IIRC, Teddy Roosevelt once summoned football leaders to the White House after a year in which 18 football players died, telling them to fix the game or see it banned.
Rugby seems to manage it with their rules on tackling. Simply, there is no contact with the head. American football has a death rate of 14 per 100,000 participants; rugby union has a death rate of 0.84 per 100,000 in the UK and rugby league a death rate of 2 per 100,000. See this Wikipedia article for more.
Hmm - ratings are barely up slightly versus last year - and that’s coming off a really easy YoY hurdle after two straight years of declines, particularly given that ratings this time last year were down almost 10% versus the previous year, when ratings were down almost 15% vs the year before that. That’s almost a *25% loss of viewership. *OK, ratings have inched back up a whopping 2%. Big deal. To say ratings are ‘on the rise’ is a bit of a stretch. Let’s see how things play out now that the baseball playoffs are in full swing and the NBA season will be starting soon.
Eight years ago my son signed up to play football on his Highschool team. When I found out I approached him for a “serious talk”. Once he realized my concern, he told me I had no need to worry. He had signed up so he could use the school gym to work out over the summer. As summer ended, the coach contacted me, concerned that he didn’t want to play (and was going to start). I never returned the call.
His Highschool just barely had enough warm bodies to field a team.
A better country wouldn’t let institutions of learning subject their students to the dangers of high impact collision sports.
As to the immediate, the NFL is indeed enjoying a little uptick this season and its tv ratings decline may never have been as dire as some suggested, relative to almost all other kinds of television viewing. The real danger to it long term is the steady erosion of participation at the youth and high school levels.
Transition to flag football. Problem mostly solved.
Knowing what we know about football, I wonder why we have laws against having people fight with clubs, but we allow a sport where they allow them to give each other concussions with their heads. We know it kills people directly and later on from gradual brain injury.
If it’s wrong for people to cause each other brain damage with clubs, then it should be wrong to do it with football helmets.
I think it could look something like 7 on 7 with no real use for linemen. Although personally I also favor the “no pads and leather helmet” approach. These guys would not be launching their unprotected bodies into each other the way they do now.
I love watching football, but I would agree that as it is today, it’s too dangerous. Too dangerous for me to encourage my son to play. And it’s not just the head injuries, it’s the whole body. You take a real beating playing football.
One of my favorite arguments from proponents of youth/high school football goes along the lines of “it gives the bigger, less athletic kids a sport where they have a chance to do well.”
The state of Michigan has 64 schools in its 8-man football classification this fall.
Ratings are down for TV across the board, but the NFL continues to dominate TV. Regular Sunday Football games pull in better ratings than NBA/MLB playoff games.
Maybe, and it’s true that they train without pads for the early off-season specifically because people slow down when they don’t feel the “armor” they normally have. But I’m not sure that’s always the case. I remember when Pete Carroll was concerned about his practices being a bit rough (and being fined for that) so he tried practicing without helmets to get them to take it easy. They played the same and he got an even bigger fine. So I’m not sure how well this works in practice. And again, people were getting hurt more in the leather helmet era. We use modern helmets because they’ve led to fewer injuries (at least fewer obvious ones, CTE may be worse).
The pads/gear had nothing to do with it. These are 350 pound guys running really hard in high heat. They could be naked, wouldn’t matter. In this example, the coaches may be culpable for not allowing adequate water, rest, and discouraging asking out. The player also didn’t come into camp in the proper shape, which contributed.
I think it’s foolish to start combining all the risks into a single argument. It muddies the waters and several risks aren’t specific to football, which undermines the point.
The ratings are down due to cord cutting. There’s very little cause-effect with the injury stuff. The Olympics, World Cup, MLB and NHL are all way down. NBA is an outlier driven by a influx of talent and the LeBron/Warriors story line.
Do you suspect that the NBA is in something of a bubble right now or is this interest expected to last?
Hard to say. Depends on how you define a bubble I suppose. They will certainly regress when LeBron retires and the Warriors break up. I do think the NBA is more fundamentally sound than the other sports and more ready to survive in the post-cable world.
Kevin Ellison’s brain will evidently be examined to see if there is a connection with CTE and his mental issues. I still have not seen a cause of death anywhere in the news.
The fact that the family is taking this step suggests to me that either (a) he committed suicide (or died in some unusual manner), or (b) his family saw things in his behavior before his death that suggested to them that he might have had CTE.
If you read much about Ellison, I think you’ll see that point (b) is most likely true. Here is an article from 2012 about Ellison setting his bed on fire by God’s direction.
Yeah, I saw this story about Joe Murphy. I remember when he played for the Sharks.