Only thing safer helmets will do is encourage players to hit harder and harder, until someone really gets killed.
I hope one day I will get to see the end of football. Why would any parent enroll their child in this sport?
I hope one day I will get to see the end of football. Why would any parent enroll their child in this sport?
The problem is if the those responsible for the athletes are not upfront on the risks, or if the athlete is not able to make a proper judgement to consent, like a child.
Up in Canada the pro-contact hockey crowd loves to talk about "teaching kids how to hit properly" which I'd suspect is a similar attitude to those coaching 5-yr-olds in full-pads football. But what does this mean? They seem to think that by addressing the technique of what is at it's a core a violent and damaging activity you can somehow mitigate the effects. I'm not buying it. Football is even worse; it's not the highlight reel tackles but the every single play collisions at the line that lead to long term, consistently demonstrated traumatic head injuries.
Frankly I feel that the NFL working to address the root causes of head injuries is like asking Facebook to take care of personal information and privacy protection. They are entirely incompatible.
Hitting properly means using your shoulders and hitting the player in the shoulders or chest.
Field hockey ( just called hockey in Europe ) doesn't involve bodily contact.
It comes across as though you've never actually played football or been on a football team. Players on one team largely go out of their way to avoid injuring players on the other team. The vast majority of the game is free motion, not the application of violence. Another large fraction of the game is what can best be described as aggressive shoving and using your body to push or block, not super violent at all.
The quarterback, further, doesn't lead the defense. The job of the offense, which the QB leads, is to score. Ideally that occurs with the minimum amount of violence necessary, not the maximum amount. Offensive players mostly want to avoid that whenever possible. The quarterback does not inherently lead the team and does not lead the defense at all (ie the primary appliers of violence).
The quarterback is popular because he's the center of the offense, which does the scoring, which is exciting. Not because he leads a violent machine. Basketball players in high school that are talented, are equally popular, because scoring points is exciting in every sport.
Hockey is occasionally a quite violent sport. Gretzky wasn't one of the most popular players in hockey history because he was violent - it was because he scored at a rate nobody else ever has. The same goes for Mario Lemieux and countless other scorers.
Baseball is particularly not violent. You know, America's pastime sport that tens of millions of people go to see every year and is wildly popular.
Basketball is no more violent than soccer.
The big open-field head-on-head hits are horrific but not the ones that lead to every single brain that's been analyzed showing evidence of CTE.
The NFL will live with having to handle the freak accidents; they can't exist in a world where playing football => long term traumatic brain injury
Perhaps an actual argument that supports your claim would be better. You haven't even established for a fact that the US likes violent entertainment more than other nations. So start there before moving on to 1980's teenage comedy notions of high school popularity to explain it.
For the poor, it is a way out. Even if you don't hit the pro level, being good at football can get you a full ride scholarship to a great school.
One of my friends at Berkeley was in exactly this situation. He grew up very very poor, played football at the local high school, and managed to get a football scholarship to Berkeley. He wasn't very good at football, and rarely played at all, but he did get a full ride scholarship that covered tuition, housing, food, books, and a small stipend for living expenses. He also got a job working in the residence halls, which also came with free housing and food, so he basically made money in college.
Then he graduated with a PhD in Education. He could have never afforded that without football.
That's a lot of student athletes getting scholarships, and most of them don't continue in their sport after graduation.
There are major downsides too: The kids are often used; they work incredibly hard, get paid nothing, and then get tossed in the gutter unless they make the NFL. Literally, I've read many stories where the coach stops talking to the kid (remember, 18, 19 years old often) and then someone gives him a bus ticket home - so much for education. The great majority of those who stay don't make the NFL; they leave with a lifetime of injuries, poor education (because they were discouraged from taking serious classes and often don't graduate), and no skills or prospects. The school, however, made tens or hundreds of millions, the coach made millions, TV networks made millions (billions?) ... a great business having free labor.
Also, the money and the intense loyalty invites incredible corruption; almost every leading program has had major corruption problems, with Penn State being the worst (systematic child rape covered up for years, so that the football program wouldn't be disrupted).
EDIT: Major edits
Which, frankly, makes the fact that you cannot enter the NFL at 18 even more egregious. It's a mutually beneficial scenario for the NCAA and the NFL at the expense of (often disadvantaged) people at or near the physical peak of their career.
Which one do you think the NFL cares more about?
It's core to the image of Football.
But the thing is: they still watch. Yeah, there'd be calls of it being "soft" or "these guys couldn't play with the greats from yesteryear" or the like as there are now, but they'd still watch. The second biggest sport in the US that I can think of (could very well be wrong) is the NBA and it isn't really known for violence being beneficial to the players/game (after the 90s, a lot of what would fly before stopped). Yeah, there are flops or drawing flags by intentionally getting into a play, but it seems the preferred method to force fouls at the end of the game isn't to blindside your opponent but to draw the ref's attention and hold/grab the opposing player.
I was a bit bummed with the "boycott" over the knee taking as I had actually stopped watching around the same time due to all of the CTE research that came out around the same time. Hated the feeling that somehow me not watching due to that was going to get tallied in with people who are anti-protest. I do think if they could solve this problem (CTE), I'd be game to watch again, but I honestly think it isn't solvable.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592535879/amsi-20