http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2572268-new-jersey-high-school-football-player-dies-after-being-injured-during-game?utm_source=cnn.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=editorialOilCanShotTupac said:On phone so no link but HS QB dies after hit in game
Apisith said:He got hit. Left the game. Was on the sidelines, felt woozy then fell down. Carted off. Then passes away.
How many years before the government bans football for all kids under 16?
Apisith said:He got hit. Left the game. Was on the sidelines, felt woozy then fell down. Carted off. Then passes away.
How many years before the government bans football for all kids under 16?
Apisith said:How many years before the government bans football for all kids under 16?
Devizier said:I don't think it will be legislated. Municipalities will just stop subsidizing (i.e. no high school football).
The one-sided nature of the rules have turned football into a mockery. This has been going on for about a half decade now but when it gets to the point where an inadvertent TAP ON THE HELMET results in “roughing the passer,” then we no longer know what the word “roughing” means.
For the record, according to the dictionary at least, the word roughing is defined as “characterized by or done with violence or forcefulness.” If essentially high-fiving Tom Brady’s face mask, which is the sum of what Jacksonville’s Dan Skuta did, constitutes “roughing the passer” then we are no longer even playing touch football. We are playing touchy-feely football, which is to say not football at all.
Again this is not Brady’s fault. It’s the fault of the men who run the game, most of whom are trained in marketing not mayhem, the latter being the foundation upon which the game was built. What those suits believe is that fans want points and aren’t smart enough to realize that many of the points today are a result of defense having been outlawed.
What the game has turned into is basketball without hand checking. You can’t touch a receiver so they run freely all over the field. Joe Montana knows a thing or two about football, so I asked him last week what he thought of all those wide-open shallow crosses Julian Edelman makes a living from. His response was telling.
“If we’d tried that, the receiver wouldn’t have played another game for a month,” Montana said.
In other words, he would have been decapitated. That’s what football was. What it’s become is a game where the McCown brothers, career backups, went 59-for-87 for 651 passing yards yesterday. The McCown brothers?
Maybe that entertains some people, but so does the tattooed lady and they both belong in the circus.
If you believe what the NFL is selling you today is football, then you have no idea what football is supposed to be or what it was for most of its 90-year history.
When the rules are so severely altered as to make the game unbalanced and leaning unfairly in one direction farther than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it makes a mockery of the numbers.
If one wants to debate it, consider this: Twenty-three of the top 35 single-season passing years have occurred since 2010. That’s 66 percent of the top single-season performances.
You really believe this is the same game as the one that made pro football a national phenomenon?
What football has become is what baseball became after they juiced both the balls and the players: a phony show of offense. The rules are juiced and so are the numbers.
Devizier said:
I don't think it will be legislated. Municipalities will just stop subsidizing (i.e. no high school football).
It really was an incredibly well written and powerful piece. I hope it gets a lot of national attention.TheRooster said:Powerful piece by Charles P. Pierce. His emphatic use of the word "child" changes the narrative.
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-death-of-evan-murray/
Where do you think these government regulations are going to come from if they aren't legislated?nighthob said:
I don't think it will be legislated either, I expect it to be government regulation banning full contact football for kids under 16.
Alone among our sports spectacles, American football kills our children.
Alone among our sports spectacles, American football kills our children
I read it through my dad eyes so I went in about as unobjective (or is it nonobjective?) as possible. But what's the equivalence of playing football with either getting a drivers license or playing video games?maufman said:The Pierce article is awful. I'm surprised it's getting so much praise on a site that normally prides itself on objective analysis. I wonder if Pierce thinks we should keep kids from getting driver's licenses and playing video games until they turn 21 too.
maufman said:The Pierce article is awful. I'm surprised it's getting so much praise on a site that normally prides itself on objective analysis. I wonder if Pierce thinks we should keep kids from getting driver's licenses and playing video games until they turn 21 too.
In terms of short-term risk, letting your teenage boy drive a car is a far greater risk than letting him play football, but Pierce isn't suggesting that we raise the age to get a driver's license to 21. It's nonsense.GeorgeCostanza said:I read it through my dad eyes so I went in about as unobjective (or is it nonobjective?) as possible. But what's the equivalence of playing football with either getting a drivers license or playing video games?
Nice find. I think the article misses the point entirely. If anything kills American football, it is going to be the increasing evidence that playing football leads to CTE.StupendousMan said:Pierce writes:
He quotes statistics from The National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. In their report covering high school and college sports injuries from 1982/83 to 2012/13, they find that the rate of direct, fatal injuries in male high-school sports are
0.28 in football (fatalities per 100,000 participants)
0.44 in ice hockey
0.11 for baseball
0.15 for lacrosse
0.13 for track
During this period, 118 male high school students died as a result of direct injuries while playing football, 4 in ice hockey, 14 in baseball, 22 in track.
To use Pierce's words, football kills children in the US --- but it is NOT the only sport which does.
Yes to CTE being the scary shit. And double yes to the deaths being horrible and easy to publicize.RFDA2000 said:I feel like he deaths are a bit like airplane crashes. Horrible and easy to publicize, but not why I wouldn't let my kid play football.
http://www.sportsafetyinternational.org/what-are-the-deadliest-high-school-sports/
It's the CTE stuff that scares me, and not knowing how many kids might be affected by it whether they make it past high school or college.
TheRooster said:Between this article and the Borges piece I actually do think there is a bloodsport aspect of football. Pierce arguably puts too much emphasis on the deaths but I think he'd say that baseball deaths come from accidents (most kids aren't trying to hit a batter in the head with an 85mph fastball) whereas football deaths often come from the expected collisions. And even the stats Stubpendus pulled show that kids are 2.5x more likely to die playing football versus baseball.
To its credit, hockey mostly bans checking for kids. I think flag football for pre-HS kids is the future for many parts of the US. Could that someday make it all the way to HS?
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me. I would guess that everyone who ever was killed or seriously injured in boxing or football or any sport felt the same way you did - until it happened to them.Marciano490 said:I think the difference - for me - is that you can do everything right in football and still be hurt/killed. You can be the best guy on the field and still be hurt/killed. If you're skiing, or playing baseball and suffer a brain injury - even a nonfatal one - something has gone wrong, or in the case of skiing, you were probably trying to do something beyond your talent or experience level.
When I fought, my mother would send me articles about people getting killed or losing their wits. I was around a lot of punchy guys. It never really bothered me, because I knew I'd only suffer any of those outcomes if I wasn't quick enough, good enough, if I let my hands down, etc. With football, there's almost an inevitability to the damage that transcends ability or level of care or size. The violence and injury are built in. You can sense it on every play. It used to be exciting, now it just makes me feel a bit of dread on every play.
Super Nomario said:That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me. I would guess that everyone who ever was killed or seriously injured in boxing or football or any sport felt the same way you did - until it happened to them.
maufman said:I know more than my share of serious skiers (not one myself, but married to one). They would definitely take issue with your description of the risk inherent in that sport.
OilCanShotTupac said:
Sonny Bono, Natasha Richardson, lots of people we never heard of. . . . .
And Drew Bledsoe was almost that guy 14 years ago.OilCanShotTupac said:
Sonny Bono, Natasha Richardson, lots of people we never heard of. . . . . I don 't think the idea that "skiing is dangerous, possibly deadly" could be controversial.
Not a skier, FWIW.
But back to football: there is a distinction between cataclysmic hits causing instant death through trauma to major organs, and the drip-drip-drip of low-speed hits that seems to end up causing CTE. The latter is far more of a concern to me long-term; the former are black swans (to an extent - just how far of an extent is debatable). But I don't think even a flood of CTE cases is going to endanger football as we know it. Someday, in a high-profile NFL game, someone is going to get killed, and that will do it.
OK, I think I see what you're saying. There's an element of violence and an element of randomness. You're saying boxing is violent but not random, and skill in boxing helps prevent injury in boxing. On the other hand, basketball is random but not violent, so you see great players like Derrick Rose suffer injuries that their skill couldn't prevent, but they're not going to get hit in the head and killed because that kind of injury doesn't exist in hoops. Football is perhaps not as violent as boxing but is more random, because Gronk isn't ultimately any more or less likely to get hurt than Hoomanawanui. Baseball is arguably neither violent nor random. I suppose hockey would be the closest analogue to football, where there's violence that can cause serious injury and a player's skill is not necessarily sufficient to avoid it, but I'm not really a hockey fan so I don't know.Marciano490 said:
Entirely possible, but it's not just about me. If you're watching Floyd of Wlad or Roy Jones or Ward fight on a Saturday night and they get knocked out or concussed or killed in the ring are you going to be more or less shocked than if you watch Brown or Watt or Kuechly on Sunday afternoon and see the same happen to them?
This is true, and it's a good point.maufman said:NASCAR grew for several years after its biggest star died in the most high-profile way imaginable.
Edit: Responding to OCST.
I don't know if it was Kim's death or the evolving PPV business model... but Kim's death was a major blow to the sport.OilCanShotTupac said:This is true, and it's a good point.
OTOH, I think the death of Duk Koo Kim did more than any single thing to reduce boxing from a major focus of American public life to a fringe sport (relatively speaking).
But only after that death (which followed a series of other deaths such as Adam Petty's and Kenny Irwin Jr.'s) galvanized changes in NASCAR including changes to car designs. If there were a live NFL football death I presume football could survive and even thrive, but I wouldn't be surprised if some aspects of the game were changed fundamentally.maufman said:NASCAR grew for several years after its biggest star died in the most high-profile way imaginable.
Edit: Responding to OCST.
maufman said:In terms of short-term risk, letting your teenage boy drive a car is a far greater risk than letting him play football, but Pierce isn't suggesting that we raise the age to get a driver's license to 21. It's nonsense...
Tell it to Ray Chapman, bro.Marciano490 said:I think the difference - for me - is that you can do everything right in football and still be hurt/killed. You can be the best guy on the field and still be hurt/killed. If you're skiing, or playing baseball and suffer a brain injury - even a nonfatal one - something has gone wrong, or in the case of skiing, you were probably trying to do something beyond your talent or experience level.
soxfan121 said:Tell it to Ray Chapman, bro.
Every pitch in every baseball game is a potential fatal injury; that it hasn't happened recently doesn't change the odds that someone - batter, pitcher, first base coach, spectator - is in mortal danger. Nothing has to "go wrong" - Bryce Florie and Justin Morneau are but two examples of the risk inherent to every pitch, and swing of the bat, in baseball.
Marciano490 said:
I understand there's risk inherent in every sport, and maybe every activity. But the point of baseball isn't to throw near the batter's head or hit the ball sharply back at the pitcher. Football is dependent on physical freaks outgrown through PEDs hurtling their bodies toward one another.
Nobody is arguing that.bigq said:I agree that the danger in football is cumulative however minor collisions are not the cause of concussions.
That's a fairly bold statement.bigq said:I agree that the danger in football is cumulative however minor collisions are not the cause of concussions.
Such a hypothesis is appropriate, but I think there's a semantics problem here. A concussion is a form of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). mTBI is definitely associated with the onset of the dementia. I have seen few studies (if any) that argue that subconcussive hits are associated with subsequent neurological problems; nearly all of the patients diagnosed with CTE had at least some form of mTBI.There is no Rev said:Nobody is arguing that.
The new research suggests, though, that subconcussive collisions can contribute to CTE, however. That's the scuttlebutt.
One of the really big fucking heavy Wham-o frisbees, especially if it hit a guy who wasn't looking and didn't brace or move...sure, I could see it. Them things is fucking anvils.EricFeczko said:That's a fairly bold statement.
Define "minor collision" here. We don't know the degree of trauma reqiured to cause mild traumatic brain injury in humans. Furthermore, the force required to cause one likely varies from person to person; I've seen one person get a concussion from a frisbee, while another takes a bat to the head and remains unaffected.
Such a hypothesis is appropriate, but I think there's a semantics problem here. A concussion is a form of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). mTBI is definitely associated with the onset of the dementia. I have seen few studies (if any) that argue that subconcussive hits are associated with subsequent neurological problems; nearly all of the patients diagnosed with CTE had at least some form of mTBI.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=SubconcussiveEricFeczko said:T I have seen few studies (if any) that argue that subconcussive hits are associated with subsequent neurological problems; nearly all of the patients diagnosed with CTE had at least some form of mTBI.
EricFeczko said:That's a fairly bold statement.
Define "minor collision" here. We don't know the degree of trauma reqiured to cause mild traumatic brain injury in humans. Furthermore, the force required to cause one likely varies from person to person; I've seen one person get a concussion from a frisbee, while another takes a bat to the head and remains unaffected.
EricFeczko said:Such a hypothesis is appropriate, but I think there's a semantics problem here. A concussion is a form of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). mTBI is definitely associated with the onset of the dementia. I have seen few studies (if any) that argue that subconcussive hits are associated with subsequent neurological problems; nearly all of the patients diagnosed with CTE had at least some form of mTBI.
bigq said:
I was responding to a comment further up in the thread that indicated that the effect of thousands of minor collisions is the problem in football and I was taking exception to categorizing playing football as subjecting oneself to minor collisions. Minor is the wrong term and it understates the violent nature of the game. I have been a huge football fan since a very early age and I think I always will however I would never allow my kids to play because of the undeniably high risk of brain injury.
I do agree that some people are more susceptible to brain trauma than others and due to the cumulative effects of concussions, someone who has already been subject to concussion events is likely at higher risk for future concussion events even from minor collisions.
The comment I was responding to was:
"The danger in football is cumulative. The risk of serious brain injury on "any given play" is lower than it is in baseball. The effects of thousands of minor collisions is the "problem" in football."
soxfan121 Posted 02 October 2015 - 02:44 PM