by getting rid of the pads.
This is probably the origins of the grand bascinet, where a knight's outer helmet were strapped to his chest: so the force could be dissipated. But they severely restricted movement and athleticism: you wouldn't be able to turn your head in a different direction than you are running to look for the ball, for example.
Think of the crash like a train... if the locomotive can't get traction to go fast, the passenger cars can't fly thru the air at 100 MPH in a derailment, can they? So eliminate shoe cleats. Maybe eliminate shoes and play barefoot on grass. If your feet literally can't accelerate you to 15 mph in one meters length, then you can't hit someone's head at 15 mph when you eventually get there.
There are other interesting rule peculiarities that have nothing to do with equipment. There seems no reason other than sheer display of aerobic conditioning to require wide receivers to line up on one side of a line an dash 50 yards downfield to get smashed into and killed by another guy dashing 50 yards as fast as he can trying to stop him. So change the rules so they don't run as fast as they can? Just let pass receivers stand around downfield, or let defensive backs line up there if they want. If you have to run 25 yards in three seconds to hit a guy catching a ball, someone is going to get killed. If you're lined up a foot away from the catcher, you don't need to kill him to get there in time. Sometimes the best improvement to equipment is to make it not used, in this manner.
Another strange rule change is you have to try to kill the wide receiver because running yards made after a catch count, although trying to kill the receiver before the pass is pass interference with a free down, so an interesting compromise is no running yards after a pass along with any tackling of a receiver an automatic pass interference 1st down or half the distance to the goal. Where the receiver's feet are located when the pass is complete is where the play ends, not where the receiver was tackled after an attempt at a run. This would tend to make the game immensely more exciting because there will be even more aerobic running downfield and more exciting interceptions, vs a tendency to tempt the defensive line into an illegal tackle via short passes.
Another strange rule is offensive and defensive lines symbolically fighting and pushing each other is acceptable, leading to a lot of physical damage. A rule as simple as you touch an opposing player you're both out of the play would be interesting to see. You don't have to hit a guy hard enough to kill him to get him out of the play, just merely touch him. Its easy to kill someone by trying to charge into them so hard you literally flip them over, but hard to kill someone by high-five-ing them as you pass by. I imagine you'd see some amazing dodgeball like madness as players try to remain untouched as late as possible in the play.
Since we just made the whole game about passing without contact, 4 downs seems a bit too generous. Change possession whenever the offense fails to advance for whatever reason.
And 22 players on the field at once is just a bit much. So many variables. So cut that down to 7 players on each team.
And maybe to promote skillful passing, ditch that weird oblong ball and replace it with a flat plastic disk.
Additionally, in rugby it's illegal to lift a player off both feet, and high tackles are much more heavily enforced, which forces players to use proper wrapping tackles instead of just smashing into each other trying to knock the ball-carrier down.
However, at the high level, spinal injuries are more common and actually a lot of players have been paralyzed. Especially in scrums.
Just wanted to compare football and rugby in this context. I think both sports are dangerous but, generally, I agree that the increasing protections provided by helmets and gear enables football players to take much bigger risks and hits. It's definitely a factor in the increase of CTE instances.
Players wore hard helmets in 1968. Before hard helmets, players died all the time [0].
[0] https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MG19051202.2.31
> Summary of Accidents on Gridiron During This Season Shows Death Reaped a Harvest Among Players Nearly a Score Killed and 137 Injured.— Universities Begin Agitation to End Brutality Permitted by Present Rules. New York.
Nearly 20 deaths in a single season. That's horrifying.
On one hand you have institutions that use the world "scholarship" in a prominent place in their mission statements, and on the other hand they profit from their students to hitting each other in the head often and hard. The paradox is beyond me. I'm disheartened that we have been having this debate for over 100 years.
The NFL can do what they like, but it's very hypocritical for high-schools/universities to sponsor football programs.
To be fair, NYU has not had a football program since 1952.
Personally I think a lot of our injuries were because we had a lot of former football players who were used to a different sport. It takes time to adjust. My "career" (fun hobby) ended from a ridiculous move from an overzealous opponent that destroyed my shoulder. If we were wearing football gear everything would have been fine. I wonder if rugby players in the US get injured more frequently than in other countries because of our legacy of American football.
I am not sure that I totally believe those stats, but the larger point is that any concussion in flag football would be due to an incidental collision. However, in tackle football collisions are built into the game, so every play is an opportunity for a sub-concussive blow, the accumulation of which has been found to be more damaging than the one-off full concussion.
So, yeah. Flag football FTW.
Boxing gloves, by contrast, can and do cause the same sort of faulty reasoning as football helmets when education isn't properly included: there's padding, therefore I can hit harder. Except, no, it (clearly) doesn't work that way. Certainly not when mass is a variable in the equation.
It is just as likely that the brain trauma differences are due to the dramatically less number of hits taken. This has more to do with the rules than the gloves.
We can be reasonably sure of that because boxing could change the glove types trivially and haven’t even in places that have changed other rules for safety (youth & Olympic boxing).
How did you arrive at that conclusion? It's fairly well established that boxing gloves have dramatically increased both number of punches to the head as well as the force of the punch. You don't bare-knuckle punch someone in the skull much, it hurts the person doing the punch not just the one being punched. Gloves change that dramatically, resulting in not just more punches to the head but also harder punches to the head (more weight behind the punch from the gloves themselves if nothing else).
Boxing hasn't changed back to bare-knuckle because it would make the sport more gruesome visually even though it would almost certainly be safer for the participants.
any change that would bring the head punch count down to ufc levels would likely have similar safety improvements.
The evidence is really sketchy but early research indicates Thai boxing has a bigger incidence of brain trauma than western boxing than ufc and boxing do. The glove is essentially the same.
The last thing I want to do is just let my helmet do its job. I'd rather do almost anything else to prevent that if I can, because there's a point when I realized that it simply keeps me alive. It doesn't save me from everything. A broken bone heals, road rash heals, CTE does not heal. If my options are to go head first into a car or lay down and take a slide, I'll take the slide every time.
I treat my helmet as just another line of defense, one of many that includes e.g. body gear, situational awareness, keeping up on riding ability, and things like that.
In case it's not clear to anyone reading, yes, I wear a helmet and gear when I ride. I'm not arguing against wearing helmets, only the incorrect assumptions made about them.
i. would. never.
I do hope helmet technology improves to handle inadvertent contact.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2757235-rob-gronkowski-sa...
And furthermore, in that article Gronkowski is quoted as even preferring to take dangerous hits in the head like that, instead of risking re-injuring a bad knee. Not a great policy.
The pads allow for you to hit harder, and constantly.
This is oft-cited but before helmets, NFL players were dying at a pretty rapid pace [0], and this is before advanced strength and conditioning.
NFL players rush into each other at full speed knowing the risks. Why would that change if you removed protective padding that has been proven to do very little?
[0]: One such article on the topic: https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/19-football-players-died-in-...
http://www.history.com/news/how-teddy-roosevelt-saved-footba...
Injuries were also caused by a lot of plays that are illegal today - flying wedges and various dirty blocks (clipping, chop blocks).
300lbs, running 5seconds for 40 yard, 2% bodyfat -- straight at you -- head down -- helmet first. Oh yeah. They trained on smashing into bags for this for 10 years.
Lots are a bit faster and around 230 or 250 lbs though.
https://www.inverse.com/article/37934-nfl-funded-study-brain...
Really? Because someone did just that in the AFC championship a week ago in order to (successfully) take out Rob Gronkowski.
Context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwALEoMUHrk.
Do NFL athletes really have 2% bodyfat? That's elite bodybuilding physique, and only sustained temporarily for competition. I find it hard to believe that football players can compete with so little fat.
I heard that in early boxing (no gloves) fighters very rarely knocked down opponents, because you don't want to attack head without gloves. Only after introduction of gloves deaths on the ring became an issue.
Which, face it, is actually a big draw for some folks. The lethality of the sport is by design.
[0] http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/16029747/rugby-nfl-concu...
The first thing we were all taught to do was tackle. The technique was to wrap your arms around the opponents legs, particularly below the knee as that would guarantee their stoppage. This was a simple but very effective technique. We never tried to go for the head, or lower our heads and hit them.
I never played football so I can't say if this technique would work there but it's at least one reason no one on my team suffered a concussion in two seasons.
CTE is almost by definition not concussion-related. The effects of concussions are part of the concussion.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1728218-rugby-player-welf...
I know time in the game is a factor, but idk what rugby is like for that. When do rugby players retire typically?
If it helps, here's the current squads for a few of the northern hemisphere teams with their ages listed. Lots in their 20s but a few current players have passed 30.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wales_national_rugby_union_tea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_national_rugby_union_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_national_rugby_union_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_national_rugby_union_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_national_rugby_union_te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_national_rugby_union_tea...
The American football is played in a series of short plays with long stretches of non-action between plays. This allows plays to be more explosive allowing players run at faster speeds for shorter distances. Also some of the rules lead to greater specialization, which favors some players become much larger (offensive linemen in particular) than rugby players. So the combination of greater mass and greater speed can lead to more dangerous play.
At least that's my take on it.
There are also other factors. The forward pass often puts receivers in dangerous positions, as they often have to turn and track the ball when it isn't thrown perfectly. Also, the stop and start nature combined with the spread in position that the threat of the forward pass creates more high speed head-on collisions. Extreme specialization among the positions also mean that there are a lot of very large, very fast people out there whose job is just to hit as hard as possible.
Those game mechanics also combine negatively with the amount of money at stake due to the extreme commercialization. A lot of these players grew up in high school or younger programs being told that if they want to go pro and make the big money, they have to be out there hitting the hardest, or there's always someone to take their spot. That isn't really incorrect, but it leads to poor outcomes.
In Australian football, AFL not rugby, we have recently seen a change in the rules where dangerous contact to the head is to be avoided and tightening medical governence on diagnosis of concussion during games. The initial reaction from fans was that making the game less rough bordered on pedantic but there's now an acceptance that degenerative brain injuries as mentioned in the article are a huge concern.
In football, once the receiver or running back has the ball, he is going to take a hit - likely from a defender who has been in full sprint for a good distance. Once he has the ball, he has 11 other players containing/funneling him and focused on crushing him.
In rugby, the ball carrier can pass or kick. That makes the game more one-on-one because the opposing team has to cover their guy. The width of the field needs to be considered. As a defender, you can't be reckless, you have to make sure you make the tackle. This means you go lower, you tackle the waist and slide down the legs of the runner.
I played at a decent level of rugby when I was younger... rugby players are not afraid of getting hurt. They do not ease up on a tackle because "i'm not wearing a helmet".
It's hard to gauge the effects of these kinds of changes without letting them play out, but I for one would love to see the NFL try this combination for a year.
How would that even work?
They did the same with offensive lines after all.
One feature that makes a difference is the American football system of downs: the next play begins where the last play ended, to the inch, and on many plays there is a nonlinear point. One inch short of a first down is vastly better for the defenders than just making it. In rugby someone taking another foot or two to go down isn't going to hurt the outcome the way it can in football. The goal in football is to stop the person in as little space as possible, which means maximizing the deceleration and thus the impact to the brain.
With the NFL, they also spent a decade and a half purposefully covering the link up and publishing biased science trying to obscure the link, so there is scandal on top of the horrors of the physical consequences.
Uh... what?
Lots of big hits happen on the line, both associated with tackles and not (a “pulling” offensive lineman hitting a defensive lineman or linebacker coming through an apparently open lane being a prime place big, non-tackle hits occur.)
Now, it may be true that because linemen are—compared to, e.g., wide recievers—built like tanks they visibly respond differently to the impacts (but that just means that something cumulatively bad for the brain won't be as likely to be limited by other more acute injuries), and it's definitely true that a lot of those impacts happen off the ball or as the play goes by, and so aren't as much a focus of attention and camera priority.
Concussions are the most common injury in the England professional rugby league so I would be surprised if Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is not an issue. CTE injuries in American Football are more common because because defensive players (primarily) use their helmet as projectiles when making tackles either intentionally or by accident.
yet MMA seems to get much more scrutiny( bans ect) than NFL.
I saw an interesting house regulatory committee meeting where people like Randy Couture testified on this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S03Z6a2ABWk
My problem is at the high school and college level. The kids are playing with great intensity for nothing more than love of the game and maybe the opportunity to move up. The long term risks seem way too high.
I'd say the same thing about kids playing soccer. I don't think heading the ball should be allowed in high school or college play. I was relieved when my daughter quit soccer.
That's the crux of the biggest issue. The NFL actively covered up/denied evidence that concussions were damaging for decades.
http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-expose-how-badly-nfl-p...
They're not actually protected in any way, because NFL contracts aren't guaranteed. Imagine what you would do if your doctor worked for your boss, and when your doctor asked if you were injured, telling the truth would allow your boss to fire you on the spot with zero compensation. Every time the subject comes up there's lots of whining by the NFL, but somehow the NBA, NHL, and MLB survived with essentially guaranteed contracts.
NFL players also don't actually have options. Scholarships are a joke and most of them learn virtually nothing. They started down the path to the NFL well before they were adults capable of making decisions, and by the time they're eligible for an NFL career, they typically don't have the academics to do much else. (Obviously there are exceptions, but Richard Sherman is not your average NFL player.)
2 - even at $1m/year, you may collect $550k after tax. Three years of that is not never work again money.
It's not FU money, but as an emergency fall back it is obviously plausibly never work again money.
I don't really see your point about $60k not getting you far at all since it's more than half the country makes. I understand you might have a more privileged view of what kind of lifestyle you expect to live, but you'd be doing better than half the country. You'll be fine.
So of course after 3 years of living like a monk you have $1.5 million stashed away...contrary to all rational expectations.
Well, less, because after income taxes and because as a young, invincible man among the best to play sports you spend money, maybe you have $300k left. If you're lucky.
But you're now unemployed, so you need healthcare. And the mortgage on your house is at least half that $60k/year because you're a young invincible sports hero.
You've been earning a half million dollars up to this point, so it's a safe bet it'll be very hard to scale your expenses down to $60k/year.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, except that your expectations of what an NFL player can/will do after being physically tortured for several years (high school, college, NFL) with hidden mental damage and having been a young, invincible man told you're the best of the best and surrounded by people eager to piggyback on your success...may be optimistic.
Still though, the median household income is in the $50ks. The 4% withdrawal rate means the base amount still grows with inflation, and so does your yearly withdrawal.
In other words, you can live a middle class life without ever working again. I would probably prefer to live a better lifestyle if that were an option. Sure, $1+ million isn't "fuck you" money, but it is "don't have to work ever again" money.
The median household income thing is also misleading. People earn much more with age. $30k is a good income for a 25-year old. It's in the bottom third for people above age 35. (It's even worse if you consider only college graduates, which NFL players almost all are.)
Also worth noting the NFL has a 2:1 match up to $10k/yr. So every year you put $10k into your NFL 401k the NFL gives you $20k in tax free income.
A quick google search didn't give me a good indication of what the royalties are to low end pro athletes. I would not be surprised if the after tax on those is greater than the taxes on their traditional income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jock_tax
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that they were all contractors.
Achieving this goal usually requires you to avoid serious brain damage. Repeated concussions and wisely living off the wealth you acquired in a few short years while still very young by managing it extraordinarily well for decades to come are probably mutually exclusive.
Still, medical coverage in the US generally sucks and I would hate to be saddled with medical bills following being a career athlete and no longer having the big NFL salary. I can't imagine it's happy fun times.
But this is not because they don't get enough money and more money would fix it (well, it it could be $trillions then maybe but it is never going to be that). It's because they don't have the right tools (widely understood) to manage their money properly, and their income structure is unlike income structure of many regular people (huge sums for very short period, then nothing - as opposed to much smaller sums over much longer period) and it requires very unobvious actions to make it work. If you have literally millions of dollars in your account, it's very hard not to buy some nice expensive things - even if you know you'd need those millions for decades to come, your brain doesn't really work this way. Some people manage it properly and create brands and side businesses for themselves or just live with reasonable expenses and are ok. Some spend too much and end up broke.
This "no experience managing a budget" stuff is hilarious, you don't need special knowledge not to blow millions. It is not hard. Let's call it what it is for most people - being trash, living extravagantly, and not thinking about the future. It's far more about character than about financial knowledge.
If you discount future earnings at 6% you get 1.8 millions for software engineering versus 2.67 million for NFL.
30 year treasuries pay roughly 3% before inflation.
Compare it to programmers who are pretty sure to get job once they finish school, have plenty of time for activities outside of programming and have much lower pressure on them either at the job (NFL equivalent) or while preparing for it.
Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco).
I think it's a playbook. They string out the lies over a long period, then let the suspicion trickle out slowly. So, there are moments of muted outrage along the way, but by the time the full story comes out the pressure build-up has already been relieved. Beyond that, the finally-admitted truth is something we already knew for so long that our outrage has waned.
Basically, a PSYOP.
And fossil fuel
It's bad that they hid it, no doubt. But couldn't people reason that taking thousands of blows to the head over a career was not a smart idea?
e.g.: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=f...
Even if you were able to "reason" that smoking was bad, there was a whole dedicated culture jamming operation to push the message "you're wrong and foolish if you think smoking is bad" and it worked very well.
Every NFL team had (has?) a bunch of doctors telling players that they can shrug off concussions and other serious injuries, and a deeply-engrained (and specifically engineered) culture to back up that message.
Looking at them now, you can literally see the stiff arms sticking in the air that is a symptom of brain trauma, and people getting up concussed as fuck.
Hell, science still can't agree on if an egg is healthy or not. I eat them because I enjoy them and their are no obvious downsides. If there were some correlation that was known and proved unhealthy I might stop eating them. For example, while big tobacco was doing their thing... people knew their family members smoking were unhealthy, coughing like crazy, getting cancer/sick, so their was some clues in society telling you that you're probably being lied to. I have memories of this as a kid, "Joe died at 55 but, you know, he smoked 2 packs a day" was a valid way of thinking. So the health effects were widely known, just not in a measurable & undisputed scientific way.
The same thing goes for tobacco, NFL, climate change, ... all kinds of stuff. The anecdotal information around you says one thing, but the scientist can't agree and some of them are biased/being paid to say something regardless of truth. Years later the anecdotal information turns out to be true and people claim they were victims when really they could have just exercised some common sense.
You can't really leave it at that though. Most learning that people do is not independently driven, it is learning that complements teaching... which is never independent. Very rarely do people come to intelligent conclusions independently.
"Does football cause brain damage" is relevant to discussions of whether I should play football, whether my friends or family should play football, whether anyone should play football, whether it's ethical to watch football, whether it's more fun to watch football than golf, whether it's appropriate for educational institutions to promote or participate in football...
I'll also suggest that if it turned out that football promoted the better functioning of your brain, outrage at the NFL for covering up research suggesting the opposite would be pretty muted. If you believe that, you should also believe that what everyone sees as "the big issue" is the brain damage, not the coverup.
It was much more interesting to hear how much the NFL had covered up, and the degree to which they directly lied about the evidence of the effects of playing the game.
The cover-up is the scandalous part, so of course that's the part that people are going to focus on.
It's possible that you can't play football (or soccer) at a professional level without accepting that risk.
One of the arguments in the article is that not even for NFL players, at the highest level, are the consequences made obvious. Here's the last paragraph:
> But when all those big hits happened and the fans cheered, did they cheer in spite of knowing a man just greatly increased his risk for dementia? Was anyone worried about an A.L.S. diagnosis or a C.T.E.-related suicide at 40 after their favorite player suffered repeated blows to the head on the field? No, they cheered and they celebrated because they didn’t know. And neither did we.
A better solution would be weight limits and stricter controls on doping, not looser.
To your second point, there's a recent push to ban tackling at levels below high school football (and play flag football instead). The current theory is that it's not the big hits that cause brain damage, but all the smaller "sub-concussive" hits that happen on every play. Eliminating those until high school would hopefully limit the long-term damage of football, especially for kids who only play through high school or college. I don't think banning tackling at either of those levels is feasible, though; college football is a huge business itself, and a change as dramatic as eliminating tackling there would completely change the sport.
The American Flag Football League is one of the organizations trying to take over this space (they recently played a game in Levi's Stadium with Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, among others). Here are the full rules if you're interested! https://www.americanflag.football/official-rules/.
By comparison, a 4-year degree is probably worth more in the long-term than those NFL earnings. So the players are actually being better compensated in college than the NFL.
Edit:
The median salary for an NFL player is about $770K and most players are out of the league in under 3 years.
https://www.si.com/nfl/2016/03/01/nfl-careers-shortened-two-...
http://blog.futureadvisor.com/nfl-players-must-go-long-on-re...
On the other hand, engineering degrees tended to hover around $4M for average lifetime earnings, and some engineering fields (petroleum engineer, SV software engineer) averaged ~$6.5M in lifetime earnings.
In short, I think we should define the group by factors that result from choice, not outcome.
It's not like they're incapable of working once they're out of the NFL. Most of them will be qualified for coaching jobs at the college or high school level. Also, most of them will have college degrees (or be a year away from a college degree), so job finding wont be nearly as difficult as if they hadn't played football.
There are many options to take a sensible position somewhere between the extremes.
Look up the meaning of "govern." It almost literally means "telling people what to do." You're a person. The government will tell you what to do with your business. That's it's only job. It's the sole reason it exists.
Nope. We should put adequate warnings on the cigarettes, so the customers know what exactly they are buying.
We should do the same with professional sports -- tell everyone the risk according to our best knowledge, and then let them decide.
OK. Where's the limit? That kind of protecting people from making their own decisions (including objectively bad ones) has always struck me as dystopian.
I think it's a good idea to educate people on the costs of their actions, and that we should find ways to impress on an emotional level how present actions will affect someone's future. I think it's a bad idea for society to make the decision for them, though.
It's not just a bad idea, it's totally immoral and unacceptable. Denying a person their agency is denying the very essence of what makes them human. It's no different than slavery in principle. Either you have self-ownership or not, there is no middle ground.
A single person without any family, can do everything he wants in their personal space. That will not harm anyone else. If they do that, earn a living and get famous, that will hurt their family and future generations too. That's why we need law and regulations.
Taking your example of sports: An organized league is something that an athlete joins by choice. The athlete agrees to abide by certain rules as a condition of participating in that league; they aren't being forced to give up their right to choice, they're choosing to.
The comment you responded to isn't arguing against laws and regulations, it's arguing against laws that take away agency for some reason besides protecting equal rights (e.g. someone's swinging fists aren't going to hit anyone else, but "we" don't like that, so we'll prohibit them from swinging their fists, because we feel it's for their own good).
Society shouldn't dictate what's good for the individual; the individual must.
Your argument might hold water if most NFL players took up football after reaching adulthood. This seems highly unlikely to me.
If this is true, maybe an alternative to making the game more "safe" were to think about whether practically living for the sport for 20 years as part of a professional career makes sense.
I played field hockey in school & college. And once was involved in a head on collision with a friend, who suffered a bloody nose/face and was taken to hospital. And I was shit scared, until I knew he was safe, very luckily for me.
I have come to hate all sports like boxing/wrestling/soccer etc. for this reason. There are plenty of athletics and sports where you display your individual skill at a distance from another person to choose from.
I think, these sports are simply not probability friendly. When many people play, somebody is bound to get seriously injured.
Tech solutions are a great place for this but its not a moral issue. He chose to play pro football. Its not footballs fault. And not every player gets brain damage so lets hear some numbers on that. What was this guys diet? Some people get brain damage that dont play football.
College is a feeder to the NFL. High school is a feeder to College, etc. Once you limit the source of nourishment, it will die in it's current state, but it will take a while.
It may also require coordinated action, since no one wants to be the first college to give up the cash cow. This is where action by the NCAA or even legislation would be helpful.
Completely true, and the previous generation of players rightly deserves compensation for being lied to by the NFL. They didn't know the devil's bargain they were striking. But the next generation? The ones who do now know?
Muhammand Ali was suffering from severe brain damage as early as 29, but kept boxing anyway because he was addicted to the fame and the glory. He'd come out of a match slurring his words and struggling to maintain a normal stride, yet would still deny any possibility of his brain being damaged by all the fighting. He was too tough, he was too fast, he was too macho. Until he wasn't, and then it was too late. This all coming after nearly a century of research showing the degenerative effects of boxing on the human mind.
Some jobs simply carry with them the understanding you are going to be "used up" by participating. Wrestlers, boxers, hockey players, and now footballers. Some men are willing to destroy themselves in pursuit of wealth and fame, and it's difficult to say it's our job as a society to overrule their choices about their own bodies.
However, I do think pop culture should try to stop downplaying the effects of this kind of stuff. Super heroes, for example, send the message to kids that you can engage in violence altercations for decades, and the only negative impacts will be physical (if they exist at all). I laughed out loud during TKDR when Batman's only injury from all his fighting is a bum knee and a few scars - his brain should be mush, are you kidding me?
I think one of the more interesting comparisons starts when you look past professions that promise fame and fortune, and start looking at jobs like firefighting, police work, and military service. I would argue that there is a similar progression of personnel (as evidenced by earlier retirement and pension ages for these professions) but the pot of gold at the end of rainbow is less celebrity and more a consistent job and service to one's community. Where do those professions stand on the spectrum?
So is it really their own fault? Or is it an institutional issue?
Sports you wouldn't necessarily expect, like ice skating, have problems with concussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel
But there are all sorts of dangerous jobs. Deep sea fishermen, coal miners, oil riggers, heck even long haul truckers are high risk due to how dangerous highway travel is. People are allowed to make decisions on their own about the trade-offs and run their own lives.
If you want a job that is less risky, study hard and go to college. Then you can get an office job and all of the things that come with that (obesity, diabetes, and heart disease).
You are not arguing for people making trade-offs. You are implying that there is something wrong with telling people convincingly about risks and consequences before they make the choice.
“They Basically Reset My Brain”
I thought this was an interesting read after reading the headline. It is an article about a person who struggles to regain his mind after concussions after concussions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14436417
Linemen are the most prone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leighsteinberg/2017/07/25/cte-s...