My point was that, before the issue of long-term brain damage was added to the risk, the question facing these men was ‘knees and shoulders’ for the opportunity of an education.
I was talking about Intelligent, Rational decisions.
The kind of decision that reasons:
OK, I probably won’t make a living at this, but, for my time and possibly a joint or two, I CAN get a real education at a good school.
For a few of these guys, that was their only shot at such an education, and they took it.
Not all college athletes take Basketweaving 105 or use the ‘tutors’ to do the work for real classes. A few of them are smart enough to actually get the education offered.
The number i"d like to see is the percent of the fellows who CAN be certain of a NFL contract who actually DO get the education anyway.
I’ll throw this in here:
Purdue likes to call its teams ‘Boilermakers’. This is not a reference to a mixed drink.
In the 1880’s the football coach went to the local factory where (steam) locomotives were fabricated. The workers were very well muscled.
He signed up a few as students and put them in uniforms.
They were roughly twice the size of the rest of College Football Players of the time.
The results were bloody messes.
A newspaper reporter, disgusted by the sham, referred to the ringers as ‘boilermakers’, which, in large part, was what they did - the dominant part of the locomotive was the boiler,
The above story is how Purdue explained the name to incoming Freshmen students in 1967.
Yeah, when Teddy fucking Roosevelt thinks you need to make things a bit safer , you might want to sit up and take notice.
Well that and the NHL is taking it more seriously it seems. However, there have been some former players who were found to have suffered from CTE after they died. (Bob Probert would be the most well-known). But, at least they’re acknowledging the problem and trying to do something about it. (The really scary thing is when you look at how back in the day these guys didn’t even wear helmets! :eek:)
After having been a football fan since the 1960s, I stopped watching football a few seasons ago when I learned about CTE. It did not seem right to derive entertainment from watching other people incur permanent brain damage.
I know that, in all likelihood, the people who made the shirt on my back did so in conditions that are detrimental to their health. And I think we should do what we can to keep that from being the case. But in the meantime, I need a shirt, while football is merely entertainment. I don’t need to be entertained in that particular way.
Also, there’s something particularly awful about brain damage. If your body is shot, you can compensate for that to some degree with your mind. But not the other way around.
Yeah. My dad’s way of putting it was “it may not be a good idea to define your head as a target.” If players think their heads (and their opponents’) are protected from damage, they’re going to play differently.
Football helmets are good at preventing skull fractures, and neck injuries, which are caused by linear impacts (the hard shell combined with the round shape redirect linera impacts). They are very ineffective at preventing brain injuries from rotational forces:
I actually read a history of the football helmet once, and apparently in the 1950s and 1960s, skull fractures were a huge source of brain damage in football players, often times lethally so. So they made the NOCSAE back in 1973, and redesigned the helmets to be protective against skull fractures. This was outstandingly successful, as the number of fractures has dropped to nearly nothing since then.
However, the modern helmets don’t protect so well against internal brain injury- indeed, what makes a helmet effective against skull fractures also tends to make it ineffective against concussions.
Ultimately, what’s being found is that the brain is absurdly vulnerable to minor impacts; even soccer players are being found with CTE, and they think it’s repetitive heading of the ball over the years which causes it.
You’re probably mostly wrong about hockey. It is plagued with brain injuries compared to other sports. It has the second highest concussion rate of any sport after only American football. Pro statistics almost certainly mirror the amateurs in ranking if not in exact rate, but I don’t know that the NFL or NHL release concussion statistics. I’m basing my comments on statistics from amateurs or youths through high school.
It also seems very likely that hockey players suffer from subconcussive hits just like football. It doesn’t happen as often as football, but every body check likely shakes the head enough to cause long term damage, and certainly every blow to the head does even when it doesn’t cause a concussion. Body checks, high sticks, accidental/intentional hits to the head, falling to the ice, accidental collisions, and more are likely contributing factors in hockey.
It would be very surprising if the sport that had the second highest rate of concussions did not have a similar problem to football regarding subconcussive hits.
I say all this as a hockey player and coach. If I had it to do over again, I would probably not let my two sons play, but they’re in high school so will be done playing competitively soon.
For the record, here are the concussion rates for high school athletes per 100,000 athletic exposures from the NFHS RIO from 2008-2014:
Football 87
Boys’ Ice Hockey 68
Girls’ Soccer 58
Boys’ Lacrosse 48
Girls’ Lacrosse 37
Boys’ Wrestling 40
Girls’ Basketball 37
Boys’ Soccer 29
Girls’ Field Hockey 27
Girls’ Soccer 20
Boys’ Basketball 20
I’d expect Girls’ ice hockey to be above boys’, but there probably isn’t enough data because of the small number of girls’ high school teams. Most girls in my area will play on the boys’ team if they’re good enough because they don’t have enough female players to make a team.
I’d guess getting checked into the boards and having your helmeted head hit the boards, even if there was no other actual contact with the head would be a major source of sub-concussive hits. So would drastic falls where the head impacts the ice.
Falls can happen, of course, and hockey is a very fast very high-energy sport. But rules are designed to mitigate those events. Deliberately checking someone into the boards is illegal:
A boarding penalty shall be imposed on any player who checks or pushes a defenseless opponent in such a manner that causes the opponent to hit or impact the boards violently or dangerously. http://www.nhl.com/ice/page.htm?id=68557
So is charging (illegal checking), head-butting, and other forms of violent play described in the NHL rulebook.
My view is that the rules should be even stronger and penalties more severe.
Right. One of my issues with the current rules is that all bets are off for a player in possession of the puck, wherein boarding and charging are normally just forms of legal checking. It’s quite common to see a player that an individual opponent or his entire team has a grudge against body-checked with exceptional violence as a form of retribution, and they usually get away with it because checks are part of the game – unless he practically kills the guy. Those are the kinds of rules I’d like to see changed. But otherwise, “defenseless” is defined as either a player not in control of the puck or, even if he is, if he can’t see the approaching check. Violence has been practically eliminated from hockey at the kids’ junior levels and it’s still a fast-paced fun game.
In the case of hockey and Rugby it may just be lack of study than lack of a problem.
I’m not sure that football didn’t have similar problems in the 50s and 60s, particularly since back then things like head slaps were legal. They just didn’t study the retired players the way they do now.
Why? There are actually more NFL teams (32) than NHL teams (30). Why would one be studied less than another?
It’s also interesting that all the NFL injuries come from a remarkably small number of actual played games. Football is among the sports I’m least likely to ever watch and I know correspondingly little about it so forgive me if I’ve got this wrong, but I think NFL teams each play 16 games in the regular season, as opposed to 82 for the NHL and almost twice that – 162 – in major league baseball. So the injury rate seems all the more extraordinary based on that alone.
They do only play 16 games, and each player is only on the field for 50% of each game at most. But they also have more practice time than other American sports because of that.
There are two issues for me: One, children play this game. From the age of 5 until high school. I believe full contact football will atrophy among children as parents stop signing them up for fear of brain injuries. But in the mean time we need to educate parents of the dangers of football. Not just the dangers to the body, which are many and well known, but the dangers to the mind as well, which are hidden.
Second, the professionals who played up until recently had no idea what they were doing to themselves. They were paid well, but uninformed about the true consequences. Those consequences were purposefully hidden from them and the public for years by the NFL. By withholding that information from the players and the public, they necessarily withheld it from the children who were then playing the game and considering professional football as a career. I’d like to see them win a lawsuit or settlement against the NFL as payment for their lost health.
Once we fix those, I’d like to see football made safer. Counterintuitively, I think less body armor and getting rid of helmets would help a lot. They only make it possible to hit people harder, it doesn’t really make the game any safer. Look at rugby, or pre-1950 football to see how that works.
Of the fifty most-watched sports broadcasts in the US in 2013, only four were not NFL games–and of those four, one was college football.
On a list of the top 50 events excluding the NFL, the highest-rated NHL game is number 50, with a 4.7 rating and 8.1m viewers. The third round of the Masters beat that, as did the Preakness and three games of the blisteringly dull Pacers/Heat NBA East championship.
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Well, for starters it’s just a couple of doctors who started studying the phenomenon and discovered this.
AFAIK there have been no similar studies done on either Hockey or Rugby, which are vastly more comparable than baseball.
As I noted, football was vastly more violent just a few decades ago when this phenomenon wasn’t noted.
Which is more likely, that it didn’t exist, or that it did and people didn’t notice.
You also are ignoring that practices can’t be ignored and practices back in the Lombardi era were far more brutal than they are today. Everything was full speed in full pads.
We should care because there are a large number of young Americans who dream of playing football in the NFL. They participate in a sport which has been proven to cause concussions to players on a regular basis. Getting your ‘bell rung’ is a common event for football players, which no one considered to be a problem up until recently. The helmets and padding only encourage more hits, and harder hits.
Not very many kids grow up wanting to be miners, or oil rig workers. Not very many kids want to be fireman any more, either. Those vocations are no where near as status-creating as professional sports, yet they are much more vital to our country.