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Comment by PerryCox | Hacker News Reader

Concussions aren't going to cause the "end of football". A lot of people forget that football used to be a MUCH more dangerous sport. Take for example that in 1905 there were 18 football related deaths with 20 times fewer players than there are today. If it weren't for Teddy Roosevelt pushing for rule changes and the use of leather helmets then we probably wouldn't have football today.

Football is a dangerous sport, I'm not denying it. But the players know the risk when they start playing. The risk is why they make as much money as they do.

Source: http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/kidscorner/football.htm

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The risk isn't why they make so much money. It's the crowds. If tomorrow everyone started watching soccer in America instead of football, then the players would make a lot less money, despite the risk to bodily injury.

The crowds and risk might actually be linked, though, i.e., it's more fun to watch because it looks riskier. I think the reason sports are popular is because they provide an outlet for warlike instincts, and football provides an exceptionally good war simulation, short of paintball or airsoft.

Wars tends to be a tad more dynamic than gridiron. Out of the major ball sports it's by far the most dragged out: 5 seconds of mayhem, 60 seconds of faffing about. Repeat for 3 hours.

Soccer, god rot its socks, is probably a better model. Hours of furious sprinting and jogging, lots of posturing and almost nobody ever wins convincingly.

Rugby Union more so due to its strategic emphasis on territory over possession.

Wars tends to be a tad more dynamic than gridiron. Out of the major ball sports it's by far the most dragged out: 5 seconds of mayhem, 60 seconds of faffing about.

I have never been to war, but I have friends who have, and your description of gridiron sounds just like their description of war. 2 month faffing around at base, 2 hours all out mayhem and intense fire fights, repeat for 12 month.

I was thinking more at the top level, rather than a private's "Hurry up and wait" perspective.

>it's more fun to watch because it looks riskier

Then why isn't the rest of the world just as enamored by American Football as Americans? It's an almost non existent sport anywhere outside the US. If it really were more fun to watch than soccer or rugby, it would surely be more fun to watch in the UK, Germany, Brazil, etc.

It's only more fun to watch because you're used to it and your sporting culture is built around it.

I think international soccer is a better analog for war, not least because there are actual rivalries between countries that have gone to war with each other. Every time England plays Germany, the English play it up as a rematch of the World Wars; every time Argentina plays England, it's revenge for the Falkland Islands.

I would just like to quote Evan Mathis who recently did an AMA on reddit:

>Linemen are constantly banging their heads. Each of those sub-concussive impacts is having some negative effect on the brain. I really don't know how long I expect to live but it's been a great 30 years. I'm kind of willing to sacrifice a decade or two for the chance of not having to work in my 40's or 50's.

I'm not sure I'm convinced by either point. Lots of things were more dangerous a hundred years ago, and people did many more things that were dangerous routinely. I've also heard many people make the exact opposite point about football, complaining that it's become more dangerous over time as the players have gotten more and more armor.

It's not about the adult players, it's about the parents of high-school players that might become more risk-averse or litigious, which might make the high-school recruiting dry up, which in turn lowers the quality of the college-level games and in turn the NFL. And that is a spiral of death: Lower quality -> less prestige and sponsors -> less kids going into the sport -> even lower quality.

One combination of rule change along with technology that I see helping is shock sensors in the helmets. If the problem is that players receive a number of micro-shocks instead of a small number of concussion level ones, I could see a rule that a player can have no more than a given level of shock (with a formula that calculates intensity of the hits with quantity, kind of like how radiation exposure is measured). After a certain level, a player would be required to be taken out of the game for the week/month/etc. This could probably be implemented at the highschool and college levels fairly easily, but I'm sure that it would take quite a while to develop the formulas needed to determine a safe level of hits x severity of hits.

This rule would only seem to encourage players to hit the best players on the other team as hard as they possibly can.

At which point the number of hits required to knock someone out of the game tends to decrease over time, the length of time during which a game contains the best players tends to decrease over time, and the desire of anyone to keep playing this game tends to approach zero.

Ah, that can be solved with penalties for bad hits, just like there is a major penalty for face masking. Also, from what I can tell, the major hits are helmet-to-helmet, so any purposeful infliction on one player may have an equal infliction on the other. Also, I wasn't proposing that this would have an immediate effect of taking a player out of an in-progress game (actually, re-reading what I wrote it kind of sounds that way), but I was thinking more post-game analysis, where the cumulative hits to the skull determines a player's eligibility to play (similar to if a player had a cracked rib or fracture in the spine, etc).

The NFL is already perhaps overprotective of quarterbacks, because quarterbacks are bigger superstars than defensive ends and linebackers. Oddly, this is one of the biggest things actual fans complain about.

Yep, player safety is one area that is constantly evolving with technology. I think concussions will be solved eventually, allowing football players to play without risking their brains.

Beyond that, maybe robot football would take off instead. Sort of like in the movie Real Steel, where robots brought boxing back to prominence.

  I think this is great point.  Transition the game to avatar like mode with skilled players at the controls.  Human element still present using players pilots and NASCAR like sponsorship of individual robots and drivers.    Think of CS, AI, Engineering programs that would have a boost.  Also, video game training of players starting in grade school which Madden already has a "lock" on.  Doesn't FOX have that Cleatus Mascot that already is a fan favorite of this type of thinking.  Now to the question becomes home come we don't remove the drivers from NASCAR and replace with Avatars.

Sorry, being pedantic here, but it's a pet hate.

If you say something is 20 times less. It means you take the original value and multiply it by 20, then subtract the new value from the original. This will always give you a negative value.

x-(x * 20)

What you want to say is that it's one 20th of the original value :)

"20 times more: 20 * x"

"20 times less: x / 20"

I wish the English usage matched the math usage. Sadly, it does not.

20 * x is "20 times as much" but only "19 times more", IMO.

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