No doubt in the 1920s people couldn’t envision a future where boxing and horse racing would decline as much as it had. You’re right that we have a huge football sports culture so I don’t think the sport is going to vanish overnight. But as more people become aware of the long term risks of playing the game I think the NFL will be forced to change the rules or their player base will dry up as parents discourage their children from picking up the game. The good news is that college/NFL officials have radically changed the rules in the past and the game still lives on.
I love watching football on TV and grew up in a place where even high school football is taken very seriously. I find it hard to believe that we’ll ever get rid of football, but what you might see is a much more regulated version of it at lower levels. I could see 7 regular season games instead of 10 and 2 week periods between games instead of one. The college football season could get trimmed as well, which is something I’m sure that the big sports conferences and ESPN will quietly fight like bloody hell behind the scenes.
In addition to shortening the number of games and increasing the time between them, another possible solution is to expand football rosters to allow more reserve players and then require that all football players who are declared active go through medical tests, not by team physicians but state athletic director personnel, in the same way that boxers and mixed martial artists do before fights. If a player doesn’t pass because of a concussion, then he’s medically suspended for up to 30 days. Period. No questions asked. No short-changing the protocols process because it’s not handled by medical quacks whose job is to keep players “healthy”
I think you’re laboring under the mistaken assumption that the state athletic director personnel would somehow NOT be quacks chosen by the State govt. to keep their pet university’s players on the field. As in, some Louisiana state-employed dr. is going to go start cracking down on LSU players? Or equally bad, the state quacks went to UT and differentially apply the protocols to screw A&M.
I’m still of the opinion that the pros need to change the rules, and the rest of the sport will follow. Otherwise, it’ll go the route of boxing, where it’s essentially a blood sport played by poor minorities for people who just want to see injuries.
Football is going NOWHERE. It is the most popular sport in the USA. Bread and circuses, people, and modern gladiatorial combat. It’s so deeply entrenched. I would gladly sacrifice myself if I could play the game at that level and be handsomely compensated for it, and that’s what NFL players do. Plenty seemed to have survived multiple concussions and gone on to successful careers as analysts too (Troy Aikman, Steve Young),.
What’s never made clear in these CTE studies is that IF you have it, it ALWAYS affects you in some maniacal, suicidal, depressive way. I suppose that has something to do with not being able to diagnose it until you’re dead and your brain can be autopsied. Youth football is alive and well here where I live and they take ANY kind of injury very seriously. Sure, it’s a violent sport, but in my opinion, it’s also a great sport. YMMV.
The penalty has to come through the officiating. 15 yards for a helmet to helmet hit is insufficient. Perhaps a rule that any such hit that causes a concussion leads to ejection and suspension for several games or the entire season without pay, and that anyone who commits an illegal act that causes an opposing player’s career to be ended (head injury or not,) is permanently banned from the game.
But that still does not address an even more prevalent cause of brain injury; the “mild” impacts that take place dozens of times in every game, thousands of times a career, when an offensive lineman and defensive lineman collide in the trenches, resulting in a “minor” shaking of the brain.
Corruption’s always a possibility, and even in boxing and MMA, you wonder how some people get licenses when it’s clear that they’re suffering from pugilistic dementia. I’m not arguing it’s fail safe, but it’s a step.
I think rule and equipment changes are necessary. Maybe get rid of the facemasks – maybe that would be enough for players to instinctively protect their heads at all times.
It would greatly increase the blood on TV (nose, lip, mouth, teeth, etc.) which the league would hate – but facial injuries are much less damaging in the long term (if I understand correctly) than head injuries, even if they look a lot worse on TV.
What’s with all the CTE suicides that seem to be in the news?
Does CTE affect the brain in such a way that the victim is tormented by it, to the extent that many kill themselves?
There are certainly a variety of other degenerative brain diseases that seriously disable their victims, yet aren’t known for provoking lots of suicides. What is it with CTE? Is it that gruesome?
I’m not sure if it’s wise to allow youth football or hard hits in youth hockey. How is it we can expect kids to consent to that sort of damage to their bodies?
“I simply can not envision a day without [bear baiting/gladiators/cockfights/duelling/dwarf tossing] because that shit makes money” was probably something said many times in the past.
He was a gang member. No one can know how much his brain was injured in fights v football.
The current thinking is that CTE leads to major depression, and suppresses certain brain functions that make suicide unlikely even in depressed individuals. I’m not a neurologist (nor do I play one on TV!) so I can’t explain it very well.
Don’t be ridiculous. Gang members aren’t getting into fistfights every day. That being said, it’s obvious that CTE is not the sole cause of Hernandez’ violent tendencies, since he was a gang member before he began playing organized football.
What utter nonsense. At what age did he start playing football-18?
IANA expert …
Suicide tends to run in waves. It’s psychologically contagious among the predisposed.
I’d expect that prior to the publicity about CTE a person suffering from it might become depressed. Or equally become angry & violent. The critical thing he’d lack would be insight into what was causing it and what the prognosis was. He might not even be aware of the changes, at least at first.
Now fast-forward into a world where he’s heard of CTE, maybe seen a TV dramatization, read the newspaper editorials, etc. Now he knows that light in the distance is an oncoming train. That’s got to have a statistical effect on the behavior of all CTE sufferers as a group. Even if it doesn’t guarantee that any given sufferer chooses suicide.
I’d connect this with the large and still growing interest in the whole idea of assisted dying. As a society we are approaching the state where we can see into our individual medical futures much farther than we can control our individual medical futures. We are also entering a moral era where life is not sacred; quality of life is sacred.
When you put those ideas together it makes ever greater sense that medical care which prolongs quantity but not quality is increasingly seen as the two-edged sword it is. Once that happens it’s only a short hop from “avoid available life extension” to “seek available life shortening” in suitable circumstances. For widely varying individual definitions of “suitable”.
I’m not arguing (here) whether these changes are good or bad. I merely assert they’re happening and may have bearing on CTE-related suicide.
True, but one thing keeps coming to mind when I think about this issue: the WWE. It’s still a thing, it also had a notorious murder suicide likely caused by CTE, it’s not even a REAL sport, yet it still makes money and it still makes people famous.
I take that as evidence that in this particular case, the extinction of the sport is highly unlikely anytime soon.
Difficult to see. Always in motion, the future is. /yoda
What may well have an impact is the extent to which parents refuse to let their sons play football when they’re in grade school or high school. Without high school players, you have no college players, and without college players, you have no NFL.
Anecdotally, this is already happening, but I don’t think I’ve seen any numbers on if participation in football at those levels is decreasing. If we start to see participation dropping in the football-mad areas of the country (like Texas, Alabama, and Florida), then I think we could well see the sport at the college and professional levels start to decline, at a minimum.
Barely. The numbers are in steady decline. Nowadays RAW doesn’t even crack 3 million.
Look at boxing: boxing doesn’t exist at the high school or college level, but you still have professional boxing.
This week I took part in a concussion survey amongst ex rugby players being conducted by my old university. I suspect it’s the start of an effort to see whether CTE is a problem in rugby as well.