Former players may attempt to sue because they can claim the league hid studies about CTE. Current players know the risk and play anyway. They won’t be able to sue.
NFL ratings are on the rise in 2018.
Drinking is more dangerous than football and its still damn popular.
Football may have its ups and downs but it will still be viable in 2200…if there is still civilization.
Boxing didn’t decline because of the danger; it declined because Don King almost killed it through corruption. Big fights still rake in tens of millions.
Football is a social activity and people love to watch it and party.
I remember talk of “get rid of football; it’s too dangerous” back in '15. That is, 1915. Seriously, the annual “Big Game” between Cal and Stanford switched from football to rugby for three years because one, if not both, of the schools switched from football because of its dangers.
There is semi-serious talk of doing this again (replacing football with rugby, that is). What I think is the main problem with this is, it’s going to have to be tweaked to allow more than three substitutions per team per game. Soccer has the same restriction, but the NCAA modified it to allow for more substitutions (I think the rule is, if a player comes out of the game before halftime, they can’t go back in until the second half; the first time a player comes out during the second half, they can go back in, but the second time, they’re out until overtime).
To your Don King point, I was born in 68, I remember my Dad dismissing Boxing as mostly corrupt and fixed to one extent or another, when I was a kid in the 70’s.
I agree, and you know what else? Football is probably the “truest” team sport there is in America, and it’s also a great platform for teaching sportsmanship and life lessons to young men. There are risks in every sport. Heck, heading soccer balls is a potentially concussive activity.
I believe that the answer is essentially a return to the “leather helmet” days of the sport. Get rid of the shoulder pads and helmets. they are not protective gear they are weapons, this point is clear to anyone who’s played the sport competitively. Keep most of the rules imposed to eliminate head-to-head contact and reduce the high-speed collisions, adding more to further protect runners/receivers. Maybe get rid of the 3-point stance for linemen. Ultimately the game will end up looking something more akin to lacrosse crossed with aussie football crossed with 7-on-7 football, but it will persist.
Agreed. It’s what most people spend all day Monday talking about at my work during the season. Everyone knows about the concussions now and there are virtually no “skeptics” on the issue. And they don’t really care. Football isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
This it totally anecdotal: my daughter rowed during high school. A lot of the kids on the team (young men and women 13-18 years old) transferred from other sports. By the time kids are 13+ they are usually committed to one sport/activity or another, so how do they end up in crew? For some of them, it was injuries in those other sports, typically soccer, basketball, and volleyball (even some former cheerleaders). There were not any football players as I recall, and only a few lacross players, but that may have had to do with body type. One of the team stars for a couple years was a transfer from soccer, where she was goalie and got kicked in the head and knocked unconscious, then decided to switch sports to something more low-impact. Even in rowing there are injuries.
My son plays high school football, and has played for several years prior. I worry about injuries and more so about damage to his brain. There are a lot of risks with football, but there are risks with ALL activities. There is also risks incurred with NO sporting activities as well (sedentary habits, delinquency-trouble with drugs/substances, etc.). Would I rather my son was on the swim team?, sure, but that train left the station a long time ago and he has had a great time with the sport, and learned a lot (as all sports offer). He has signaled that after high school he has no illusions about playing college ball (he does not want to), which I support.
Because football is popular both as spectator and participant, and is highly visible, it will get a lot of attention. Football is a very physical sport and there is a reason it is in the top tier when it comes to injuries. Is it too dangerous (operative word “too”)?, well, I dunno. You could argue that any activity is too dangerous if you only consider the risks without the benefits. I don’t think Pro football is going anywhere soon unless something else can usurp it’s dominance. I do think there are changes happening and will continue to happen to make play safer, but it will never be risk-free. For a risk-free existence, never leave home.
A couple of points. I don’t think MMA is as dangerous as boxing, if only because the cerebral pounding must be less, by design. The rounds are shorter, and combat consists of more than: hit him in the head (or do things that make it easier to hit him in the head), get hit, and hit back. He’s right about the damage probably being caused by the multiple tiny hits that are an inherent part of the game, and therefore, probably un-legislatable for fixing. I want to say that there’s a study where all of the players on the field got hooked up to cervical accelerometers (however you spell it) and they found that O and D-lineman took the most shocks in a game, just because they were the ones who were always hitting each other.
We really need an en vivo test or study that shows conclusively, the effects of playing tackle football on children’s brains, as well as adults. I think it’ll be 20-25 years, for Stranger’s “when will the NFL be done”, but I too think it’s going away soon, and it’ll be like his mentioning of boxing. You need a test that you can show Suzy Suburbia that, “if Chandler plays Pop Warner, he loses 3 IQ points, on average, for every year he plays.” Then it’ll be a ghetto sport, like boxing. (I will demur from answering the ghetto-ness, or lack thereof, of the football crazy schools of Texas.)
Anyway, no suburb pipeline, no high school players. Not as many high school players, fewer D-1 teams. And fewer D-1 teams, fewer pros. There will always be some, like there’s still boxing. But it won’t be something that educators will encourage kids to do in 25 years. Just like boxing used to be something that educators used to get kids to settle their differences and blow off steam.
I think Omni’s got it with returning the sport to more of its rugby roots. You can’t have human missiles flying around anymore and hitting people with their heads. Or at their heads.
Oh yeah, almost forgot: didn’t most of the former players settle with the League already (for a pittance, IIRC) concerning any CTE or continuing injury liability?
FWIW, and I’m no expert on the topic (though I started following the Irish rugby team a few years ago), but rugby players get a lot of concussions, too, and it’s not at all clear to me that changing to a rugby-like game would solve the problem (and rugby players suffer an awful lot of spinal and facial injuries, too).
Some of you seem to be implying that the fall of boxing had something to do with it’s risks. It didn’t and I don’t think any serious researcher on the topic could argue that it did. Boxing fell due to competition, loss of trust and the changing media landscape. The corruption of the promoters and judges had orders of magnitude more impact than any health concerns. The biggest problem with boxing in the US is it’s lack of organization, and that lack of organization is what makes it viable in really poor countries with weak institutions. You don’t need a relationship with the sport to understand boxing and enjoy a fight, its visceral, but almost every organized team sport requires it’s fans to have familiarity with it to really appreciate it.
Football is probably the most institutional of all sports, and for that reason it will hang on the longest.
Football at it’s most lethal was very rugby-like. The forward pass was instituted as a safety measure. I definitely agree that this is not the future. But facial and spinal injuries are highly preferable to invisible brain injuries, and not nearly as pervasive as CTE appears to be. Like, not even in the same galaxy.
To a certain extent these heat injuries are indeed football specific. The players are wearing thick padding and multiple layers in hot heat; something you wouldn’t see soccer or tennis players doing.