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Comment by snomad | Hacker News Reader

Their is some measurable chance the NFL and football disappear w/in 30 years. Sooner or later a college / high school will lose a lawsuit for a player w/CTE, and schools will have no choice but to stop participation. Once that happens, talent level and interest in the sport will die off. Kinda silly cities are in such a rush to continue building new stadiums.

The unspoken elephant whenever these studies come up is skiing and snowboarding. Lots more participants, and I bet the concussion rate is similarly high over X number of visits. Damn well better not make me wear helmet though, my worst injuries came when I had one on (overconfidence syndrome)

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The NFL has a minimum salary of $450,000. 3-4 years in NFL at that will earn you more than the average American earns in a lifetime. That's probably a rational economic trade-off for the risk of CTE.

NFL salaries aren’t guaranteed by default. That 450k is paid weekly during the season and the player can be cut at any time. I don’t know what the median amount of money earned by NFL players is but it is likely well below 1.5 million.

I think a lawsuit stopping the sport is highly unlikely. It’ll die off gradually as the game is starved off of young participants, which sap it of both elite players and viewers. See: boxing.

And I think it’s much too soon to say other sports with occasional head impacts are bad to do now that football is known to be unsafe. Football has head to head collisions as a matter of course, every play. Soccer, with the header, is much more likely to be next to come under scrutiny IMO.

Boxing had a similar problem, but the solution was that they changed the rules and the fan base dwindled after that. "Football" will likely take a similar path.

I don't think a lawsuit will stop it. There's too much money and citizen support. One way or another, they would settle and it would go away.

as soon as there's a precedent that schools (particularly high schools but also colleges) are financially responsible for CTE in football players (and possibly other sports) they'll be unable to get insurance which means those programs will be shut down

without school programs as a pipeline the nfl probably can't continue to exist

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