I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
> 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.
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.
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.
Sports you wouldn't necessarily expect, like ice skating, have problems with concussions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/01/nfl-concussion-super-bow...
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Linemen are the most prone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leighsteinberg/2017/07/25/cte-s...
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
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.
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.
I 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.
- Terry Pratchett, Night Watch