Malcolm Gladwell had an article in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago about head injuries in football. Gladwell thinks football will be vastly different in fifty years:
I do not agree. We have known about the dangers of boxing for years but have not made vast changes.
The only change I can think of that would really help is taking away the helmet. This change would prevent (mostly) using the head as a weapon.
I doubt this will happen.
They could also make a concussion an automatic season ending injury, but this change might cause players to hide concussions.
I think that within the next ten years, someone will die on the field from head to head contact (or at least be knocked unconsious and never recover.) How this will change the game, I don’t know, but it will change it.
True, but boxing seems to have lost ground to even more violent sports (say the UFC) which has less rules and less padding. Maybe that means football will be replaced by something even more violent.
Boxing has lost popularity because the marquee division, Heavyweight, has nobody worth rooting for or against. The lower weight classes are thriving.
Football organizations will have to address this problem (if in fact you consider it to be a problem, which I’m on the fence about), but they will certainly not do it by removing helmets. That’s suicide.
Boxing is a shadow of its former self because of corruption and an alphabet soup of governing bodies and championship belts.
I could see maybe disallowing the 3 and 4 point stances, and perhaps independent medical authorities with the power to disqualify individual players from playing, but I don’t see the game itself changing that much.
I read the topic and thought “Hey, I’m going to post a link to that Malcolm Gladwell piece I just saw.” So, it seems that Malcolm Gladwell has recently written an article about football and head injuries…
I recently read a rather disconcerting roundtable discussion with several NFL quarterbacks on Sports Illustrated’s website, in which Carson Palmer expressed virtually this exact view. (Minus the 10-year window.) None of the other quarterbacks seemed to seriously disagree, at least according to the interviewer.
The impression I got after reading the Gladwell article was that a heavy proportion of players suffering lasting effects were lineman, and that it was repeated lower-impact collisions that were the main culprit, rather than a single or a few hard hits. My thought at the time was, well then, just change the game so that linemen don’t start in a down stance, or put a little more distance between them at the line of scrimmage, and you’ll take care of a lot of the problem. So, I can see this change being implemented, and in my view, it wouldn’t change the game that much.
That still doesn’t help the quarterback who gets blindsided by some hulking linebacker running at full speed, though, or a receiver who gets clotheslined while stretching out for a catch, which is what I sort of think Carson Palmer was talking about. It’s been over 30 years since Darryl Stingley was paralyzed. The game didn’t change much then and is as rough as at any time in the modern era now. I don’t know how the game could be changed as a result and still, as Gladwell says, resemble the game we know today. I don’t think any huge changes will be made even in the event of another tragedy (or even multiple tragedies), which is where I think Gladwell gets it wrong. He seems to think our society won’t tolerate such things. I think the sport is too lucrative, and is played in a country that places too high value on the freedom to choose one’s own path, to undergo a radical transformation.
Yes, but brain injuries seem a lot less prevalent in MMA than in boxing. In boxing you stand there getting punched in the head. In MMA there are lots of ways to end a fight besides hitting your opponent in the head 20 times until he loses consciousness. And the heavier padded gloves in boxing don’t protect the head and internal organs of the punchee, they protect the hands of the puncher. So lighter gloves means softer punches.
Of course MMA doesn’t have the longitudinal history that boxing does, so it may just be that we haven’t had time to see MMA fighters develop long term health problems.
If you go back far enough, there has been vast changes to boxing. Compare today’s boxing with the bare-knuckles era. It may still be a dangerous sport today, but it’s vastly safer than it used to be.
Trying to compare boxing to football doesn’t work because of a basic difference between the two: football is fun to both watch and to play. At a family picnic, everybody can join the game.
Football will change in the future due to the massive drug testing campaign that is currently ravaging MLB. Once football players (College and Pros) start getting tested regularly, the players will inevitably get smaller and slower.
This in itself will result in fewer injuries.
The limited research I did stated that the NFL was more open to testing and they test 10 players from each team weekly so yeah pretty much the whole roster gets tested once or twice a year.
The problem with testing is that there is always a drug to be used that either:
While it seems less violent, I’m not sure the fundamentals of the sports itself have changed in ways that make it safer. The main things seem to be more weight classes, shorter fights, and fewer fights; things that were done in part for monetary reasons. I’m sure if they only played 8, 40 minute games a year in football, it would be “safer” too.
The other things is that modern boxing gloves, like NFL padding don’t always result in safer play. They often allow people to hit harder, and take greater risks. Boxing gloves primarily prevent you from hurting your hands at the expense of hurting your opponent’s head and body.
Real Sports on HBO had a piece on this issue recently too. The conclusions they drew, from speaking to many past and present players, was that the players knew the risks going in, and would do it again. Some of the players who said those things were already experiencing the negative effects of playing in years past. You can’t convince people at such an elite level, in a zero-sum game, who have such a small margin for error to let up in the interest of long-term health and safety. In many way it’s analogous to compensation for bankers and hedge-fund guys. The people who risk the most, take the greatest chances, are most confident, or alternatively, hit the hardest, are rewarded. You encourage behavior that is fundamentally risky.
Eh, I’m not sure how much of this can be attributed to size. Particularly since the era of huge linemen, et. al. have not been out of the game long enough to experience for the lasting effects of traumatic brain injury.
That’s a problem for all sports, Kearsen. The NFL does test for performance enhancing drugs and masking agents and it’s been doing that for years. I don’t think it’s reduced injuries or the size of players but I’m open to statistical evidence.
I read this article yesterday and the evidence on injuries was really alarming. But I don’t think it was one of Gladwell’s better efforts in that he didn’t build a case for what’s going to happen or what would help. (He did, however, explain why the wedge has been eliminated.) The players do know more or less what they are getting into, and it is hard to protect people from themselves. I would like to see stronger rules protecting players who have had concussions or been shaken up, though. The ideas posted in this thread sound like good ones. They wouldn’t fundamentally change football but they might help.
The X factor in all this is what it would do to public opinion if someone does get killed on the field. I don’t think that’s impossible. Maybe we would see a hockey-style rule against leaving your feet to make a hit?
I don’t agree. For one thing if that does happen, then the incentive to use drugs will be even higher. If right now assume 95% of all players are users or have used anabolic steroids, if in the future only 50% have used them then that means the incentive goes up because you aren’t just keeping up with your competitors, you are overwhelming them. Someone who uses drugs while his competitors do not has a massive advantage to use them.
Besides, drug testing can be gotten around. You can use drugs like growth hormone and insulin which, to my knowledge, are not tested for. I believe the MLB drug tests ran into this problem of drugs that aren’t tested for. Another problem is that you can take anabolic steroids with short half lifes that do not show up on drug tests. Drugs like dianabol are (I believe) cleared in about 3 days and testosterone propionate and andriol are cleared from the system in 1-2 weeks. So unless you do drug testing every 3 days, you have problems. What is to stop someone from doing a 4 week cycle of short half life anabolics? These should be undetectable within 2 weeks after stopping.
Plus people might be able to clean their urine faster with various supplements. I don’t know.
Either way, drug testing is not the panacea it is made out to be.
On another issue, muscle building drugs are getting better. It used to just be anabolic steroids. Now it is HGH and insulin combined with anabolics. And now myostatin inhibitors should be hitting the market (they block a protein that inhibits stem cell activity in muscle. Block the protein and stem cell activity in your muscles increases, resulting in more muscle mass).
Here is what a bull looks like that has been bred to not have the myostatin protein. I’m assuming the bull has not done any exercise above and beyond what a normal bull would do.
I think injuries are going to get a lot worse soon. The reason is that drugs like anabolic steroids just make pre-existing muscle fibers bigger. But drugs like HGH or myostatin blockers actually create new muscle cells. So not only will athletes have large muscle cells, they will have far more of them. Soon it may not be uncommon for a lineman to be able to bench press 800 pounds (most do about 500 pounds now).
No idea what happens then because at that point people will be injured even easier. But I do think we are going to start entering an age where advances in biology make people far stronger who want to become stronger.
Not over 50 years. Over a long period like that, I expect we will see far more use of performance enhancing techniques than we see now. And for sports in general, not just football.
In the long run - like 50 years - I expect the use of performance enhancing techniques ( not just drugs ) to become common. Not just in professional sports; in anyone who wants to better themselves physically. At that point, forbidding such things would not only disqualify most potential athletes from competing at all, but it would hardly be good for sports if the athletes were all weaker and slower than the audience. So at some point I expect the whole ideal of forbidding performance enhancement to collapse.
What I expect is that sports like football will come to resemble car racing; rather than technology being forbidden, there will be an attempt to regulate a technologically level and reasonably safe playing field. In other words, the rules might be that muscle enhancers A, B and C will be allowed; the dangerous-but-stronger version D will be disallowed, and full on cyborgs are right out.
