NFL players: height and weight over time
noahveltman.com
noahveltman.com
"In rugby, the only collision (i.e., running at speed for the purpose of forcing a player to the ground) is when one has the ball. The other 29 lads on the pitch are there for support. In American football, 21 of the 22 players had better be colliding with someone on every down - at full speed. In gridiron, there is collision while blocking. In rugby, the equivalent is called "obstruction" and is illegal, thus there are far more opportunities - requirements - for player collision in American football."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...
* NEVER leading with the head, which is quite common in American Football
* There must be an attempt to wrap your arms around the player. Not doing so is a shoulder charge, and illegal.
* High tackles (above the shoulders) are illegal and can result in yellow or red card depending on severity.
* Spear tackles (picking the player up and driving him into the ground head-first) are grounds for a red card.
Only if you're talking about Rugby League.
The current laws have definitely changed the feel and reduced the danger when it comes to scrums. I watch a kid taken off the field a paraplegic due to someones foot slipping on "engage", so I don't necessarily disagree with the laws, but you can't argue that they're not in place to slow it down and make it safer.
Also, just an FYI that high tackles (at the head) are also illegal in football. The "head tackle" was made illegal after being popularized by Dick "Night Train" Lane. See this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPm-6ZlTM5o, for the savagery of yesteryear.
Specifically, in rugby, the way you maintain possession of the ball is by falling properly with your body in front of the ball (not lunging forward) and making sure your team is around you so you can ruck[1] properly and continue on with the ball.
In football, there are 4 attempts to get 10 yards and you want to make sure with each of those chances you absolutely get the most amount of yardage (running backs are taught to always fall forward, defenses are taught to run people over head on, etc) and of course that doesn't even mention the forward pass where there is an incentive to hit a player as hard as you can to "separate the man from the ball" (this is something that is drilled into you as a defensive player).
[1] for people who haven't watched rugby, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2htLUcu-lcs is a video which explains what rucking is. Note how it's not important that you lunge forward for an extra yard. In fact, it's stupid to do so! The defense would allow you to do that, and then just take the ball from you once you're down.
This is also just my understanding of rugby having watched it from a distance. If I'm incorrect about my assumptions of the rules I'm happy to be corrected.
Nope. Spot on.
1: http://www.craigmbooth.com/category/nfl/
2: http://www.craigmbooth.com/height-and-weight-of-every-active...
3: http://www.sportsballweekly.com/the-relative-age-effect-in-p...
Does anyone know changes to average weight/height for the population in the US?
A larger random sample ought to fall closer to the line than a smaller sample: it would be statistically highly remarkable if the graphs did look similar with zeroed axes - the larger sample should look much flatter.
Starting both graphs from zero is unhelpful if the goal is correct visual interpretation.
To correctly compare the variances, the scale should be adjusted according to the square root of the ratio of sample sizes.
The author has not done this correctly, but I claim that zeroing the axis would be further from the correct graph.
Without the details, we can't evaluate significance claims.
NHL: You play by year. An under 17 team (U17) this year will have everyone born in the 1997. If you're born in Jan-May, you're already 17 playing in the under 17 league. This is a small advantage. It is a huge advantage in the U6 league and gets the earlier born into club teams and youth programs where they receive special attention and better hopes of a professional future. This same model applies to soccer.
Basketball: Basketball is unusual in that a tremendous amount of the players growth consists of playing pick up games against other players. Playing against better players is simply a matter of being able to keep up. It is the closest to a meritocracy among these sports.
NFL: Football is unusual in that it is not club dominated but scholastic in nature. The age cutoff is typically Sep 1st, or nearby. I would be curious about those in the July/Aug band and how many were held back a year so they could be older
> Conclusions: > Average weight has increased dramatically in the last 40 years with the greatest increases seen in adults. Mean BMI has also increased. Although height has also increased this increase has been much more modest.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130902101714.ht...
There was an awesome blog post about the '70s-era Broad Street Bullies and how "soft" they look if you're used to today's NHL: http://www.mc79hockey.com/2014/05/the-broad-street-bullies-w...
I've experienced a severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI), meaning I've seen many brain doctors. I have seen a neuro-omptomolgist (brain-eye doctor) who sees a football player who can't even add up his checkbook (meaning he can't add, not this his checkbook is too complex). I had a therapist who dated a college football player and eventually saw him as more of a patient than a boyfriend.
A concussion is now defined as seeing bright spots[2] and is classified as a mild TBI. The results from concussions are cumulative[3], and football is one of the sports most prone to concussion[3]. A football block is defined as being good if you see bright spots or having a concussion, and players often play through this[4].
I'll never let my children play football.
[1]:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussion
[3]:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673675...
[4]:http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/dont-tell-coach-pla...
This horrifies me more than I can describe.
Your last sentence is out there though. We're talking about kids in college, no one has put a price on their intelligence yet. Also unnecessary to imply that football players wouldn't be able to do anything useful with their intelligence.
Coincidentally, I've worked with a former Pac-12 football player (who left the game after I think freshman year), and in fact I have sought out his opinions on optimizations for database wrappers (among other subjects). Beware of who you write off with your stereotypes!
I don't want to live in a society where people are told it's okay to have their bodies destroyed to get a living (or a scholarship) or to satisfy the market (for a prestigious football team that sell tickets). We shouldn't strive for that.
Ranting:
> Why can't one sell their the cognitive ability if they choose to? If the player is "smart" enough to cheat the test then ultimately it is their choice.
That's a catch-22. If they were smart, they wouldn't sell their cognitive ability.
> Society has deemed their muscles more valuable then their intelligence and I don't think we would be turning towards them for their thoughts on optimizations for database wrappers.
So when the economy isn't good we should sell our organs because society deemed our body parts more valuable than our well being ?
I wish more people had this attitude.
Me personally, I'd rather be the best at creating something.
The biggest thing for me is the aim of the sport. The aim of American football is to stop the opposing team using your body; soccer and hockey both involve pretty intense strategy to get the ball/puck in the net.
Hockey does have some body-body impact (through checks). I haven't played much hockey, so I don't know how severe it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/sports/footballs-risks-sin...
So please consider this when I say that those college guys were jacked up on 'roids' and WAAYY too big for me. I didn't take steroids in high school but I was big enough and strong enough (and in truth, angry enough) to play against those kids on 'roids anyway. I knew in college, I wouldn't have been.
I walked away from a certain Division I college scholarship (at the time - I blew out my knee a year later) despite what my coaches were calling a 'no-brainer' to play football. I've NEVER regretted it and each year that has passed since has made me even more glad I did it.
He basically said, "I don't know. Every year I go back to camp, the guys are bigger, stronger and hit harder than last year."
When you look around the league, it's obvious how much bigger these guys have gotten. Look at some of the current LA KINGS forwards:
Jeff Carter - 6'4" - 212lbs
Dwight King - 6'4" - 230lbs
Anze Kopitar - 6'3" - 224lbs
Jordan Nolan - 6'3" - 221lbs
I'm assuming their heights are all reflected without wearing skates, which adds a good 2" to those heights. This is one of the reasons many pundits said LA won the cup in 2011. Big, strong forwards and a merciless forecheck. I still remember one of the announcers saying, "Imagine you're a defensemen and everytime LA drops the puck into the corner in your end and you have two of these guys hurtling towards you as you go for the puck. It's a defensemen's worst nightmare."
Hockey also has the problem of players wearing body armor now so hits are even worse than what they used to be.
Women's soccer has a higher rate of concussions than men's football at the collegiate level, and it has 75% of the rate at the high school level [1]. Similarly, men's college soccer has a higher rate than high school football. In fact, football is higher than the average sport (high school or college) by less than a factor of 2, an average which includes non-contact sports like volleyball.
Will you be preventing your girls from playing soccer?
Yes, football has a somewhat higher rate of concussions than most other sports, a fact that should be considered before participating. And yes, the recent improvement in concussion treatment and monitoring is a great thing which will naturally focus on football since it has a higher concussion rate and since more US high schoolers play football than any other sport by far.
But the idea that football is in its own category of danger is ludicrous. If you're withholding your children from football, you should almost certainly be withholding them from all contact sports.
[1] Table 1 here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2140075/
You're saying that Football (where hitting another player is illegal) is as dangerous as American Football, where hitting another player with the full weight of your body at high momentum is the point of the game for most positions.
Does not compute.
From the study you linked to:
> Contact with another person was the risk factor responsible for most concussions among high school athletes.
You could play an entire season of Football without ever coming into contact with another player. Unless you were a Marvel superhero, that wouldn't be possible in American Football.
I skimmed the study you linked to an the conclusion was merely that Football and American Football had the highest rates of concussion... compared to what... track and field athletics? DUH!!
Somebody ran a survey where they looked for replies that indicated "probable" concussions that were unreported, and they found
> The sports with the most unreported concussions were women’s soccer (24%), men’s football (21%), field hockey (13%), and cheerleading (10%).
http://www.sportsmedres.org/2014/02/unrecognized-concussion-...
I don't believe those numbers are normalized for the number of concussions, and in any case would indicate that women soccer players were slightly less likely than football players to report a concussion conditional on having one.
As for "unrecognized" concussions (i.e. the athlete gave a reply on the survey that sounded like maybe they had a concussion) they say
> The sports with highest potentially unrecognized concussions were football (55%), cheerleading (50%), and cross-country (28%).
which to me means you can't trust this survey at all. Whatever they're interpretting as an "unrecognized" concussion, it happens as often in cheerleading and over half as often in cross-country.
On the other hand, if you want a human interest piece, you can go read skierscott's link to the NYTimes blog post about how all those football players are toughing out brain damage....
Either you don't watch much Football, or you don't watch much American Football. One only needs to watch a few games of each to see how violent they are. American Football has dozens of people smashing into each other (often head-first) every minute of the game.
>A brain injury study conducted at the Boston University School of Medicine showed that 33 of 34 players tested post-mortem showed clear signs of CTE.[1]
Even when you account for selection bias the number of NFL players with CTE is insane.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NFL_players_with_chroni...
"While it remains unknown what level of exposure to brain trauma is required to trigger CTE, there is no available evidence that occasional, isolated or well-managed concussions give rise to CTE," one of the study's co-authors, Dr. Robert Cantu, said in a press release.
So basically, you're just stuck with your priors on this one. As far as I am aware, CTE data doesn't provide you with any additional evidence for non-concussive effects beyond what you could have conjectured pre-CTE.
Of course, the media has breathlessly reported on how NFL players are all commiting CTE-induced suicide despite the fact that the NFL suicide rate is less than half the rate of the general population...
http://loyolamedicine.org/newswire/news/little-evidence-reti...
"there is no available evidence that occasional, isolated or well-managed concussions give rise to CTE,"
He said there was no evidence for occasional concussions, he didn't say anything about repeated non-concussive injuries.
Here's a quote from the BU CTE center
"We believe CTE is caused by repetitive brain trauma. This trauma includes both concussions that cause symptoms and subconcussive hits to the head that cause no symptoms." [1]
I'm a big guy and I live in the south, so you can bet I played my share of football growing up--there are definitely a lot more repeated hits to the head in football than any other popular youth sport.
The fact they're finding it in many other sports and in military personnel, as pointed out in the FAQ, makes me pretty skeptical that this is a disease strongly linked to nonconcussive hits since hockey players and soldiers aren't butting heads every day. But it's pretty hard to draw conclusions while the data and definitions are so vague. Do you know if they've looked specifically at populations of long-time football players with no concussions?
A review article from 2012 had this to say
> While it is clear that anyone who suffers repeated head trauma, regardless of the mechanism, may carry the risk of developing CTE, there is no clear consensus on how much or how little trauma is needed to cause CTE. While most feel CTE is a manifestation of repetitive trauma, the question still stands if it can be caused by a single TBI [10]. In a study by Johnson et al., widespread tau and beta-amyloid deposition was found in the brains of individuals who suffered a single traumatic brain injury. The study included the examination of postmortem brains from long-term survivors (1–47 years) of a single TBI () versus uninjured age-matched controls (). Results showed NFTs to be exceptionally rare in young uninjured controls, yet were abundant and diffuse in one-third of TBI cases.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/rerp/2012/816069/
The last sentence seems to support the idea that the appearance of symptoms is an important threshold, but it's hard to tell what they mean; could also be that anyone cracking heads enough to get sub-concussive CTE are likely to have picked up at least one full concussion.
> I'm a big guy and I live in the south, so you can bet I played my share of football growing up--there are definitely a lot more repeated hits to the head in football than any other popular youth sport
I played 11 years of football, mostly on defense and mostly with my head, and I fully agree. I coach youth football, so any data that would show a dramatically higher risk for football than other sports (which are generally regarded as acceptably risky) is of great interest to me.
As I see it there are a variety of ways to become injured in sports: - traumatic injury such as concussion, spinal injury, torn ligaments, broken bones, etc. - repetitive stress injuries such as CTE, tendinitis, stress fractures, etc. - what I'll call body stress injuries. Things like putting on too much weight for your frame to play lineman in football, extreme weight dropping for weight class sports, or the extreme oddities professional cyclists put themselves through for an advantage.
Nearly every sport you play has some chance of having injuries in at least one of these categories. The problem is that football has a high likely hood of injuries in all of these categories, and at the worst case of the injury in the category.
Other people point out how 1 group seems to separate into 3. That 1 group had to be good at lots of different things, and while football was probably still a rough sport, there was no chasing of extremes.
What I find most interesting is that there's a clear gulf between the (probable) linemen on the far right and the others. That middle ground is probably not best suited for any role - if you're chasing the receivers, you're going to be too slow, and if you're trying to protect or attack the line, you're going to be too small.
These players, while having some responsibility in the passing game are primarily involved in either running the ball, or defending against the run. And having a bit more mass there is very beneficial, but they still need to be able to have the speed to be able to work horizontal across the field and sometimes be quite a ways away from the line of scrimmage by the end of the play.
Take a look at this reddit post with more detailed information that's position based. http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1oh47i/heig...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Perry_(American_footbal...
Tuinei was a contemporary with Perry in the mid-late 80's, but Allen wasn't drafted until the mid-90's.
I still say that Perry was an inspiration. :)
edit Fix team name. Ooops.
I live very close to one of the pro team's training camps, and see the players around town every once in a while. Professional athletes like this are truly in a league of their own. You can go to any random gym and look for the guys there in peak physical condition. The pro-NFL guys stand out easily in a crowd of gym guys. Not just the really huge guys, but you can spot one of the "smaller" players from a mile away. Their musculature and body motions are simply superhuman. It's something very very hard to see on TV when they're surrounded by their peers.
Offensive Lineman and Defensive Tackles.
http://theloveofsports.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/t...
Been looking for a Sebastian Janikowski draft picture but couldn't find one.
I'm 6'4", 215lbs and don't often experience what being small feels like... except when I'm standing next to NFL linemen. They're just huge.
While the general growth over time makes sense, I wonder what caused the shift specifically in the 70's.
NFL players are absolutely, positively freakishly fast for their size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_football_on_television#...
So, they pushed up on the height parameter, but hit a ceiling.
Then they've started to push further on the weight parameter, where the "ceiling" is more flexible.
You can bulk up to some extent, but your height is pretty much a given.
Then there are 'customary units'. Outside America nobody knows what a pound of weight is, is that pound of 'customary units' the same as an 'Imperial' pound? Nobody knows, particularly when applied to body weight. The height situation is better, there are places like the UK where Imperial measurements are used for height, but, in mainland Europe and beyond, I doubt anyone knows what 6' tall means.
I imagine that in America it is hard to see this perspective on how different America is, and, most of the time with most HN stories there is no cultural barrier to understanding things, yet this story is an edge case and reminds me how different American culture really is.
I think this is extremely misinformed. Did you know that there is a world cup for gridiron football? It's the IFAF World Championship. And believe it or not, Japan is ranked 1st right now, with the U.S ranked second. American football was pretty well known in Japan and before I left, was becoming increasingly more popular among high school and college aged kids.
The also continually sell out games in London every year. The broadcasts there get extremely high ratings. I think the "myth" that the rest of the world doesn't know what American football is died sometime in the 90s. It's been on the rise globally: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/sports/football/13iht-nflc...
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/TUZE...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean-shift
Example python code using scikit-learn: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_me...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/tomfordyce/2012/03/land_of...
And prior to 1940, the same players played offense and defense, along with limited substitutions. These days, players not only play one position but are often substituted out depending on the particular play or formation. That lets players specialize and, I'd argue, put on body mass for their more limited role.
My old man once commented that he his Big 10 college alma mater once had someone on the football team whose only virtue was being 275 pounds.
tl;dr: no