The linemen are bigger?
IANA Doctor or Concussion Specialist or Engineer, however, I think the Helmets are the issue. When you have a leather helmet on, and you hit someone head to head, or on some other hard location (knee), you will hurt your head and will tend to avoid the head on collisions. Todays helmets, you won’t feel the pain due to the hardness of the helmet, and you believe the helmet will protect you. Therefore, you will be more willing to hit harder and to use your head as a weapon.
Of course this is just my opinion.
Players, on the whole, are bigger and faster than they were a few decades ago, thanks to better training techniques and diet. And, as a result, players (especially linemen) are far heavier than they used to be. For example, Mick Tinglehoff was the center for the Vikings from 1962 to 1978; he was one of the best centers of his generation, and his listed playing weight was 237 pounds. Jason Kelce of the Eagles was the first team All-Pro center last year, and he’s 295 pounds (and most offensive linemen now weigh over 300).
40 or 50 years ago, unless you were a star, you were a football player for half the year, and you did something else the other half of the year, to pay the bills – when I was growing up in Green Bay in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of the Packers worked other jobs in the spring and summer (often as salesmen or insurance agents). But, now, most players can focus on training all year round.
The result is that, at nearly every position, players are bigger and stronger (and maybe faster, too), and thus, collisions between them have more energy.
Here is my anecdote. My son played football from 3rd thru 12th grade - he just graduated HS. He started in the local youth league, and back then there were so many kids trying to get on the team there were some cuts made - I remember one night we were on pins and needles about him being cut, which would have devastated the 8 year-old him, as it would have meant all his friends got on the team and he not (something that happened to me around his age, but that’s another story). Anyway, he made the cut.
Fast-forward to this past season. The youth league no longer has to think about cutting kids from the team. Opposite problem: they have too few of some age groups so they need to combine teams. Upper middle class suburban town.
I think CTE definitely changed people’s attitude about letting their kids play full-contact fooball. Had the info on CTE emerged a few years earlier we may have chosen a different sport. Anyway, point being, if our town is typical of other football towns, there will be a shrinking pool of players down the road for high school, college, and ultimately the NFL.
agreed, but CTE is showing up in former soccer and rugby players, so it appears to be the concussions, sub-concussive blows, and acceleration/deceleration forces to the brain… remember: helmets were designed to prevent skull fractures (which they do very well) and not concussions
A friend of mine played for the Pittsburgh Steelers and has a bunch of Superbowl rings to show for it. He also has evidence of CTE. He has shown me films of games where he was knocked out cold, sat out a play or two, then was put back in and played very well, but had no memory of the game post concussion.
I am not sure that is enough to kill the NFL, especially not in a time frame as short as a decade. The pool is currently much, much larger than the number of jobs in the NFL. Most college players, even from the Power 5 conference FBS schools never put on a pro football uniform. There are currently highly skilled players that do not even get a chance to play professionally because they are a bit lacking in size or speed. Average size and speed on NFL teams likely goes down some but there is no reason the games cannot still be competitive and interesting.
Maybe if the pool shrinks enough that NFL revenue starts to drop due to quality of games a negative feedback loop kicks in. As revenue drops pay will gradually drop. That risk to reward change for players can shrink the pool further. That would be a slow process IMO. For the early part of this the feedback is positive. With NFL pay still the same but the odds of making the NFL going up the expected value of playing college football has been increasing. That would tend to stabilize the pool for the time being.
At the turn of the century (1900, not 2000) football was brutally violent.
The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, mostly among prep school players. Obituaries of young pigskin players ran on a nearly weekly basis during the football season.
There were a series of reforms, including the addition of safety equipment like helmets, that took from football from the bloodsport it had become to something resembling the modern game. But since then the players have gotten much bigger, stronger, and faster, with only some changes to the safety equipment and rules. It may be time for second major reform of football.
Agree. The NFL is not going away in 10 years for sure, and maybe not ever. However, the quality of the players, and play, may eventually start to suffer at some point if smart athletes take their skills elsewhere. However, with big money involved, there will always be a pool of players willing to risk their health for a dollar.
That said, boxing was pretty big and popular for a while, but something happened along the way that turned people off to it. I suppose something like that could happen to football, but football as a major concern has resources to keep the game popular and in the national consciousness with their slick marketing machine, advertisers, and all that. It may take a death or two on the field to get people turned-off to football.