One of the problems with contact sports are the macho idiots who think it is manly to grunt and crash heads, little do they realise that by decreasing the risk factor you can increase the skill factor and create a entertaining spectator sport.
Flag football is fundamentally different. In football, someone who is strong and difficult to bring down has a huge offensive advantage. With flag football, it’s primarily about speed.
Not a chance. Even if there were minimal contact in football, the type of exertion isn’t comparable to baseball. You’d still have linemen blocking, you’d still have incidental rough contact. Not to mention that, each play is essentially a full on sprint, lots of hard cuts, etc. But even more, there’d be virtually no preparation for opponents, which is a huge part of the game. In baseball you might prepare for different pitching or batting styles, but that’s more on an individual basis, you have entirely different offensive and defenseive schemes.
Frankly, it’s one of my favorite things about football. Particularly with baseball, there’s often games during the day or other times that make it difficult to watch if I want to. With football, I can set time aside, and with a week, there’s the build up of anticipation, which is as much fun as watching the game.
And, sure, in baseball, there’s almost always a game on, even if it’s not your team, but during football season, there’s football games on most days too. NFL has Thursday, Sunday, and Monday, College has Fridays and Saturdays. So five out of seven days have games on them, Saturdays and Sundays have games on basically all day, and the other days are typically chosen to try to be the best games and are in prime time. Football schedules tailor-made around a typical work schedule.
Yes, there are people who take contact in sports too seriously and hit excessively hard and take too much pride in it. However, not every sport is about grace, and part of the skill factor in certain games IS the physicality of the game. Football aside for a moment, sports like boxing and wrestling, have a lot of grace in them, but you still need to physically dominate your opponent. Even in a game like basketball, large physical presences and manhandling is a major part of some player’s games. Yes, football takes the physicality aspect to a high degree, but without it, it’s not football.
That is, sure, to a casual fan, seeing a high-flying passing offense is spectacular to watch, and it certainly requires a high degree of skill, but to a more hardcore fan, seeing a hard-fought defensive game, a dog fight in the trenches, grinding out yards in long 15-20 play drives marching down the field rather than 6-8 passing plays. Yes, there’s significant skill involved in precisely running routes and timing a pass to hit the receiver in stride, and most fans of sports and athletics recognize that. But that’s not inherently more skillful than the quick hands and feet of linemen, fighting for even the slightest bit of leverage, offensive linemen reading defenses for stunts and blitzes, reacting to various ways of countering their blocking technique and defensive linemen reading the backfield and attempting to get around the block. Or the running backs who have to have the nimbleness and speed to run and cut in the open field, the strength to push through tackles in the trenches, all-the-while reading the defenses and the blocks ahead of them and adjusting and cutting based on how it’s playing out in the moment.
It’s sort of like saying that Usain Bolt, world’s fastest man, is a more skilled athlete than Brian Shaw, world’s strongest man. They’re so fundamentally different, it’s impossible to meaningfully compare them other than that each is at the top of his field, is a genetic freak of nature who works his ass off. A lot of sports tend to favor a certain type of athlete, football is one that allows for a gamut of various athletic skills.
As for the OP though, specifically, the physicality of the game is what causes these types of injuries. I think the reason we see the types of injuries we do has as much or more to do with the types of athletes we see today as it does with the equipment. Our methods of training, diet, exercise, medicine (and, unfortunately, PEDs), recovery, not to mention that athletes are often working toward it from younger and younger ages. Particularly in football, comparing athletes even from just 15-20 years ago, much less 30-40 years ago, to ones today, the vast majority wouldn’t even be sniffing the pros. Players are bigger, stronger, faster, and more aggressive than ever, and this leads to more players laying it all out in the field sacrificing their bodies or making harder hits. Taking a hit from a safety that’s 200 lbs and runs a 4.2-40 is going to hurt a whole lot more than one that was 180 lbs and ran a 4.4-40 a generation ago.
We don’t see this type of thing in less physical sports, instead we just see more home runs or faster times or whatever. And I don’t think removing safety equipment will do anything but exacerbate the problem. Players in football are encouraged to leave it all on the field and to sacrifice their bodies for the game, and if they don’t, there’s always someone waiting to take that spot that will.
Instead, I think the way to fix it is to look at ways to adjust the rules to help minimize it. Like, for instance, when they moved up where the kick-offs are kicked from a couple years back. It makes for a little less excitement, but a lot more touchbacks, and kick-offs are one of the most violent plays precisely because players are running full speed at each other. I’m not sure how much it might have reduced injuries on those plays, but as long as it was statistically significant, it’s a fair trade.
It seems to me, though, that what the most recent knowledge brings up isn’t so much sudden injuries, but repetitive injuries. As in, one might get a concussion or two from head on collisions, but that’s likely outweighed significantly by countless micro-injuries from lower speed contact on a play-by-play basis. To a certain extent, that’s inherent to the game, but if they can find ways to slow down impacts even slightly, that will likely help.
So, for instance, a lot of players get away from non-mandatory pads, or go with the smallest ones possible, because it slows them down. Receivers and defensive backs, for instance, rarely wear anything other than shoulder pads and helmets. Make them wear hip and thigh and knee pads, if for no other reason, than to slow them down. Some players don’t use mouth guards, which do a lot to help reduce brain injuries.
First off, the issue IS NOT CONCUSSIONS. Let me repeat that. CONCUSSIONS AREN’T THE PROBLEM TO BE ADDRESSED.
CTE seems to be caused by the accumulation of thousands of sub-concussive impacts. Like those that an offensive lineman might do dozens of times every game or practice. That’s also why non-contact sports like soccer have some issue with this- heading a hard soccer ball is much the same.
Originally, the big issue was that skull fractures and the corresponding deaths were very common back up through the early 1970s. Then, new helmets were designed that dropped the incidence of skull fractures dramatically, down to almost zero these days. Problem is, they keep heads from breaking, but the brain still bounces around in the skull. Combine these better helmets with better face masks, and you end up with players and coaches who advocate using them as weapons and/or a method to stop the momentum of the other player (O-line/D-line/linebackers), and you get the situation where these guys butt heads thousands of times a season.
It seems like maybe there’s a critical number of impacts and their accumulated brain damage that once past, the brain can’t compensate for, and the ex-players start showing symptoms. This is probably also affected by individual brain structure and biology.
Ultimately though, what this means is that Troy Aikman, with something like 7 concussions in his playing career, is probably at leass risk for CTE than his center, Mark Stepnoski, who AFAIK, had no concussions in his career.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the athleticism of the players- the old-timers from the 1960s and 1970s have had CTE for a while, but are just now being diagnosed. If anything, the greater speed and strength of today’s players will make the CTE epidemice worse and more depressing in years to come.
If the dinosaurs refuse to allow change we will see the gradual decline of contact sports. Within a generation we will start to see head shots being banned from boxing as it is being proved that helmets can increase the risk of head trauma, in the UK we are starting to see safer rugby at school level, will this create a spin off league of its own for adult players? Rugby also has senior leagues where older players are not expected to clash with younger, fitter and faster players.
One cause of injury is performance enhancing drugs that create an un-natural aggression that encourages participants in contact sports to take far greater risks not only to them selves but to other players. If we are to keep our contact sports we need to treat the whole of the sport not just use a sticking plaster.