For some players, it certainly doesn’t / won’t. But, there’ve already been several star players who have decided to retire early (such as 49ers linebacker Chris Borland), and specifically cited concerns about CTE as why. I suspect that that’ll continue, but what’ll be more invisible to us are the kids who don’t ever even start playing.
(This thread is now over five years old. Imagine that.)
I hate watching NFL because too damn many commercials and everything has a sponsor. I was also reading how many NFL games now, especially those during the week, have low attendance.
Agree NFL is unwatchable without pre-recording the show then replaying while zapping all the commercials. I wonder how long before some agreement between sponsors and streaming sources makes that impossible for all (non-bootleg) shows?
I suspect that the Rose Bowl player you’re thinking of was Texas QB Vince Young, who had a huge game in the 2006 Rose Bowl.
Referring back to the minor-league arena football team for which I briefly worked – the season before I worked with them, their quarterback was a guy named Juice Williams. Williams had been a reasonably successful player at the University of Illinois, but never even had more than a tryout in the NFL. But, in the talent pool of a minor-league arena team (where most of the players had been at Division II or III schools), he was head and shoulders better than anyone else. My friend, who had been the statistician for the team that year, said it was like watching a high school senior playing against 8th graders.
My understanding is that the early days of the NFL were sort of like that – there were a few extremely talented players, who were clearly far better than most of their opposition (such as Ernie Nevers or Don Hutson), and who dominated the games in which they played. Maybe you’re right, maybe the NFL becomes more like that.
But, part of the conceit of the current NFL is the idea of parity, and that “on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team.” Whether that’s true or not is another issue – ask any Browns fan. But, that’s a matter of poor management of some teams more than any fundamental structural flaw in how the league is set up. If the league winds up in a place where there are a few dominant players, then maybe it’s a fun game to watch if you’re a fan of those players’ teams, but if your team isn’t fortunate enough to have one of them, it becomes an exercise in futility.
Back to concussions: Forbes has a brand new article out about the possibility of detecting CTE while people are still alive, as opposed to the current situation where CTE can only be discovered after death.
Players of any professional sport need to realize, yes its a game but also, its a product.
It’s entertainment. Yes, they play football but the cheerleaders, the mascot, the half time entertainment, the music, and yes, the national anthem are all part of that entertainment. That being their product has to compete with other entertainments and the money from the fans.
You know one BIG problem, the price of victory.
Here in Kansas City for years the KC Chiefs really sucked. Then years ago they got better, more fans went to the games and guess what? The ticket prices shot up! So that’s the price a fan has to pay when their team does well. So sometimes your hoping your team loses.
Anything to say about this new article about the topic of concussions?
Perhaps there would be some comment if you linked to a reputable site–not a garbage site like Forbes.
What in that cite was garbage?
edited to add: Is The Atlantic also a garbage site?
Updating this thread here is a scientific medical study of concussions in high school football players:
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(18)31586-5/fulltext
Concussion concerns prompt more Badgers players to leave football:
University of Wisconsin’s Austin Ramesh, Walker Williams and Jake Whalen quit football after brain injuries; ‘I’m gonna have CTE — I just know it,’ Williams says
Another victim? Marion Barber dead at 38:
It certainly seems possible. The article to which you linked seems to be more of an opinion piece; the following, more news-y piece, also from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, contains this passage:
It’s no secret that head injury in rugby league leads to chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Concussion is a big issue issue downunder, its usually but not exclusively caused buy illegal play, if you concussed your off the field.
For a number of years Australian players have been given computerised cognition tests to establish a baseline. It’s a step in the right direction although I’ve heard of players struggling to pass before the season starts or being told not to go too hard at the test.
I was wrong:
According to the autopsy report, one of the bathtub faucets in Barber’s apartment was running when officers arrived, and the unit’s thermostat was set to 91 degrees with the heat set to “on.” Officers also found exercise equipment in the unit.
“Mr. Barber was known to exercise in sauna-like conditions,” the coroner wrote in his report.
Even if he didn’t die of brain damage, Barber would have been a prime candidate for such. He was always deliberately ramming his head into opposing players. As a Cowboys fan, I hated watching him play for that reason, because I always cringed, thinking of the cerebral damage he was doing to himself.
I did not like watching Roy Williams (safety-31#) either for the same reason.
While this happened a long time ago it’s possible football concussions were the cause of this suicide/murder (Jim Tyrer):
Tina Tyrer Moore, the eldest of the four children who was in college at the time of her parents’ deaths, has one of his old helmets. The padding, she said, “is not even a half-inch thick.”
Brad doesn’t remember any specific conversations about whether his father suffered concussions, but he did recall “quite a bit of talk about ‘head pain’ and it seemed that pain had to do with helmets that were too small to fit my dad’s head,” he wrote in an email. “Because they couldn’t get an outer helmet shell large enough, I somewhat remember that they would remove material from the inside (padding and suspension) to allow for more room inside.”
[Note this article is on msn–so not paywalled.]
That is an interesting couple of paragraphs, and they stood out to me for a somewhat different reason.
When I was a teenager, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and rabidly into NFL football, I checked out and read a ton of books about football from the local library (it being Green Bay, I suppose it’s not surprising that they had a lot of such books). I remember reading a book about O.J. Simpson, while he was still a widely-admired sports hero.
The book mentioned that Simpson had a very big head, to the point that, when he arrived at training camp for the Buffalo Bills in his rookie season, they didn’t have a helmet that was big enough for him. He couldn’t participate in contact drills until the Bills were able to obtain (and repaint) the helmet which he had worn while playing for USC.
The passage above makes me now wonder if Simpson (or his teams’ equipment managers) had to similarly “adjust” his helmets to fit him. It might possibly help to explain some of his later, horrid, acts.
(FWIW, I played tackle football, briefly, as a high school freshman in 1979. The helmet I was wearing was probably 10+ years old, and its “padding” was fairly primitive, as well as being old. After getting a concussion during a tackling drill, I quit the team. Helmets from that era likely were pretty poor at protecting the brain.)