Coal miners are not paid anything like football players.
They’re paid better than somebody. In fact in a lot of contexts, coal miners are among the best paid in their communities. Is there some objective income at which you can categorically state that there is no need to take reasonable steps to protect the health of the workers?
And by not taking steps to protect the health of elite athletes—in terms of things like preventing injuries or doping—what you’re essentially saying is that no one can even hope to compete in those fields without accepting a major trade-off to one’s long-term health.
How is this any different than Roman gladiators? Why not allow battles to the death? Why not allow football players to carry truncheons or knives and use them on the field?
Awesomeness overload?
But that’s the point- nobody came in knowing the risks until very recently. CTE is a pretty new diagnosis, and I can tell you with perfect confidence that between 1985-1990 when I was playing middle school and high school football, I was specifically instructed to lead with my head as a defensive tackle and offensive guard. Had I known, or my parents known, or even my coaches known about the possibility of CTE, I doubt that would have been done.
That’s the thing- I think concussion treatment is what will lose the NFL their suit, but what’ll ultimately cost them the most money will be the CTE claims from linemen and linebackers who didn’t ever actually get any concussions.
Hopefully, football will morph back into some kind of 1940’s-1950’s leather-helmet game, but I fear that it’ll end up no-contact or a historical curiosity.
I think the mounting evidence of long term damage mean rule changes are inevitable. Any sporting code that fails to respond to medical issues like this is inviting litigation in my opinion.
Just this week the Australian rugby league banned the shoulder charge (despite some disgruntlement from players) on medical grounds. Roughly two thirds of the hits from this 2012 NRL highlights reel would now be illegal.
This is why the harsh old tort rules of contributory negligence and assumption of risk were put into place at the start.
Without them, everyone starts looking for a payday. Even before the discovery of CTE or that lung cancer causes smoking, didn’t people know that slamming heads together repeatedly or that repeatedly inhaling tar filled smoke might be bad for you?
Back when I played football in middle school and high school back in the late 80s and early 90s the only things I worried about were the possibilities of a concussion, a broken limb or the slim possibility of a catastrophic injury of some sort. We knew our activities carried some risks associated with them but our understanding of at risk was incomplete. I don’t believe my school district, coaches or even the doctor who gave me my physical were aware of the possibility of CTE. Now the NFL is aware of the problem though. They may have been aware of it for a number of years.
I do not see football surviving as a high school or a college sport for the same reason neither boxing nor MMA are high school and college sports (are they? I guess I don’t actually know…).
Forget whether or not we can “manage concussions.” As an ED physician, I’d suggest that is simply impossible.
Moms will steer kids away, and the pipeline will dry up at the same time that regulations and lawyers kill it.
So the question will become whether you can have pro football without a great feeder system, and I don’t think you can.
I give it twenty years to die, at which point it will be an interesting relic.
Might help soccer, which in the US has been on life support for decades. 
Lot more injuries, but they tend to be fixable, unlike repetitive brain injury.
I know this is a three-year-old post, but since PastTense reopened the thread with an update, I’ll just point out that the whole point of the tobacco-company lawsuits was that the companies deliberately downplayed and concealed evidence that inhaling that smoke might be bad for you.
Yes, consumers have a responsibility to exercise reasonable caution and awareness of risks, but that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for marketers to deliberately try to fool them
about the nature and severity of the risks.
IANAL but it seems to me that the legal consequences of the recent discovery of CTE in football players will similarly hinge on whether the industry had significant evidence of previously undocumented risk levels that they tried to hide from the participants.
Back in 1994 the NFL created the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee. As chair, they appointed the team doctor of the New York Jets who was a rheumatologist. He lacked any previous experience in brain science.
Frontline did an expose of the NFL’s foot dragging a couple of years ago:
You got a particular cite in mind for that? I’m seeing way conflicting ones, like this onethat concludes the opposite. Or did you mean specifically kids, whichthis study seems to bear out.
What’s up with elk, moose, and deer? Do they get concussions when they butt heads? Is the biggest, most dominant animal the one with the most messed up brain?
Since the thread has been bumped, I’ll link to three articles about deaths from concussion in the game of rugby, which is like American Football but no armour is worn.
I can’t help but laugh at predictions of American football going away anytime soon. I simply can not envision a day without football in my lifetime with all the money made at the NCAA and Professional levels. Now we now have fantasy leagues which have grown enormously in popularity since this thread was started 3 years ago. The game will be heavily regulated at all levels with increasing regulations going down towards college and high school levels. Hockey players get concussions, rugby players, even soccer players. A global sports culture is not gonna just disappear.
I don’t think very many people have postulates that the global sports culture will disappear, but that American football will not survive in its current form. There’s no reason to believe that the NFL would be powerless to adapt.
Watch about 10 seconds of a rugby game on youtube (where clips are edited for maximum action).
Compare the tackles and, esp. the blocks - they do not use their heads as battering rams, as is done in American football.
I was never good at sports, so my football “training” consisted of backyard chaos - we were told to “put a shoulder into it” to block, and grab the legs -preferably from the side - to tackle.
I gather the advent of the massive pads and esp. the helmet, caused the instruction to change.
I see that Monday Night Football no longer shows the opposing helmets crashing into each other and being smashed to smithereens. That charming graphic lasted 20 years - almost as long as Marshall Dillon was gunning down the bad guy at the start of Gunsmoke (charming name, btw)
Way to imprint violence on the young, folks.
Are there any in this thread? From what I can tell, the predictions are talking about a ~20-year span.
Head butting is completely banned in both Rugby and Australian Rules Football. Would it change the game dramatically to just introduce a similar rule and get people to use their shoulders to charge and block instead of their heads?