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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Hockey has the advantage that the sport could we reworked into something less violent. Hockey could survive a change to the rules that would reduce blows to the head.

Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable.

Actually, that might be worse... If hockey turns out to have as bad a concussion problem, the leadership of the sport is likely even more culpable because they had more options to fix the problem than football does.

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I think the rules could get reworked to make it less dangerous for brain injury. Take a cue from Australian Rules Football: remove all padding and make high tackles that endanger the head illegal.

Great idea! Less head injuries, but still a hard-hittin' sport https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aU0hz5Tf8

Virtually every example of a "big hit" in that video ends with the person who got hit showing the fencing response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_response). That body pose indicates a pretty severe concussion.

In fact, the most popular video on YouTube about the fencing response has a shocking amount of overlap with the "big hits" video you shared. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXjwAlOflA

Frankly, your video was kind of hard to watch. It's basically 3 minutes of people getting their brains rattled in their skulls.

That's true! I didn't think about it because it was a collection of "rare" events - hitting above the shoulders is not a valid tackle. Usually won't get these hits in a game.

But still, obviously it certainly exists, and I'm sure there is a lot of head trauma every year.

I have never seen this video. I always had heard that without the gear that rugby was less brutal than football -- but seriously I don't know. Those hits looked devastating... I could not watch that sport.

That's not rugby, it's Aussie Rules, but those are illegal tackles in both sports. I don't know why the poster chose a video of vicious fouls to make his point about safety.

What % of players are going to get such a tackle once in their careers? How many are going to get five?

Rugby and league have no padding and those rules. It doesn't appear to anywhere close to enough.

It's still a risky and violent sport, but the issue of hard-to-identify-and-track accumulated damage is lessened.

Rugby is a much better analogue to gridiron - it's essentially the same game. Two lines of players run at each other, with a certain number of attempts to run the ball downfield, and almost every 'play' has contact of players running in opposite directions. Aussie Rules is much more freeform and has fewer 'opposing hits'.

However, much as we aussies like to mock gridiron for the pads it requires, without the pads, players used to die relatively routinely. Take the pads away from gridiron and it would need to change and loosen up enough that it basically becomes rugby.

Well, if they switched to rugby, then they could play internationally against established rugby teams.

But I'm not sure American broadcasters could adjust to a game with only two halfs of 40min each, no stopping of the clock and nowhere to stuff their abundance of ads.

> abundance of ads

I wouldn't mock the Americans too much for their famous love of advertising. I haven't found a sport yet that is as much a slave to advertising as Aussie Rules. Try to find a square meter of space[1] at an AFL game without advertising - even the ball itself is adorned with the golden arches.

[1] Okay, some of the grass doesn't have advertising on it.....

We could just plaster the ads all over the jerseys like Europeans do.

Rugby is a much better analogue to gridiron - it's essentially the same game.

The huge and essential difference is that in gridiron the players in the 'scrum' start ~2m appart and run towards each other head first at full speed. And while most players in rugby can go several plays without taking a hit, linemen take a significant hit basically every single play.

>no padding

This is offered as a solution a lot, but I am not sure if it would actually be effective. Football helmets were introduce early in the 20th century because dozens of people were dying every year playing football. Football helmets put an end to those deaths caused by acute trauma, but the physics of the game and those collisions haven't changed. Football is just a more violent game than Rugby due to various reasons like position specialization, more frequent stoppages of play, and the inherent directions of play for the offense and defense. It is rare to have two players in rugby running full speed at each other head on. That happens in football on nearly every play and often multiple times per play.

> In the NFL 18.8% of injuries occur at or above the shoulders, the area where athletes wear the most protective equipment. In the AFL 11.5% of AFL injuries occur in this area, where they wear virtually no protection.

Source: https://medium.com/upstart-magazine/nfl-vs-afl-injury-compar...

Helmets enable players to weaponize their heads, like this recent hit (Vontaze Burfict's suspension earning HIT on Anthony Sherman): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7qQtadYqsI and many others demonstrate. I believe removing helmets would mitigate this behaviour and increase the long term health of football players. Looking for data on Aussie rules, this is not quite what I was hoping to find, but interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_rules_footb...

Without question Aussie rules has its share of devastating brain injuries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aU0hz5Tf8. Plenty of concussions and fencing responses in that clip.

At 33, I've stopped watching North American football altogether because the violence turned me off. 10 years ago it was my second fav sports (to Hockey).

With relatively rested players lining up against each other on every down the situation is much different from players chasing each other on the field like they do in AFL.

WRs for example have a somewhat similar situation to AFL players since they are mostly being chased by the defense and they don't get nearly as many contact injuries as RBs for example. Not to mention they are protected by (frequently controversial) pass interference rules.

From what I gather, introduction of the helmets back in the day reduced injury rates.

There's also suspicion, if I recall correctly, that the routine repetitions of linemen taking knocks to the head in practice does more long term damage than what we see on game day. This may be more pronounced in high schools and to a lesser extent, college, where the coaching can be more suspect.

Yes, research has suggested that a number of smaller collisions can cause damage even if a player never suffers an actual concussion. A helmet also only protects you from external trauma. It acts as a second skull. But the problem isn't always from external trauma. If you are moving at speed and you are put to an immediate stop due to a collision with another player, your entire body experiences a lot of force. Your brain will end up colliding with the inside of your skull due to inertia regardless of whether you were hit in the head or not. That is why simply cutting headshots out of the game or removing helmets won't be enough to protect players. It really gets down to the fundamental nature of football and the physics of its collisions.

Analogy I've stolen from a Uni. of Toronto brain doctor: fill a mason jar (skull) with water (cerebrospinal fluid), and throw in a golf ball (brain). Shake the jar, the golf ball will hit the side of the jar.

You could bubble wrap the jar (helmet), but the ball will still collide with the inside of the jar.

> It is rare to have two players in rugby running full speed at each other head on.

When they run towards each other, due to the rules, they don't just try and collide and call it a "tackle". I agree football is a more violent game intentionally but it's purely how the game is played and if you change the rules you'd have teams finding ways to play differently, with different skillsets prioritised.

I too was going to suggest the counter-intuitive 'remove the helmets' until you said that. Wasn't it the case that there were some form of padded helmet then? What was it like when there was no headgear of any sort? It is still a fact that there isn't this brain trauma issue in professional rugby. As a former player I assure you the contact is real and I suffer for it every day but thankfully not my brain - (well you be the judge). :)

Head contact, boarding, and checking from behind are already illegal.

I agree hockey could survive the elimination of checking, and think it probably will happen eventually. It's not even introduced until 14U age and younger kids learn to play with body contact only.

It would be a different game but all the skilled puck handling, skating, passing, shooting and speed would remain.

The rules could get reworked, but I seriously doubt if they ever will. Maybe its possible to slowly change the game over time, but completely changing the rules overnight would be too dramatic and risky for any league to really get behind. The best chance is probably for the NFL to come up with a long term plan to fix things, but that'd require them to admit the problem, which I don't think will ever happen.

Go back to leather helmets and cotton pads and it's a different game. No reason we need to turn their heads into sledgehammers. We do that because then they feel more comfortable with the big unsafe hits and the flying around but we could get back to the real game with the ruck style running game and wideouts with hand fighting all the way down the sideline and half the commercials and I bet ratings would start going up.

Ratings may go up, but with half as many commercials the profits would also go down. The league only cares about ratings insofar as it helps their bottom line.

I'm not saying these changes would be a bad thing, only that I have doubts it'll ever happen.

meh if they sold it for $2 or $4 per game directly to the customer they would get the money anyway. They need to look at new ways to monitize and it probably involves cutting the commercials and the middle men and putting the money directly in their pockets. The only reason they need cable is for 1. distribution which is not an issue since the internet. 2. to splice the commercials in which could easily be done. Sell the games directly and get 100% of your add revenue and you'd probably make more.

If viewership continues to go down, and parent stop letting their kids play at lower levels because of health conserns, they will also lose money.

As a big hockey fan, I completely agree with this. The pads players wore 30+ years ago were pretty much nothing so if you tried to hit someone hard it hurt you as well. My theory is that the NHL would see less concussions if they reduced the padding but such a counter-intuitive process is never going to happen.

I'm curious, did Australian Rules Football go to padding and then remove it? Because I think that once padding is put in place, it's very tough to get people to remove it.

AFL has never had padding.

One big reason for padding that is not directly related to player-on-player contact is getting hit with the puck. I play in beer league hockey (non-check) as a defense man and I wear full shoulder and chest pads to protect from the puck, not hits from other players. At the pro level, taking a hit from a puck without padding could easily cause very severe injury.

American football is also obsessively measured. The difference of a few yards at any point in time can be the difference of a game. Players are also obsessively measured for their performance, so every second counts towards a professional player's career - and their compensation.

Players are highly incentivized to "give it their all", and that's how people end up getting injured or receive massive head trauma.

Hockey can be just as violent, but it's a much more fluid sport, so the pressure isn't on as much for the extra exceptional effort.

s/difference of a few yards/difference of 1 yard/

signed, this totally not still upset Seahawks fan.

(re: 2015 Superbowl)

I don't understand Rugby, Australian rules, or Gaelic football especially well (or US football for that matter, though I've watched it casually over the years), but my understanding is that tacking in these sports has a different purpose and that tackling technique reflects this. You may be on to something with you comment about yards - in American football, it can even be a game of inches. As a result, tackling isn't a way to halt play or stop someone, or to transition during flow of play - you need to essentially completely halt that person's forward movement without even giving an inch.

I've thought this may be why American football has more of the full body collision, where two (very large and powerfully built) men collide at high velocity almost horizontal to the earth. They're trying to gain as little as a few inches in the collision.

I've heard complaints from Australian rules players who come to the US about tackling - that the way US players have learned to tackle doesn't have much strategic value and greatly increases the possibility of injury, buy they continue to tackle this way when they join Australian rules leagues.

That's what I've heard and thought about, I do want to be clear that I don't know too much about all this - what I've written is more of a question in case someone in the know could weigh in.

Another difference on tackling in Rugby: you can only tackle the ball carrier.

Not sure what you're saying here...are you equating blocking and tackling?

In American football you also may only tackle the ball carrier. You can initiate contact other guys (usually in the form of blocking), and that can be very violent at times...but I don't think there's a scenario where you can tackle someone without the ball (and it not be called for a penalty).

In rugby there is no blocking. The only time non-ball carriers come into contact with the opposing team is during a scrum or accidental collision (which are quite rare).

Or a ruck - clearing out the ruck, it's allowed there. Or a catch and drive in the lineout. But yes, the contact in these situations is more pushing than collisions.

Yes. Far less physical however. You can 'join' a ruck, but not tackle full steam, let alone a shoulder charge or direct hit.

Or in Rugby Union, during a ruck or maul.

The main difference in tackling technique between American Football and both codes of Rugby is use of the arms. In Rugby the arms must be used to tackle the opposing player. A shoulder charge, with no arms used, is illegal and may result in expulsion from the game. In a recent New Zealand vs British and Irish Lions game, NZ player Sonny Bill Williams was given a red card and sent from the pitch for this exact offence.

The other main points to note are that the opposing player can only be tackled below shoulder level and, as you've pointed out, in open play only the ball carrying may be tackled (or blocked).

And even the scrums have reduced contact nowadays; arguably this has resulted in them becoming rather difficult to execute well, and they're becoming a bane to the modern game. Tweaking these things does have knock on effects.

I think there's been a positive change since Rugby Union scum engagements went from "Crouch-Touch-Pause-Engage" to "Crouch-Bind-Set". The initial contact is not as violent, and it would seem far fewer scrums are collapsing, especially on the point of engagement.

I don't have stats to back this up, but my general impression over the last couple of seasons is that less scrums require resetting.

Tackling in American football is almost gone from the game. The object now seems to be to smash into the ball carrier as hard as humanly possible and hope he falls down. You rarely see a receiver or quarterback tackled, you see the defender simply run into him as fast and hard as he can. Watch some film from the 50's and 60's and you will immediately see the difference.

This is because defensive scoring opportunities (turnovers) are so valuable in American football that defenders are pushed to do whatever they can to get the carrier to fumble, and this usually means launching themselves "at the ball" every time.

Tackling the ball itself and not the player.

There is another factor at play here: Rugby, Australian rules, and Gaelic league wear next to no equipment. The problem with American Football is the players are geared up with heavily padded helmets. This has the effect of turning heads into battering rams. You wouldn't see 2 rugby players run into each other full steam because they don't have gear and would break bones and get cut. The gear lessens brain impact but does not eliminate it. So you then get higher impact forces that appear less brutal due to non visible trauma to the brain that is being rattled the whole time.

The other big difference is what's obsessively measured.

A few yards makes a huge difference in rugby, and players are certainly highly incentivised to give it their all, but even for the battering ram-type players, their ability to help the team actually get the ball across the gain line is a function of the stamina and mobility to get around the pitch for multiple phases of play, complex situational awareness and some degree of ball handling skills, not just the ability to block off the man directly in front of them for a few plays.

Not to mention rugby's increasingly strictly applied and penalised rules on what is and isn't a legal tackle which mean that a player who doesn't tackle in a relatively safe manner will be a liability to their teammates as well as themselves

What?

There are just five men on the ice for a team in hockey, there's arguably more pressure for each individual player to "give it their all" at any one moment than in football where there's 11 men on the field.

As someone lucky to be from Pittsburgh where we have both the Penguins and Steelers consistently being the top teams in the NHL and NFL respectively, there is no shortage of serious brain trauma in the NHL. Just ask Sidney Crosby.

> Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable.

And yet, rubgy and Australian football have just as much contact and do not suffer from an endemic injury problem.

Maybe something related to the padding?

Here's a bit where they measured the force of rugby -vs- football tackles. Football is 3 times harder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7tGY-VDx3o

Don't have much commentary on the subject and just wanted to share the vid. I'd only think that a difference like that can't really be resolved to padding.

It's a pretty unfair comparison, though I'd expect it's largely representative.

A rugby union player has to run around the pitch for 2 bouts of 40 minutes [about 40 minutes of 'ball in play' time]. According to this article - https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-comm... - the average NFL match is 11 minutes of action, in [average] 4s bursts, over a 3+ hour period. Many NFL positions can optimise for muscle mass without worrying about stamina and sustained speed.

FWIW the measured tackle and at least one footage tackle [8mins 26s] in your linked video - https://youtu.be/TSc_Gxq1two - look illegal to me, lifting a player and pushing them down with head/shoulders first towards the ground (spearing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear_tackle) is a red-card offence.

> Many NFL positions can optimise for muscle mass without worrying about stamina and sustained speed.

Not just mass. What I often hear NFL athletes and trainers talk about maximizing "explosion" in their movements.

Rubgy has much less contact than american football. You can't just tackle people without the ball.

You're also not allowed to tackle a player without the ball in American football. You're allowed to block, but when two players come together, especially at the snap, it can be a violent collision.

A quick Googling of that suggests otherwise:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/one-seaso...

Aussie Rules has nowhere near as much contact as gridiron, and the kind of contact it has is rarely as full-on as in gridiron. There's no real contact in aussie rules if you're not on the ball, whereas every play in gridiron, more than half the players are slamming into each other, regardless of what's happening.

Most of the contact in aussie rules is tackling from behind, whereas in gridiron on every play you have around nine guys smashing into each other just as the quarterback receives the ball... and then all the additional contact depending on the play, including tackling like in aussie rules.

Here in Melbourne there was a news article recently about some AFL players who got high on drugs and alcohol and set a dwarf alight.

It may be harder to detect chronic brain trauma in that population.

For some context, here is an article from the aftermath of that incident: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/sep/03/afl-st-kilda-d...

I'd say this is not true. The doctor from the movie "Concussion" said that Rugby, most martial arts, and lacrosse are all sports that need massive modification for those under 18. Adults can make their own decisions, he said, but these sports are demonstrably bad for brain-safety.

Hockey can be a beautiful game of finesse, speed, and precision. It could absolutely be re-worked.

Football is fundamentally flawed. Many positions exist entirely because it's rough and violent. Players who never touch the football in a well played game.

Football can also be played with flags or where players are not tackled by saying the play is over when momentum is stopped. Countless intramural and pickup games are played like this every day. And you still have an offensive line in setup, depending on the number of players.

Aaaaand viewership drops 90%.

>>Hockey can be a beautiful game of finesse, speed, and precision. It could absolutely be re-worked.

Indeed. Olympic hockey is a perfect example of a step in that direction, and one of the greatest versions of the game in existence.

Watching the Canadian national hockey team is one of the highlights of the Winter Olympics. The US team would be better if it had access to all those kids wasting their athletic potential on the worst sport in the world--football--and the second-worst sport in the world--soccer.

If it ditched the requirement that the game always be played on ice, the skill level of hockey in the US could be comparable to its basketball. All those high school football stadiums could get some asphalt surface, chainlink fencing to stand in for the glass, and a few sets of sticks and inline skates, and we could all watch hockey on Friday nights instead of kids knocking their skulls together.

Lacrosse or field hockey is basically hockey on foot. Floor/Ball hockey played in an arena apparently breaks at very high skills and you need the changes added by the formerly named sports to make it work. Roller hockey never really caught on.

I grew up playing field hockey (as well as rugby union) as a kid in New Zealand. Such a fun sport!

Yes, any of those would be better than football.

Even shirling (snake baiting) would be better. No-fly Quidditch would be better. Robot fighting league would be better. Two old barbershop guys telling shaggy dog stories would be better. A magnified view of an ant colony devouring a moth would be better. Just watching the grass on the field grow would be... worse. There is a line.

>Hockey has the advantage that the sport could we reworked into something less violent. Hockey could survive a change to the rules that would reduce blows to the head.

Could it? I wonder how many people would continue to watch hockey if fights weren't essentially sanctioned as a part of the game. I imagine only the diehards as it's not the most entertaining sport in the world...

I mean, only about a third of hockey games have a fight, and usually it's not that dramatic. Part of the issue though is that fights are partly for players to enforce unwritten rules about sportsmanship, so if you got rid of fights there is some bad conduct that might increase that could also be dangerous.

The answer for the bad conduct is suspensions, but the PA fights hard to keep them toothless. I don't understand why they want to defend their member giving dirty hits instead of the one receiving them, but it certainly seems that way to me.

Who really likes the fights, though? I don't know anyone who does. They are more boring than commercials.

I don't think it's the fights though. They're mostly just hugging. I think the checks are what do the damage.

College hockey has no fights and is awesome to watch. (Go Red!)

https://www.cbssports.com/nhl/news/hockey-fights-are-going-a...

http://awfulannouncing.com/nhl/2016-17-nhl-ratings-dropped-u...

I think hockey would not be affected much, but NASCAR would drop precipitously if they reworked safety, car design, and rules such that there were no more major crashes.

NASCAR is already dropping precipitously.

I'm a traditionalist; I like the fights. But it's a very, very tiny part of the game. There's basically nobody who actually follows hockey who is doing so primarily for the fights, as you seem to be suggesting. That's an opinion that only someone who doesn't follow hockey could think makes enough sense to say aloud.

field hockey is not as violent as ice hockey and they could implement the same rules over. I believe Rugby too is not as violent as American Football but I guess less exciting ? (I don't watch either so don't know).

I think Rugby Union is more interesting than American Football (in my biased opinion), because the ball is in play for a lot longer and the game has better momentum. Then again, many Rugby Union vs Rugby League debates involve the criticism of Union that it is too stop-start.

There is certainly a growing awareness of head injuries in Union and League at all levels. Players which show any sign of head trauma are (should be) immediately removed from the field for a 10 minute evaluation. However, having played Union for nearly 20 years (from the age of 14), I can attest to the fact that there are many occasions where a head clash occurs which doesn't result in concussion, but still can't be very healthy.

Besides head injuries, I've required an ACL operation due to Rugby injury. My shoulders and back are also in pretty bad shape. I now have a young son and am really trying to steer him towards cricket rather than Rugby.

Rugby has gone through periods of being a boring game and has had constant rule changes to try and make it more interesting, some of which significantly changed the nature of the game.

The period of constant scrums was an especially dull period, as was the rolling mauls period. I vaguely remember a period of constant punts from each side down the field. I haven't kept up to date with Rugby, but google seems to suggest boring rolling mauls are back.

As an Englishman, I still have to say cricket is one of the most boring sports to play, with only 3 players in a team of 22 doing anything even vaguely interesting at any one time (batter, bowler, wicket keeper, 9 other players are literally sitting doing nothing and 9 others are standing around).

It's less a sport and more an excuse to lounge around.

For all it's faults with prima-donnas, football is one of the most engaging team sports with much less risk of injury than rugby or ball-in-the-face field hockey.

>"football is one of the most engaging team sports"

Do you mean Association Football there, ie "soccer"?

For a few hundred million in the world it's soccer, for billions of people, it's football.

I think the parent was legitimately uncertain which one you meant. After all, this is a discussion about an article on American football on a forum hosted by a US-based company.

For me it's "football", I was looking for disambiguation. People in the UK often hate USA-ians calling it soccer, despite that name coming from the UK. The comment was a question, hence the punctuation.

As an ex-prop forward, I have to say scrums (especially), rucks and mauls are a fascinating part of the sport. These aspects are what really differentiates the game of Rugby Union from Rugby League.

Regarding cricket, this too is an evolving sport. The emergence of T20 (20 overs per team) has a completely different appeal to 5 day Test matches. Try watching a game of Indian Premier League (IPL) or Australian Big Bash cricket. Batting is back in the ascendancy, with sixes and fours galore. Very much mass appeal, light sporting entertainment.

> For all it's faults with prima-donnas, football is one of the most engaging team sports with much less risk of injury than rugby or ball-in-the-face field hockey.

It's heading the ball that's apparently the biggest source of concussive damage in football.

Or even better, change it to flag football

In the UK we have rugby, a similar sport without all the armour.

While there is a problem with concussions[1], it's nowhere near the scale of American Handball.

[1]https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25182-rugby-players-w...

I think you know that rugby is played and known worldwide (even in the US), and that football refers to the fact that the players are on foot and in fact rugby, soccer and American football all share a common ancestor.

> football refers to the fact that the players are on foot

Really? As opposed to what? Polo? Quidditch? Beer pong?

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