A report out today entitled, by the NY Times “New Sign of Brain Damage in the NFL” is sure to stir some controversy.
Basically, it shows that concussions, at least in some subset of players, perhaps 20%, seem to lead to early dementia/death. More research is needed, but it’s hard to ignore.
I’m not exactly sure what I would want to debate, but this seemed to be the logical forum to put my OP in. While this may be more fitting for MPSIMS, or deserving of a pitting for the barbaric practice that allows this to continue, I figure a debate on what exactly the responsibility of the NFL is here? I don’t have the answers, just asking the question.
Are the lives of 1-5% of those who play pro football worth the game?
I’m more concerned about the high school and college players, who may be suffering serious brain injuries for no good reason. At least the pros get some financial compensation for destroying their bodies.
What rule or equipment changes might reduce these injuries?
What happens in rugby, where the action is supposed to be as rough as American football, but nobody wears any kind of padding or helmet? Does the use of protective gear raise the bar and encourage rougher play?
I agree that all pro players should know that it is dangerous but it affects college and even high school players badly as well. In my small Massachusetts town, a high school football player took a bad hit this year and went down. He managed to walk off the field but was dead less than two hours later due to massive internal injuries that no one recognized in the beginning. The funeral visitation line was more than two blocks long and all students got grief counseling. In my home town in Louisiana, we also had a person that took at hard hit and became a paraplegic for life. Those stories are not uncommon at all and pro players are the ones that have the strength and strategy to protect their body parts during a very hard hit and almost never get killed or paralyzed during a game but it still takes a massive toll on their bodies.
I am mostly a libertarian and I say let the pros play and destroy their bodies and brains as much as they want but there may need to be more education at all levels to know when things have gone too far and they need to sit out for a few minutes or be able to assess the risks overall for simply playing the game.
If the players know what they are in for, that mitigates things a bit, but part of what made Ted Johnson’s story so disturbing were his claims that he was put back in games despite having concussions. The team have one interest and the players have another. When that’s in conflict, you get ugly situations. And players are prone to overlooking their own health anyway in the interest of keeping their jobs. When that filters down to high school and college levels it’s troubling.
Rugby is a different kind of rough. Rugby is more like a street fight whereas pro football is like running into someone directly with the most force you can muster. I’ve played rugby and football and rugby is tough as hell but it’s a different kind of physical encounter.
Large numbers of college football players were dying before the adoption of protective equipment, to the point that there was even widespread talk of banning the sport.
Isn’t professional football/soccer also purportedly bad for the heads of the players due to all of the headbutting? I believe someone posting something to that effect on the board a year or two ago.
The #1 thing the NFL (and anyone involved at all levels of football) can do is to treat a concussion as a serious injury, one that is automatically game ending for the player and possibly an injury that would mandate a mandatory trip to the injured list for at least a week, if not more. If you let these guys go back on the field too soon they will.
I was half-watching an interview to a retired cricket player. He says that he never thought the cricketers would end up using helemets.
He said that he sees more head-shots than in his day, because, as he put it “getting hit in the head wa game-set-match”; the helmet protects you so much that you don’t duck.
I guess it’s similar vis a vis rugby and American football.
There are helmets that have shown evidence of reducing concussion risks by at least 1/3. Some players wear them (Peyton Manning is one), but many don’t. The gladiator helmet is another one, but is experimental only.
This company claims to have a superior helmet for concussion protection, but no data seems to back them up yet.
Also, remember the ProCap (the Gazoo helmet). That supposedly worked, but, again, no one wanted to wear it.
If evidence can be shown that these types of helmets do work, the NFL could mandate them.
Also, as MOIDALIZE said, trainers and coaches need to start recognizing concussions as a serious injury, not something you can shake off.
Shagnasty Kids know that Football is dangerous too. What are you going to do next take away their cars, their motorcycles, their hunting rifles, their martial arts, their boxing, their wrestling, or anything that can possibly hurt them? Come now.
I saw this story earlier today, and it made me wonder about what they expect the helmet to do. My experience is mostly with purchasing car racing/motorcycle helmets. A good Snell rated one is as expensive as comparable football helmet, and they do provide protection from a higher speed impact. But if I was in a situation where my head used my helmet, even at the closing speeds that football players move at, I’d at least have the helmet checked by the manufacturer.
It seems to me, that since in both situations, it’s your body that is usually providing the mass, the energies going into the impact are somewhat comparable. The main difference is the immovability of the object that is expected to be impacted. The frame of a vehicle or paved ground is going to provide a more sudden stop than a linebacker or grass field is. I don’t really think that a motorcycle or racing helmet would protect you completely from a concussion in an impact that caused you to come to a sudden stop at more than 30 mph, almost certainly not from a complete football game’s worth of them.
So, long story short: The main protection a helmet gives against a concussion is the cushion to slow the head’s impact (and in turn your brain). It seems to me that football helmets have the same amount of cushioning space as a racing helmet, if not slightly less. If there was something more useful than the styrofoam in racing helmets for doing this, it would probably be used by at least a motorcycle manufacturer to get a Snell rating. So, I doubt the padding in a football helmet provides better initial protection. Why is the football helmet supposed to be more effective in repeated impacts when it really might not be adequate to protect you from the worst individual impact?
No cite right now, but it seems to me I have read of reports where soccer/“proper football” players are right up there with problems due to head injuries.
No, they really don’t understand the long term implications of repeated, traumatic head injury. Neither do the pros, really. We’re all just learning it now.
There’s two types of rugby: league where the hits are more like American football, with people accelerating into tackles, and union, where the hits generally aren’t as hard (you need to recycle the ball, so you generally try to orient yourself into the tackle in the best way to facilitate that), but you get crushed then stamped to death on the ground by your own team trying to get the ball back.
League players generally wear shoulder padding to protect themselves, although this isn’t universally the case. Both codes allow limited form of head protection, in the form of skull caps, but these are mainly to protect against cauliflower ears.
Just this last month an amateur prop was paralized from the neck down playing rugby union (there was a clash of heads in the scrum, one guy walked away unharmed, the other became a paraplegic). The authorities know about this risk, and referees are trained to be especially careful with the scrum, that’s why “touch, pause, engage” was brought in, to try to control engagement, somewhat. Further, at the amateur level, if a player is playing in the front row who doesn’t normally do so, the scrum becomes uncontested. At professional level, I believe it is required for there to be a set of front row replacements in reserve, although I’m not sure of that.
In rugby league, the scrums are merely a formality in order to remove the forwards from the game and let the backs run at each other. As the largest risk is in the tackling, the rules are pretty stringent on what is and isn’t allowed, namely a player has to lock at least one arm around the player being tackled in order for it to be legal, and high tackles usually result in the player being sent to the sin bin, or being placed on report, if they’re that bad.
A head injury will usually stop both games, whereas any other sort of injury generally won’t. Our first preseason game last summer resulted in one of our backs breaking his leg on the pitch; the game carried on around him, for instance :eek:
Both codes have rules for limiting the risks, but everybody recognizes that both games are contact sports, and you can’t remove all the risks without gutting them completely.
