Here is an article from Men’s Health comparing American Football to Rugby for fitness. Regarding injuries, it says:
They do not provide any citations for the stats, unfortunately, and it is not dated, so not sure how well this can be trusted.
Here is a detailed papercomparing injuries between the two sports, dated 2001. It says:
IMHO taking away helmets from football would also require massive changes to the rules and strategies of the game as we know it today. We are essentially talking about a new sport, or maybe one more matching rugby. I doubt the NFL is going to just admit the sport is too risky as it is currently played, and then redesign it to be safer - football is a huge entertainment enterprise in the US with millions of $$ attached to it as it exists today. Change will come very slow, indeed.
Boxing is also an entertainment sport. But in both cases, as long as there are millions of willing participants, and they know the risks they are taking, and there is demand to see them, these sports will exist.
You are probably right. That and the tradition (inertia) of football in US culture, will make it impossible to change course. Full-contact football with helmets and pads is being played by kids as young as 8, it is an integral part of the scene at most US high schools, and is a huge part of many college environments. To make a change for safety would require all those levels to act in concert with the pros. I do not see that ever happening, no matter the body count. Instead, they will continue to try and make the game safer with the current equipment.
Keep the helmets, but install a small taser-like device that activates when the acceleration reaches a dangerous level. The helmets would still provide protection in case of accident, but the taser would motivate players to not exceed a certain level of roughness while not causing long-term injury.
Don’t forget the fun of enduring the jokes about how wimpy Americans must be to need all that padding. Rugby and football are fundamentally different sports. The reason football players wear helmets is because back in the early 20th century people were dying and there was serious talk of banning the game.
I just finished captioning XEG wrestling. This is all broken glass, barbed wire bats and metal chairs and baseball bats. Each willing participant is covered in real blood. We see them getting stitched up by volunteers sans latex gloves. Every stereotype you can think of is in the audience.
With that, football and boxing are sports for pussies.
You ever watch MMA?? Google some videos that show broken legs and knees in slo-mo.
To quote a wise man:But in terms of both total injuries and the probability of any given participant being injured, boxing isn’t even in the top 10. It rates way, way below basketball, cycling, skateboarding and even softball.
So it has nothing whatsoever to do with injuries. It is entirely your objection to the “barbaric” practice of intentionally inflicting injuries.
How many people actually get injured doesn’t matter one bit, so long as you don’t have to be confronted by cultural practices that offend you. And the best way to do that is to force people not to engage in those practices.
And if you can show that boxing results in proportionally more “mild to moderate brain injury” than any other sports, you will have a point.
Not much of a point, because a mild injury is a mild injury and a moderate injury is a moderate injury. Someone who can’t walk because of cartilage damage is no more able to walk than someone who can’t walk do to brain damage. Someone who can’t hold down a job because of a spinal injury s no more able to work than someone who can’t hold down a job due to a brain injury. But you will have some sort of point.
But pending those figures, you got nothing beyond your puritanical objection to people deliberately doing something that you find “barbaric”.
This is common argument, I would counter this by pointing out that what you are generally talking about are injuries that are immediately obvious. The issue with concussion is that it can be cumulative and the science is not really conclusive on the long term impacts although the initial information and anecdotal evidence is pretty frightening.
But we should restrict personal freedoms anyway, because you find anecdotes frightening.
:dubious:
Boxing has been a popular sport for along time. If injuries were common we would have no problem detecting them, most especially in the long term.
Compare that to activities like running, where the long term damage is welldocumented..
There is no doubt that professional boxers have an increased chance of debilitating injury, but it’s actually a lot less than that of other sports. From memory around 20% pro boxers end up with debilitating injuries, mostly of the hand or brain. It’s around 70% for footballers and 50% for basketballers. For amateurs it’s much worse. Amateur runners have around a 300% increase in the risk of developing debilitating injuries over non-runners. In contrast boxers have about 2% increased chance of debilitating brain injury.
If the contention was that we should ban all professional sports that routinely injure players, I couldn’t agree more. We wouldn’t let McDonald’s operate if they were employing healthy 18 yos, and 20% of them were incapable of working 15 years later. Yet for some reason the NFL and NBA are allowed to do exactly that to their employees.
But banning specific passtimes just because someone feels they are barbaric and frightening? That’s not good.
I have no argument with this at all, all I was pointing out is that the science is not clear and that we should be looking at how we minimize potential issues.
I love football of the Australian and American type.
What is the purpose of a football helmet’s hard shell? (it just transfers impact without absorbing any). Wouldn’t it be better to go back to soft helmets with some kind of gel-filled lining to soften the blows? (a face guard/visor could still be attached)
I’ve played American football high school and college. The tackle you wished you could avoid, always, was the guy who hit you squarely with his helmet. The one you hoped wouldn’t kill you was a helmet to the head. I was knocked out of a game once by a player who rammed me in the chest with his helmet.
The better the helmets, the worse the effect to the brain? Maybe. I remember a Buffalo Bill safety who had to wear a special helmet to be allowed to play. I think it may have allowed him to survive falls where his head hit the ground or another player, and it didn’t lend itself to him tackling with the head.
No matter how good the helmet, if it is designed to protect the wearer and not the person being hit, injuries will increase.
I suspect that football will actually be banned at some point in the future. Hockey, too.
I am against boxing, but I’m all for UFC. See, the whole crux of boxing is that you’re supposed to get up after being hit so hard in the head or body that you fall down. In the UFC, the refs are normally VERY good about getting right in the middle before the dude gets punched as he’s unconscious.
Thought it will never, ever happen, I would get behind everyone just playing Australian rules football. I feel like it certainly a more athletic sport, since there’s almost no stopping. On top of that, there’s no head first contact and its always body to body tackles. PLUS…Its just insanely more entertaining to watch, especially when you have two great teams playing eachother.
You know what I think is barbaric? Banning things. Live and let live, bro. As long as nobody is being forced into those sports and as long as the information regarding their relative danger is available, I see no harm. If you don’t like football or boxing, don’t play.
