How would football die?
Not by defections from the NFL — either of players or audience. News like this is (so far) falling into the business-as-usual folder for most who love the pro game, inside or out.
No. If football as it is now played is going to die, it will be because this becomes a growing trend:
The nation’s largest youth football program, Pop Warner, saw participation drop 9.5 percent between 2010-12, a sign that the concussion crisis that began in the NFL is having a dramatic impact at the lowest rungs of the sport.
According to data provided to “Outside the Lines,” Pop Warner lost 23,612 players, thought to be the largest two-year decline since the organization began keeping statistics decades ago. Consistent annual growth led to a record 248,899 players participating in Pop Warner in 2010; that figure fell to 225,287 by the 2012 season.
The ESPN reporters who wrote that, Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada report that without being sure what drives the decline, the threat of long term brain damage is likely part of what’s keeping parents from enrolling their kids in the sport. Sounds right to me — as the parent of a sports-averse 13 year old, I haven’t had to weigh in on this, but there isn’t a chance at all that I would let my kid play tackle football (and I have my doubts about soccer, too, as it happens). I’m sure I’m not alone.
The article goes on to talk about some changes the Pop Warner folks are thinking about — the big one being a suggestion to ban the three point stance for linemen. That move isn’t happening very quickly. It may come about, and such a change might tip the scale for some families.
But let’s say football goes some large part of the way towards boxing, becoming (what it once was) a more minor, more geographically constrained sport — especially for the youth and high school game. Say a couple of school systems, and maybe a few universities, get sued for malign neglect of their student-atheletes’ interests. Suppose insurance companies start hiking the charges for liability coverage — or dropping it altogether — for the less financially robust nodes of the football-industrial complex.
Won’t happen fast. Could come faster than many of us (me) imagine.
Right now, like lots of folks, I’m still drawn to football. I still feel excited if I’m at a bar and see someone break something big. But increasingly I can’t sit down and watch a game. It feels like I’m looking at slow-motion executions, and I don’t like that one bit.
Not with a bang, folks. With some moms and pops deciding not to sign a permission slip. With an insurance bill that the (X) Unified School District can’t pay. And yeah, in part, with just a little too much prime time exposure of still young men who can’t remember why they got into the car to go they can’t remember where.
Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 1765.
Redshirt
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!
patrick II
Back when my son was a sports adverse 13 year old, I asked him whether he was coming out for the football team. He replied “now why would I do that?” I had no good answer for him.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
I’d be interested in seeing where the biggest declines are taking place in PW enrollment. My guess would be towns and neighborhoods where it’s less likely to be seen as a way to get an education and make some money.
If so, the circuses aren’t going anyplace anytime soon.
Cassidy
The decline of football and boxing are not apt comparisons.
canuckistani
Seeing Muhammed Ali as a moving vegetable was a death blow to boxing. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent iconic figure for football.
hildebrand
Soon the Right-wing will sink their slimy claws into this and make football the next hill to die on – your freedumb to get your brains scrambled will become their righteous cause.
Rock
So…how dangerous is soccer do we think?
We have this http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130611082233.htm
Fair Economist
My son wants to play tackle football. He’s not going to.
I’ve never been a fan of professional sports – after all, I don’t know anybody on either team, so why would I care who wins? But after the latest round of revelations, I’m boycotting football. I’ll watch another sport with a friend or family member who likes it. But not football.
balconesfault
Football has always been dangerous (go back to Teddy Roosevelt threatening to outlaw the game if rule changes weren’t implemented).
But I’m beginning to wonder if the level of conditioning and mass that players have achieved (thanks in no small part to PEDs) will be its downfall. No way to put on enough padding to deal with 260 pound guys who can run 4.3 in the 40.
Crashman06
@hildebrand: Soon? They already have. Some guy named Dan Flynn at the Value Voters Summit. Drew Magary wrote about it for Deadspin. Expect to hear more of this sort of thing in the future.
Ash Can
No, you are most definitely not alone. I too have a sports-averse 13-year-old son, and am glad that, as a result of his non-proclivity, I will never have to argue with him about playing football, which I would never let him do.
I admit to still enjoying watching professional football, moreso now that further strictures against brutality have been enacted. But I’d still enjoy watching it if it were to evolve into more of a flag-football game. And I do wonder if that could turn out to be what the huge industry that is the NFL ultimately ends up doing to address the issue of dwindling player numbers.
Fair Economist
@Rock:
Allowing heading is inexcusable, but even with heading soccer is several times less dangerous than football. More significantly, we can take heading out of soccer without significantly changing the game. To fix football you’d have to take out blocking and tackling – and that wouldn’t be football.
mellowjohn
“With an insurance bill that the (X) Unified School District can’t pay.”
but there are districts in some places (i’m looking at you, texas!) who will always find the money to keep the football program going. they’ll just take it out of the instructional budget.
Richard Mayhew
I have a young son, and he won’t play football. This is despite the fact that the Peewee/Midget league practices at two fields within a 7 minute walk (at toddler pace) so a 3 minute walk at a 1st grader’s pace of our house, and the program has a history of producing top of the roster NFL and D-1 players. Not worth the risk.
As for soccer, I think the move (from my POV as a referee) will be to discourage head challenges until the kids are at least 13 or 14 and for competitive teams to engage in serious neck/shoulder strength training to minimize concussion risk going forward.
low-tech cyclist
It would be interesting to know why the drop-off in the Pop Warner participation numbers. Between 2010 and 2012 just seems too early for the word about CTE to have made that much difference yet.
But I have to believe it will. A few years ago, I would have been OK with my son playing football someday. But since we found out about CTE and football, my wife and I have both been on the same page: that he is not playing tackle football anywhere where our permission is required, no way, no how.
And despite having been a Redskins fan since the 1960s, I just can’t watch the game anymore. I just can’t accept that it’s okay to derive pleasure from watching young men do long-term damage to each other’s brains.
I wish I could still enjoy the game, because aside from the damage to players’ brains that it is doing, it’s one hell of a game. But that ‘aside from’ is very much an “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…” sort of thing. So I am letting go of football. Can’t say it’s easy. But I can live with myself more comfortably if I make the effort.
Redshirt
@balconesfault: There’s an argument, which seems counter-intuitive, that they have too much protection. That is, they feel invincible, and the helmets are designed as spearing objects. Thus, this argument goes, reduce the padding, and the players will be less likely to launch themselves like missile.
You’d have to add some rules changes as well, but this is a viable avenue to consider.
If this worm keeps turning though, football will eventually be forced to become “Touch”, or “Flag” football. Would still be a fun, entertaining game.
Cassidy
@canuckistani: The decline in boxing’s popularity can be attributed to a number of factors, but the brain damage taint came after that.
MattF
@canuckistani: I think boxing is a special case– after all, the goal in boxing is to hit your opponent in the head, repeatedly, as hard as you can. Also, Ali was exceptional in just about every way.
Anton Sirius
@canuckistani:
Not yet there isn’t. Having seen Brett Favre in recent interviews though, I’d say give it a few more years.
Cacti
@Ash Can:
I admit to still enjoying watching professional football, moreso now that further strictures against brutality have been enacted. But I’d still enjoy watching it if it were to evolve into more of a flag-football game. And I do wonder if that could turn out to be what the huge industry that is the NFL ultimately ends up doing to address the issue of dwindling player numbers.
If they ever did, something equally violent would step in to fill the void.
Football players, moreso than other ball sports, are our modern day gladiators. Watching supersized men in armor bash each other’s brains out, touches something primal in the casual fan.
EconWatcher
I wouldn’t let my son play (he’s only 3 now), so I feel like a jerk for enjoying watching other people’s sons play and damage their brains. I still enjoy the game, but I’ll wean myself off of it.
Cassidy
@low-tech cyclist: I think we’ll find that finances have played a more significant role than TBI/ CTE. Youth leagues are not cheap. Add in two parents working 2-4 jobs and you create an environment where people outside the suburbs can’t afford the investment ro time to get their kids into sports.
Roger Moore
@canuckistani:
I don’t know if there’s an equally iconic figure for football, but there are many, many less iconic figures who are suffering long term effects from CTE. With Ali, you might be able to convince yourself that his Parkinson’s is unrelated to brain injury; after all, plenty of people get Parkinson’s without ever getting hit in the head. But if you’re a halfway serious football fan, it’s almost inevitable that at least one of the icons you looked up to is a shell of his former self because of brain injury. The sheer number of victims ought to be enough to convince anyone that there’s a causal link.
Yatsuno
It will fade, but then again everyone was predicting the demise of professional baseball by now and last I checked it was still going strong. I think football will always find enough players because there will always be 6’3″ oversized kids who need a social outlet, and right or wrong football turns into that outlet. There is also still a shit ton of money rolling around in football, and enough parents will be willing to risk their kids’ brains to get that sweet sweet billionaire ego money.
low-tech cyclist
@canuckistani:
Nobody’s as iconic to football as Ali was to boxing. In basketball or hockey, you can point to Jordan or Gretzky, but football just doesn’t let one player dominate to that extent.
But still, the news that Tony Dorsett is afflicted with CTE is going to make a lot of people pay attention who wouldn’t otherwise have done so.
Anton Sirius
@Redshirt:
Put down the Slate column and back away slowly.
NotMax
Exoskeletons first, robots to follow.
Comrade Dread
@Redshirt: Exactly. Since this stuff has come out and I’ve learned about the real long term brain damage that even a season or two could have on someone, I can’t watch the game. I could justify someone choosing to risk having a bad back or bad knees or a bad shoulder, but degenerative brain damage is too much to justify for my entertainment.
Bubblegum Tate
I kind of enjoy the fact that this is the NFL’s own doing–it tried to deflect blame for its concussion problems onto Pop Warner football, and now look. You shouldn’t shit on your own doorstep, NFL. Or shit where you eat. Or shit in your seed corn. Or whatever shit metaphor you prefer.
balconesfault
@Redshirt: My own remedy would be to cut substitutions significantly, so the game is less explosive. Guys forced to be on the field for much more of the game won’t be as able to “tee off” on any given play and deliver a maximum blow. Hell – I’d actually go back to making them play on both sides of the ball! These rules would also reduce the value of the extra massive bodies you see out there now.
But I disagree with the whole “more pads make players more reckless” meme. Guys speared back when helmets were barely padded, and drove with their shoulders when shoulder pads were 40% of today’s massive contraptions.
Redshirt
@Anton Sirius: There’s something to it. Consider, for example, there is no possible helmet technology that can prevent concussions given the style they play today. There’s no solution when it comes to equipment to prevent this. Thus, either the rules need to change fairly dramatically, and/or the players must trained to not launch themselves.
low-tech cyclist
@Cassidy: That certainly makes more sense to me. Thanks.
Redshirt
@balconesfault: Fact: Shoulder pads are far smaller today than they were in the 90’s and past. They’re smaller so the players are faster and have mobility. They’re offensively designed, rather than defensively. Shoulder pads used to be huge.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
We had my thirteen year old’s football awards banquet last night and he’ll likely play again next year, the last year he’ll be eligible for this particular league. The football program has given him a self-confidence he didn’t have prior to playing. He was a mostly sports-averse kid who cried the first time he was knocked down in a full contact practice. The coach walked him over to the sideline so he could compose himself and the boy said “I don’t want to do this but I know I have to because my mom is making me. I’m okay.” By the middle of his first season, he was starting at left tackle on offense. He got the Most Improved award last night.
There are plenty of kids – the vast majority of them actually – who play football for a few years and learn some valuable things about showing up, teamwork, commitment to excellence, and probably the most important skill: how to pick yourself up after a crushing loss and try again. They don’t get brain damage or spend the rest of their lives in a wheelchair or on a respirator. I know that doesn’t comport with the current hysteria about football concussions but sometimes the truth doesn’t have an agenda.
HL_Guy
One thing to realize about football is, perhaps with the exception of the QB position, it is NOT a skill game. Unlike baseball or soccer, you do not need to pick up the specific coordination of hand, eye, foot, or brain while a pre-teen to compete throughout life. Playing ‘Pop Warner’ might be fun, but it has zero impact on whether someone can play in high school or college or the NFL. That, overwhelmingly has to do with your size, speed, quickness, and strength. The rest can be taught. When I coached high school football there were big kids we literally ‘pulled out of the cafeteria’ to try out for football, who’d never played before, and eventually got D-1 scholarships.
So, I think lack of participation in Pop Warner/youth football is a poor predictor of the ‘end’ of football. As long as the enticements are strong enough for older teenagers and young adults to do it, there will be a pool of football players. What I see as more likely is a socioeconomic marginalization of the sport, as with boxing. Suburban kids with better options will take those options, with a push from parents. Kids without, mostly but not all black and brown, will go for the scholarship with hope of grabbing the money.
taylormattd
Might be a little premature. I have a feeling Thursday Night Football is more likely to kill the NFL than this.
catclub
@low-tech cyclist: “just seems too early for the word about CTE to have made that much difference yet.”
Given the protectiveness of many parents, and the vaccine story as an example of how stories can circulate semi-underground and change some behaviors. I am not so sure.
ETA: See Pen’s post at #40 for an example of protective parents.
Karmakin
The equipment vs. no equipment argument is actually fairly easy. Look at Rugby. Does Rugby have a bigger or a smaller problem with concussions?
Roger Moore
@Anton Sirius:
The suggestion that padding is at least a double-edged sword is nothing new. Even before the current worries about brain injury, people had noticed that the padding in football doesn’t seem to reduce the injury rate compared to sports like rugby that have much less padding. And the rules against players using their helmets as weapons are there for a good reason.
IMO, though, the biggest problem is all the stoppages to play and unlimited substitution rather than padding. If players had to be out there running around for 10 minutes at a time without a breather, you’d select for players with good endurance rather than maximum strength, which would cut down on the violence level. Players would also have to pace themselves a bit more rather than going at 100% on every play. I also think the game would be more exciting if it the action were more continuous.
Pen
@Anton Sirius: I’ve actually seen the “less padding” argument before, though usually in the context of rugby vs football arguments.
As for myself: I have a 4-year-old that loves to watch football with his grandpa. As long as my wife and I have any say he’ll never play it and, once he’s old enough, he’s getting the full diagramed talk on why it’s dangerous. Ever since hearing about Ali and then the footballer who committed suicide by gunshot to the heart (to save his brain for study) I’ve been reading up on CTE. What I’ve read in the journals… There’s now at in hell my son is playing any sport that risks that.
patrick II
@canuckistani:
Boxing’s problem now is that it isn’t violent enough. The MMA cage fights lead the brutality index.
MikeJ
@Cassidy:
Boxers or former boxers who were punchy were cliché in movies even back in the 30s.
catclub
@HL_Guy: “Suburban kids with better options”
Like good jobs and a promising future where they are better off than their parents!
Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey
I haven’t watched a down of pro ball in years, but only because it’s become excruciatingly boring. The only ball I can stand to watch is high school; no interminable TV time outs, the players are still developing their skills, and the half time shows are entertaining.
Gin & Tonic
@HL_Guy: I don’t follow football at all, never really have, so forgive what may be an ignorant question. But, given my casual TV viewing here and there, passing through to something else, isn’t big-time football already majority non-white?
Mike E
@HL_Guy:
This is unpossibly wrong. Doug?
Ransom
So what sports should kids play these days? recommendations?
Baseball still seems pretty ok, and qualifies as “play”, but there’s lots of bench-sitting.
Basketball is maybe better, but has a lot of knee injuries.
Success in both really favors the “quick” physiology, excluding most from excellence due to biology.
Running’s better for ease of access and different distances, but has a disturbingly high rate of eating disorders, particularly with girls.
My favorite: Rowing. Its healthy, safe, rewards “slow” physiology, is a team sport where “stars” don’t dominate their teammates, can be a life-long sport and if you are good at it can really help you get into a top college.
On the down side, many just won’t have access due to geography, very few start the sport before high school (and under 10 generally don’t fit the equipment) and in the northeast US there are surprisingly few opportunities for public school kids, unlike other regions where it is primarily a “club” sport, not just for private schools.
Youth participation in rowing has grown dramatically in the lat 30 years, particularly in the midwest and south.
http://www.pocockfoundation.org/about-us/why-rowing
KG
the boxing analogy is a bad one. boxing is dying in the US (it’s still big in Latin America and Europe, where most of the champions and contenders are from) because there are no great American heavyweights – and other than Merryweather, there aren’t any compelling American fighters at the lower levels. But MMA (UFC is celebrating 20 years this week) is filling the void, where there are plenty of compelling American fighters. 20 years ago, Jon Bones Jones and Cain Velasquez would have been boxers, today they are mixed martial artists.
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: how dare you bring nuance to a discussion!
Mj_Oregon
I can barely watch college or pro football anymore knowing what I do now about CTE. Even with a non-helmet-to-helmet tackle this happens all too often:
http://www.azcentral.com/12news/free/20131111northern-arizona-high-school-football-player-critical.html
drkrick
@balconesfault:
Chuck Bednarik and Frank Gifford would like to have a word with you.
Cassidy
@MikeJ: And boxing’s heyday came in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s.
brantl
@canuckistani: There will be.
MikeJ
@Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey:
So it’s more entertaining when the game is full of mistakes instead of watching people who know what they’re doing?
The obvious fix is to replace the ball with a live monkey.
Stan Gable
@Karmakin:
Rugby isn’t the same as football. The reason why padding was developed (I think) was as a result of turn of the century safety concerns – basically, football was seeing an unpleasant number of on-field deaths and padding was seen as a way to protect the players.
There are some significant differences in the type of contact you’d see in rugby v. football – in football, you probably have about 10 collisions per play that involve two players going max effort directly at each other, there’s no momentum between plays. In rugby, far more of the players are moving in the same direction and so there is going to be less force delivered per impact. There will still be concussions and other head injuries but they are more likely to result from chance collisions rather than deliberate effort.
Fair Economist
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Wrong. Autopsy studies show even high school football is significantly associated with brain damage later in life. In this study 6 of 13 high school players had brain damage on autopsy before age 50 (mostly in their 20’s, actually). Two were exposed to explosives in the military (thanks President Bush!) but that leaves 4, or about 30%. That’s a HUGE risk.
Are you seriously going to allow your son to take a 30% risk of brain damage? Why not learn about teamwork, etc. from basketball, lacrosse, soccer or baseball instead?
C.V. Danes
@Fair Economist:
Either that, or soccer players can wear light headgear.
KG
@Ransom: I think the answer depends on the kid. I love basketball, but was simply never built to play it other than in pick up games. I was probably built to play football but chose water polo instead when I started high school – and cross country or track were simply not going to happen. loved the game, still do, but it’s very much a regional sport. I’m a big believer in letting kids try as many sports as they want so they can figure out what they they like or don’t like and what they have the ability to be good at.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Ransom:
I think you may be looking at the effect rather than the cause. The person I knew in high school who was on the track team and had an eating disorder was an anorexic/bulimic well before she started running. I think it’s more that people with eating disorders are attracted to running than that running causes eating disorders.
The sport that most likely causes eating disorders is wrestling, because of the weigh-in requirements, which encourage binging and purging behaviors.
Arclite
My kids swim. I don’t encourage sports other than swimming and running due to injury potential. I admit that I’m of two minds about football.
I haven’t watched it in decades. I’m not interested, and the violence inherent in the game is unappealing. And now with the brain injuries, it is even less appealing.
However, my daughter went to state swimming championships twice in her first year. Part of my plan is to get her a title 9 scholarship to some college. The reason there are so many women’s sports scholarships available is due to football. If football went away, that would be good for those players and their injuries, but I’d have to change my plans. I’d gladly do it. I guess it’s not knowing how this will play out over the next decade that’s troubling.
KG
@Fair Economist: that’s an interesting study, but in fairness, one study using 13 subjects in a category raises a question of sample size bias.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Fair Economist: I doubt he’ll play high school football, but thanks for your concern.
Cassidy
@Ransom: Yeah, but catching a crab can hurt like a mofo.
@KG: Mayweather.
Awrighty, the decline of boxing has a number of factors. The primary one being that it’s a sport that requires a very high level of skill to compete and make money. When you tie this in tot he decline of boxing gyms that are available, and good ones that teach the “sweet science” well, you find that the dedication, commitment, and investment just isn’t there. Now, we can add on a pretty corrupt professional system and you get to a point where even if you are good, there is no guarantee you’ll make a living. Boxing is doing very well in Latin American countries, but they don’t have the less skilled (not unskilled) alternative of American football to turn to. Think about it. Why spend years learning to box when you can take the same level of athleticism and turn it into a scholarship to any Division I school?
MMA is not filling that void as a youth sport. Basic karate is still more popular than MMA as MMA gyms are not cheap. BJJ had a slight peak, but a lot of those gyms have gone under pretty quickly. As I mentioned above, parents working multiple jobs for low pay aren’t in a position to pay upwards of $100 a month so Johnny can be a cage fighter. What is filling that void, though, is wrestling. The number of local wrestling clubs are rising and today’s crop of MMA fighters see a lot bridging over from collegiate wrestling as you don’t need the highly refined technicality of boxing to be competitive in MMA.
This is not true regarding brain injuries, etc. Most MMA KO’s come from flash knockouts (compression of Trigeminal Nerve behind the jaw) on the chin. That is changing, though. As competitors are becoming more skilled, we’re seeing a lot more “wars” in which both competitors beat the stuffing out of one another for three rounds or more. But as it stands, boxing has significantly more strikes to the head and harder blows to the head, the last being the difference between 4oz MMA gloves and 8-12oz boxing gloves.
drkrick
@Fair Economist:
Assuming you can train players to let a ball go by that can only be played by the head to allow someone else to play it by the chest or foot (and we’ve trained them to forego the advantages of the millions of years of evolution it took to get the opposable thumb, so I wouldn’t bet against it), it seems like the result would be a very different game. The tactics of corner kicks would be fairly unrecognizable to take one example.
maya
I played in some sort of PW league many years ago in spite of my mother’s total opposition to the idea. She finally gave in and purchased helmet, shoulder pads and knee padded pants. Also, too, neither of my parents ever came to the games.
Which turned out to be most fortunate since I did wind up getting a concussion after being tackled by a kid who landed right on my head. The coaches got me up and had a friend walk me home. I remembered that I virtually had no memory of the event for a good while – like a dream. Never told the rents about it and the season was soon over. I decided myself not to go back for more.
And that explains why I keep coming back to BJ against my better judgement – brain dead.
Ransom
@KG: True. Mine right now are doing Karate, figure skating (lessons 3x/week) soccer and the oldest just starting on rowing and basketball.
The figure skating is turning out to be a great skill. Last winter we went downhill skiing a few times and with no lessons they were just bombing the hill. I’m really excited to see what they do this year.
Here in suburban Philadelphia a year of 3 lessons/week (1/2hr + free skate & ice time) for one is $700. How does that compare with participation costs for other sports? (its quite a bit more than the township’s karate/soccer/basketball offerings).
Rowing club memberships for adults are generally under $500/year, and juniors usually a fraction of that, including “team” participation, not just personal access.
Mike E
@KG: Yep, hanging on by a thread with a relatively small number of PPV subscribers footing the bill. The vast majority of the viewing public don’t care to watch boxing, and this will not change.
gian
@Cassidy:
I see a correlation with the rise of pay per view boxing versus network television boxing and the decline of people watching boxing.
Causation? Don’t know.
Breezeblock
I’ve ALWAYS been a big NFL fan, since I can remember watching Howie Cosell on MNF. I quit cold turkey last season, and have not missed it a bit.
Reasons? Well, the concussion stuff was the tipping point, but I think it was a long time coming. The Miami Dolphins thing (watch Shannon Sharpe’s discussion on it), the Snyder/Redskins thing, and then an article in The Atlantic about the non-profit NFL and all the money its owners get at the expense of education, etc. Whatevs, there’s plenty of better ways to spend my days then plunked in front of the TV during the day on weekends…
KG
@Cassidy: I agree MMA isn’t filling the void as a youth sport. but part of the reason is that there are a lot of paths to an MMA career. As you said, wrestling is one of the big ones (it helps that more than a few champions/greats have wrestling backgrounds). And having grown up in karate, I can tell you the failure of many BJJ dojos is not unique to BJJ. For every long term success dojo there are probably 10 that failed within 5 years. Finding a quality dojo of any type isn’t easy. But the truth is, most people don’t send their kids into youth sports with the goal of making them a professional athlete. They do it for a thousand other reasons.
Mike E
@drkrick: Bednarik already had “his say” with Gifford. There was no waning energy problem there AFAICT.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
That soccer study showed effects, but only for guys heading more than 900-1,500 balls per year. And the ball is probably not travelling nearly as fast as it does in the pros until you get to the division 1 college level. I played HS soccer and never came anywhere near that quantity, even as a center fullback where the need to head crosses out of the penalty box means you’re going after those balls more frequently. I think the risk is pretty acceptable until you get to the pro level and it’s really fun to play. It’s also more friendly to the vertically challenged and undersized than most sports.
As for what else kids can play – tennis and basketball are both pretty popular. I always wondered why ultimate (the frisbee sport) never took off. It’s fast paced, low contact, and fun to play. I played pickup games in grad school and you run even more than you do in soccer.
What killed boxing, I always thought, was the decision to make all the big fights pay-per-view. They lost all the casual fans. I used to watch boxing during the Sugar Ray Leonard era but after that everything was PPV and I wasn’t willing to pay.
Cassidy
@KG: My only quibble is that I think that the failure of BJJ gyms is unique: they priced themselves out of competition. lol
@gian: I think that’s a big part of it. Boxing isn’t on television hardly anymore. When they try to bring it back, it’s usually a lame reality show.
burnspbesq
@Fair Economist:
The simple solution to this: buy him a lacrosse stick. He’ll immediately lose interest in football.
maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor
@Fair Economist:
That’s your takeaway from that study? You seriously work with numbers for a living?
Kilkee
@Redshirt: Exactly right. Bare-knuckle boxing is actually more humane than the current version. Yiou can only hit someone so hard with a bare hand before you break it. With gloves, you can rattle his brain endlessly with no price paid on your end. Want to make football relatibvely safe again? Leather helmets, reduced padding. True, you’ll wind up with soemthing that looks like a cross between touch football and rugby, but you won’t have the scrambled brains.
Anoniminous
For a fast exciting team sport requiring individual skill, training, and effort check out volleyball. College games are not only fun the ticket price is piffling. Generally season ticket price are $30 (for 15 matches) and they are offered “buy one, get one free.” Single match prices are $5.
(Yes. I am a bit of a volleyball
nutfan.)Randy P
@MikeJ:
Uh, yeah. That’s exactly the reason why I love watching college basketball, when I watch, and never much enjoyed watching the pros. I feel like there should be some suspense when somebody goes for a 3-pointer. I feel like it should take some time to get 100 points, and there should be some uncertainty as to whether the game will reach 100 points.
But I’m admittedly not a big sports fan. More of a once-per-year-if-some-team-I-like-is-in-a-championship sports fan.
Anniecat45
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
“valuable things about showing up, teamwork, commitment to excellence, and probably the most important skill: how to pick yourself up after a crushing loss and try again”
And plenty of people, especially girls, find ways to learn these things without playing football.
catclub
@Mike E: I figured that out. Being tall is the key thing in basketball. So no matter how much skill he has, the short guy will just not make it.
Similarly with football, no matter how skilled, 120lb players will just not exist, (exception placekickers – skill position).
Once you are big and fast enough, then you will also become skilled, but those first requirements are not skill requirements.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Anniecat45:
Keep your kid out of it if that is your prerogative. Or let the girls play if they want. No argument from me.
AdamK
@Kilkee: How about naked football? I’d watch that. (Maybe they could wear cups.)
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
And simple starvation diets. One of my brothers wrestled during Jr. High, and he’s about 4 inches shorter than me or my other brother. He blames it on starving himself to make weight at a time when he should have been eating like a pig to support normal growth, and I think he’s probably right.
prufrock
@Ransom:
Here in suburban Philadelphia a year of 3 lessons/week (1/2hr + free skate & ice time) for one is $700. How does that compare with participation costs for other sports? (its quite a bit more than the township’s karate/soccer/basketball offerings).
Little League in Largo, Fl is $100 for Fall AA ball (6-9 year olds) and $125 for Spring ball. In Fall and Spring they give you a shirt and cap, and in the Spring they also give you pants. You have to provide your kid’s helmet, cleats, glove, and bat. It’s a tremendous bargain.
Jeffro
@Fair Economist: Totally agree. Me & my kids are getting much more interested in watching soccer at all levels (college, MLS, Premier League) and drifting way away from the NFL…despite being the ultimate NFL fan as a kid, I have no problem letting it go now.
Lee
Want another bit of rage inducing news from Texas?
School districts are not required to have insurance for their players.
DMN Editorial
So youth football players are getting permanently damaged for the benefit of the districts and are on their own for the rest of their lives.
Gin & Tonic
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I always wondered why ultimate (the frisbee sport) never took off.
It contines to be fairly popular at the college level, and there are some high school teams, but this tends to be in the traditional enclaves, mostly the coasts. In the last two years there have been a couple of fledgling “pro” leagues (paid admission, players get paid, but not enough to live on), again, mostly on the coasts – the BOS-NYC-PHL-DC corridor and the SF-to-Vancouver axis. Some of the “pro” franchises are doing pretty well with the youth outreach. This, combined with increased coverage by ESPN at the elite “club” level and occasional highlights from the “pro” game are encouraging developments. I agree that the game, with low barriers to entry, very little equipment costs, fast action and a high skill level required all make it a compelling proposition athletically.
taylormattd
@Fair Economist: That’s a completely bullshit percentage. It looks to me like you didn’t even read the article to which you cite.
august
Hard to watch football. As a kid, my favorite football player was “Big Daddy” Lipscomb. 6’7 280lbs. The largest player in football in the mid-sixties. Jim Brown was a 235lb running back( and he was considered huge. O lines were 240-250. D-lines averaged 260. Linebackers were 230. D backs were 190-210. Today. the size of a Division 2 team would dwarf the NFL players from the 60’s
Lacrosse is the new football. MMA is the new boxing. All team sports have risks. Our daughter played soccer at UCLA. Concussions are very common, and repetitive headers are not good for the brain. One player we know is having some issues in her mid twenties.
Team sports build character. I don’t know anyone who would trade their experience for an individual sport.
Lee
@Gin & Tonic:
Here in our fair burg we just had the national championship tournament for ultimate frisbee. It was pretty cool watching them.
Trollhattan
Strongly recommend all parents and interested folks look at this, from the National Academies: “Sports-Related Concussions in Youth: Improving the Science, Changing the Culture (2013)” You can download the pdf, free.
.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18377
A portion is very technical medical sturr that we civilians aren’t going to fully grasp, but there’s plenty left to learn and ponder. I found concussion rates for girls’s sports startling–with soccer ranking very high (about double the rate for boys). And it’s not primarily from headers. As a soccer dad, I’m very interested in prevention, treatment, diagnosis and monitoring.
MCA1
@Ash Can: Could be that’s where they end up. Or an alternate league could come about. I note that, in addition to the decreased participation in traditional youth football leagues Levenson described, at least where I llive there’s a growing number of kids playing organized flag football. If flag football becomes a “thing” for kids who are athletic enough and don’t want head trauma and knee replacements at 40, then we might see a slow siphoning of talent from the old game into the new one and a competitor arise (waaaay down the line, of course) to the NFL.
I think it’s more likely that, with decreased participation, college and pro football eventually get less and less of the elite athletes, the sport regresses to the mean a bit in terms of the public’s insatiable appetite for watching it, we start to feel collectively less guilt for consuming it as the media glare about CTE et. al. of today recedes, and demographic change leads to soccer being as big as football 30 or so years from now, with lacrosse where soccer is today and baseball and basketball benefitting from the decreased popularity of football, as well.
MCA1
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: All lessons that could just as well be imparted to your child through participation in any one of a dozen other team sports, with much lower chance of broken clavicles and possible brain injury, of course. Not that the others are without risk, but you argue like football’s unique in its ability to teach a child teamwork or something.
J R in WV
@Anton Sirius:
Franco Harris. He appeared in commercials for yellowpages lookup company EZtoUse.Com and can barely say the name of the company he’s advocating for.
Truly sad.
And Ali has Parkinsons Disease, which I understand makes movement and speech difficult, but doesn’t really interfere with intellect. Of course if you can’t talk or write, how can one tell what intellect remains? Does it make a difference?
All that said, I think there’s no question that modern PRO football is bound to severely affect brain function, as well as attracting people who are just violent by nature.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I’m not even sure about that. Yes, placekicking is a skill, but it also requires power to get good range. The lightest kicker in the NFL right now is Alex Henry of the Eagles, who’s 6’1″ and 177 lbs. A rough average is somewhere around 6’1″ and 200 lbs, which is pretty good sized for an adult man, if not for a football player. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the average kick returner was smaller than the average placekicker.
Gin & Tonic
@Lee: Frisco, TX? The nationals for many years had been held in Sarasota, FL, and this was the first year they moved. Given that the powerhouse teams are mainly SF, Seattle and Boston, I guess some more central location was preferred. I couldn’t make it there this year, though I hear the venue was very good.
MCA1
@MikeJ: w/r/t basketball, I actually feel that way. NBA players are so tall, so strong, and so skilled that they’ve effectively evolved beyond the physical confines of the court, the 10 foot basket and the rules as codified a century ago. I mean, Lebron James and Kevin Durant and Kobe Bryant are literally too good at basketball for it to be interesting to me anymore. The college game features some level of fallibility and streakiness that helps it avoid the unsurprising, scientific nature of the NBA, where everyone knows in advance exactly which one inch height mismatch each team will ruthlessly exploit the entire game. The whole thing is too predictable, because the players can execute too well. Counterintuitive, I know, and probably the exact reason most fans like the NBA.
Lee
@Trollhattan:
I am soccer data as well. I looked over that report. The one thing that they don’t go into is how many of the concussions are repeats.
Once a person gets one concussion there is a significant chance for subsequent. My oldest had one amongst her many injuries and thankfully she never got a second. A family friend is working on her 3rd. A team-mate of hers was forces to stop playing.
Steve S
Where i live (Lake City) is a redneck community which is pathologically obsessed with the Florida Gators. I told someone last month, “CTE is going to make insurance companies close college football programs, and the day the Gators announce their football team is over, this town will riot.”
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
I’m a huge fan of women’s ice hockey. It’s problematic as it actually has the highest concussion rate of any NCAA sport even though it’s (theoretically) no-check. A lot of the speculation is that the women’s necks are weaker and so even with the limited contact there’s more whiplash. You also get the hammerheads who insist that we need to add checking because the injuries result from girls never learning how to receive a check and so even the more limited contact is more dangerous; watching, I think these people are idiots.
My conjecture is that a large, though not sole, reason the reported concussion rates are higher is that young women are less likely to pretend that they aren’t injured. So I’m not sure that the actual concussion rate is really higher than it is for men’s hockey or football. Some of it is the different personalities of the players, but there’s also the element that no one is ever going to make a living playing women’s ice hockey professionally so there’s less incentive to prove how tough you are.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Trollhattan: As I said, I am very curious to know how much of the difference in concussion rates between men and women in sports is due to women being more likely to report a concussion rather than being more likely to sustain them. My guess is that that’s a significant factor.
Lee
@Gin & Tonic:
Yep Frisco, Texas. The complex they played at is really a remarkable place. It is 16 full sized soccer fields. One of which has a small stadium (and turf) another 4(?) have turf and the rest are pretty high quality sod.
Couple of hotels near by as well as several nice bars.
Yatsuno
@Roger Moore: Kickers should have some size at least, since there are occasions when they would be expected to tackle. And honestly some of them are quite good at doing so.
Roger Moore
@Yatsuno:
It’s interesting, because there’s been a swing in the tackling department over time. There was a while when coaches went after players from other forms of football, especially soccer, because they thought they were enough better at kicking to make up for any inability to play other parts of the game. Now, the American football players seem to have picked up whatever skills the other guys had and are just as good at kicking the ball, but they are good enough at other aspects of the game that coaches demand actual football players rather than the guy with a good leg.
Stan Gable
@Trollhattan:
The headers aren’t actually causing concussions, they’re causing minor undetectable injuries that lead to brain damage over time. That being said, I’d assume that nearly all soccer concussions are due to heading-related actions – collisions in soccer are nearly always due to players jockeying for position beneath a ball in the air.
I suspect that changes in soccer will come very slowly as in football, but it’s also not difficult for me to envision a game where there are far fewer headers/head injuries. Basically, I think the offsides rule forces a lot of passes into the air because that’s the only way to get the ball through traffic. If the field opens up, then being good at heading the ball will cease to be much of a value. Corner kicks would probably need to change along with some modifications to substitution rules but I don’t see that as creating a fundamentally different game.
Football is a different story – I can’t see how it can be fixed.
Fair Economist
@maximiliano furtive, formerly known as dr. bloor:
Sure there are a lot of issues with sample size and bias. But you’ve got to work with the evidence you have. And you *can* say, even with only 4 out of 13 cases and mild selection bias, that the condition is not rare. That conclusion you can take to the bank, regardless of quibbling about percentages.
Fair Economist
@Kilkee:
Yes and no. It would help enormously with the CTE, but there is a good reason for all the padding. Accidents happen, and when then involve 200+ pounds weight-trained players moving as fast as they possibly can at each other, they are occasionally fatal. Not often relative to the number of games, but often enough that they were talking about ending football before they added all the current padding. Overall, you’re probably better with (hypothetical guesstimates here) 0.01% dying than with 5% ending up with CTE but it’s still not an acceptable situation.
I’ll grant that with the right rules changes, it’s doable. People do play rugby.
MCA1
@Gin & Tonic: There are a number of things constraining ultimate frisbee. I say this as someone with a cousin who’s played in some world championships and who thinks it’s somewhat fun to play, and definitely a good workout, so it’s not coming from a “fuck those hippies and their frisbees” perspective. Perhaps primary amongst the drawbacks is that it’s not a good spectator sport, at all, mostly because it’s way too slow and lacks any variety. The frisbee travels too slowly, even when thrown by an experienced player, and you can’t run with it. Thus, there are few surprises to the spectator, but rather a series of cuts and chases. Compare to hockey or lacrosse, two of its closest analogues. Or, imagine basketball if dribbling were outlawed. Who’d want to watch that? Also, the skills involved are too basic and limited, contrary to your assertion. There’s running and leaping, and there’s throwing a frisbee, but that’s pretty much it. It’s cool that some guys can accurately throw a frisbee 60 yards in the air, but that’s not even in the same galaxy of impressiveness as a guy on ice skates being able to hit a moving rubber disk 100 miles an hour to a 6 inch target in order to get it past another player with a glove trying to stop it, while yet another one is baring down on him in order to knock him off his feet. Re: the former, as a reasonably competent and coordinated former baseball player and quarterback, I’m completely comfortable saying that with a few weeks of concentrated practice I could do it, too. Not so re: the latter, by which I’m amazed and can marvel at the player. Baseball requires one to hit a ball thrown as hard as an opponent can with a stick, and to catch a batted ball and throw it accurately. Tennis and golf require infinitely more hand-eye coordination than ultimate. Soccer requires one to overcome evolution and instinct and intentionally not take advantage of having opposable thumbs. There’s also no goalie, and no other form of differentiation from one player to the next, in ultimate. And very little in the way of tactics other than finding an undefended line for a teammate and throwing to it.
It sounds like I’m shitting on ultimate, I know. I’m sure someone will say “You don’t get it if you haven’t played in a league, etc. – it’s way harder than it looks.” To which I say, no, it’s actually not. It’s fun enough and I don’t begrudge anyone who’s really into it, but the level of variety, skill, and strategy pales compared to the team sports that haven taken off in popularity. And the rules wouldn’t allow it to go anywhere. Calvin Johnson would be an incredibly kickass ultimate player, but he wouldn’t make watching the game any more interesting because his athleticism is kept in check by the very nature of the game.
Trollhattan
@Stan Gable:
Have been soccer dad for six or seven years, but until this year it’s been rec league, so pretty low key. But my kid decided to go into comp this year, which is a whole different thing. She’s U12, maybe 73 pounds soaking wet, and often on the field against girls literally twice her size. (I don’t know what they’re putting in their cornflakes.) Speed and athleticism are likewise phenomenally better so when collisions occur, girls can really get hurt.
Heading isn’t emphasized with our team but clearly is with certain others. In any case, the big collisions seem to occur around the goal and while controlling the ball along the sidelines. I don’t watch many older group matches so am not up on how the game morphs as they advance, but at this age the ball is on the ground most of the time.
Once they have a robust data set, I’ll wager the double frequency of concussions for girls soccer will be the result of their less developed musculature and the greater body mass disparity on the field,.compared to the boys.
feral1
@Gin & Tonic:
This. Ultimate is an awesome sport to play and watch. I’ve played for about 15 years at the pick up, rec, and club levels. I’m 45 now and still play 2x per week. I grew up playing and watching football and loved it. I give football a lot of credit for my life long love of sports, which has been a major contributor to my quality of life and has had significant health benefits, as I’ve stayed active and in shape into my 40’s.
However, given the information coming out about the dangers of concussions I would not let my child play contact football. You don’t mess around with brain function. I do think eliminating hard-sided helmets and shouder pads would go a long way to reducing head (and other) trauma. When you are wearing shoulder pads and helmet, it makes you feel invulnerable. This leads players to tackling, diving, etc with abandon. If players were wearing thin foam helmets and shoulder pads, I think they would be significantly more restrained in their play.
Petorado
I don’t know Tom, I may have to quibble with your assertion that brain damage to pro players as the possible primary reason for a diminishing interest in youth football. I’ll bet things like two high school football player fatalities in just the past week (case #1, case #2) from traumatic head injuries as the kind of fodder that will quash parental approval of their kids playing youth football.
Ella in New Mexico
Oh fer Christ’s sake. When did this issue–how to prevent football players from having permanent brain injuries from frequent concussions–turn into “Good parents put their kid in a plastic bubbles of protection”?
I raised four healthy, active and smart kids who played some or all of these sports and guess what? None of them today is a frigging brain-damaged paraplegic. My daughter particularly benefited from the inner toughness and sense of physical confidence sports taught her, my boys, self-control and commitment to the needs of a group. They all have learned things about themselves, other people, right and wrong, winning and losing that they simply would NOT have learned elsewhere as young people.
Of course it’s good to find better ways to play more safely, limit age ranges of kids in dangerous contact sports, place stricter rules on things like time out after head injuries or limits on cutting weight in wrestling. And it’s especially important to be an involved advocate for your child if a coach isn’t placing their health and well being over winning. And yes, some activities should just be banned for anyone under the age of 18. But according to some of you, the only answer is to outlaw any sport in which Junior could even on the off chance trip over his own shoelace in the parking lot.
We already have communities where kids are not allowed to play in their front yards or climb jungle gyms or sit in the park or shoot water guns anymore. Lots of kids will never know the incredible freedom of whizzing down a hill on their bike at 30mph with the wind in your hair, of climbing to the very top of a tree, or–if we keep dumbing down sports to only “safe” ones– of the incredible feeling of accomplishment you get from working with the other members of your team to carry a soccer ball all the way down the field and pass it off to your forward to be slammed into the net. Pushing your physical self mentally past discomfort in order to achieve a goal is an essential aspect of all sports, something that you will use at many, many other points in your life on planet earth.
Every single thing in life can maim or kill your precious little ones, folks. At some point, your desperate attempts to protect them from anything bad in life, your putting up all these barriers to everything potentially risky will turn around and bite you in the ass because, A) they will fucking hate you for it and B) they will either do stuff on the sly, in which case you are not there to support or advocate for them or, worse yet, C) turn out to be physically phlegmatic, risk-avoidant, neurotic little twirps who will have learned exactly ZERO of the essential life lessons playing a sport teaches you.
IMHO.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
It wasn’t the padding that made the big difference in ending football fatalities, it was eliminating the flying wedge. Playing style is the most important factor in injuries, and fairly small rule tweaks can have a big effect on playing style. My understanding is that the biggest factor with CTE in football is not the occasional dramatic hit but the play on the line of scrimmage, where the players are getting their heads snapped back on just about every play. Some kind of playing style change that would reduce that would be the best way of reducing the risk to players’ brains.
Stan Gable
@Trollhattan:
Yeah, I recall from my own youth days that even at the high school level there’s such a gap in athletic ability that there’s no real benefit to putting the ball up in the air. Once you reach a point where the athletic ability and field awareness levels out, then the balls are going to go up, since that’s the only area where there’s room – and that’s I think where the brain damage is coming from.
At lower levels, I’m sure you do get freak collision concussions with a ball on the ground but I would bet that a greater share of concussions come from kids banging their heads together on balls in the air, generally from another kid shaking a kick.
feral1
@MCA1:
All I can say is you are incredibly wrong about the skill, hand/eye coordination, strategy required to play Ultimate. And statements like this-
are patently ridiculous. You could say “soccer is runing and kicking a ball, but that’s pretty much it” and you would be missing a universe of what it is involved in the sport and what it takes to play it well. The same is true for Ultimate. So yeah, basically, you don’t get it.
Fair Economist
@Ella in New Mexico:
Nobody here is advocating plastic bubbles. Basketball, lacrosse, soccer, water polo, etc., all have non-trivial risks. But football is probably an order of magnitude worse, especially once you figure that you’re getting a high risk of *brain* damage, which is far worse than bum knees, back problems, bad shoulders, or missing teeth. I’m very much in favor of my son playing some team sport, even though he might end up seriously injured. But he’s not going to play tackle football: I don’t have to take *that* much risk and I’m not going to.
Gin & Tonic
@MCA1: Re: the former, as a reasonably competent and coordinated former baseball player and quarterback, I’m completely comfortable saying that with a few weeks of concentrated practice I could do it, too
Completely comfortable and completely wrong. Elite players practice throwing all year long, year in and year out. They can reliably hit a running receiver in traffic, while a defender is in their (the thrower’s face), using any of three or four completely different throwing styles, sometimes at distances of 60-70 yards, taking into account the wind and atmospheric conditions, even at the end of 90 minutes of play. You appear to underestimate a great deal about the skills and strategy at the elite levels of the sport.
Cassidy
@Ella in New Mexico:
So, basically, you couldn’t teach them these things and outsourced it to someone else.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore:
I’m pretty sure that football has *two* major sources of CTE: tackling and blocking. The blocking you’re referring to seems to give almost every linebacker CTE; the life expectancy for a NFL linebacker is something like 52 years. But tackling must be causing problems too; there have been several spectacular cases of running backs and quarterbacks developing severe brain deterioration as well. I’m all for fixing things with rule changes, but you’d probably have to have no blocking and no tackling to know it’s safe unless you wanted to wait 30 years for long-term studies to come in.
Basically I think you’d have to go to something basically like flag football. Which IMO could be a great game although I wonder if you can pull along the fans, some of whom seem to like the blood-and-fighting aspect. Lacrosse might be a better fit. It can certainly have fights and injuries, but at least not too much of this nasty sneaky-but-life-destroying brain damage that’s plaguing football.
Ella in New Mexico
@Fair Economist:
The point was about people’s comments here about not allowing their kids to play all kinds of sports besides football because they could potentially harm a child.
And good luck to you on keeping a kid who really wants to play football away from it. I was not going to be able to do that without literally chaining my boy to his bed in 10th grade. I just stayed vigilant the whole time, and yes, loved the hell out of watching him play.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
I don’t think so. We have some idea of the physical forces involved in brain injury, and researchers have already figured out how to make an instrumented helmet that measures those forces. That kind of testing should provide enough information to know if rule changes are effective in preventing the kinds of head movements that lead to CTE without having to wait for players’ brains to turn to mush.
Redshirt
I played Goalie all through High School and College. Goalie is hardcore sport, if you play it hard – which is the only way you can play Goalie – and concussions are natural. I sustained at least… 5? 6 concussions? In soccer. Others in baseball as a Catcher. Others in street fighting. My FSM – I’ve had like a dozen concussions, at least. Now I am afraid. My body was abused.
drkrick
@Ella in New Mexico:
Don’t they require parental permission for high school sports in New Mexico? If your 15 year old was really that far out of your control, you should probably refrain from commenting on other people’s parenting skills and practices.
drkrick
@Roger Moore:
This was one of the breakthroughs. The first set of these helmets was equipped with sensors in the range they thought reasonable for high school players only to discover they had pegged on many of the players’ helmets scores of times in the first practice. It was pretty eye-opening as to the level of impact players were being subjected to on a daily basis.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@MCA1: No, I made no such case, my illiterati friends. There are more dangerous sports he could be participating in; there are less dangerous sports. He probably shouldn’t be riding a minibike and bouncing on a trampoline either. And let’s be honest, our hunting trips and shooting range activities would doubtless be on a ban list as well, if you nannystaters had a say in it.
I merely pointed out that the vast majority of children in the Pop Warner leagues are not destroying their brains and are learning important skills.
Nuance, as KG put it.
Thymezone
Oh come on, did Rome scrap the Christian-Lions death matches just because parents didn’t sign their kids up for the peewee death matches? I don’t think so.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Now let’s talk about banning all the other dangerous sports:
http://www.thetoptens.com/most-dangerous-sports/
canuckistani
I’ve watched people play Ultimate Frisbee and I was bored to tears, but I also find golf on TV to be unspeakably boring, so I’m a lousy barometer for what makes an appealing spectator sport.
TheHalfrican
Count me among the “Oh for fucks sake” crowd.
So much of this discussion irks me because it reeks of people who never liked the sport anyway embracing a new moral justification for disliking it. It’s like watching old white people talk about Hip-Hop music. Nobody in say….PHILADELPHIA is talking about Football’s decline, trust me. You could blow up City Hall and it’d be a lesser news story than a Eagles/Cowboys game. Soccer replacing the NFL? In THIS country? With all those 0-0 ties and thrilling 1-0 victories? Really cuz? With all due respect, you’re fucking high.
Newsflash: Boxing didn’t die because of an outpouring of sadness and guilt. HA, you give people too much credit. It died because the sport was obviously, NAKEDLY crooked on so many levels (Don King and that bullshit Lewis/Holyfield decision did more damage than Ali’s health ever did) and the superstars insisted on fighting tomato cans instead of each other until they were all old and unwatchable. Mayweather/Pacman, dude. Shoulda been the Fight of the Century. Biggest PPV buyrate ever. Now it’ll be a joke if it ever happens. Oh, and MMA – the kids had a shiny new violent combat sport that made the old one look lame. A heavyweight boxing champ can no longer claim to be the baddest dude on the planet because we all know Silva would kick his ass.
Remember what happened to Eric Lindros? I do. If *ANY* football team at any level had pulled the inhumane crap the Flyers did w/ that kid, there’d be a 30 for 30 and a Oscar nominated Michael Moore documentary about it. 80 game season and its a accepted part of the sport to punch guys in the head repeatedly. I refuse to believe that football is gonna be the ONLY sport that has to cope with a new understanding of how bad repeat, sub-concussive impacts can be. “Oh but Rugby is soooo much safer cuz no pads and they tackle safe-” No its fucking not, do a Google news search please.
The NFL will take more hits, but it will level out eventually because other sports will have to cope w/ concussions too, and Football will still be easily, clearly, far and away the most exciting sport to watch on TV. Nobody can offer weekly, unscripted epic live TV drama like the NFL can. (BTW, you can make a convincing case that College Football is actually the #2 sport in the country. Look at the list of the world’s biggest stadiums.)
@taylormattd:
He gets it. Crap quality football from greedy owners looking to squeeze blood from a stone will kill the sport faster than anything. The 18 game season and expanded playoffs talk is a bigger threat IMHO. The XFL’s biggest problem was Vince McMahon being too greedy and impatient to give subpar players proper training and prep time.
Alternatively, the NFL could get obsessed with finding a safer cigarette, and wind up destroying the sport by instituting so many rule changes that it basically becomes flag football.
In the meantime, I’ll be over here watching mah gladiators rip each others heads off, YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDD!!!!!
(btw I like Foles, but I still want them to draft Johnny Football.)
Thymezone
@TheHalfrican:
You are right. A sport that denies permanent crippling injury to its participants in the face of overwhelming evidence should be held in the highest respect.
Other sports may be crooked, but at least most of them don’t leave their players cripples and vegetables.
Obviously you are no good at flag football or you wouldn’t make such asinine comments.
TheHalfrican
Also, fwiw, if I had to pick a “sport of the future”, I really think Paintballing has a better shot than Ultimate Frisbee.
Thymezone
@TheHalfrican:
The sport of the future is lady mud wrestling. On top of everything else, it is good for the skin.
Ella in New Mexico
@Cassidy:
Uh, no. And in case you don’t know this, kids do not learn everything in life from their parents. That’s a cheap shot, and you are an asshole for saying something like that.
@drkrick:
Of course they require parental permission, but when a kid has a strong spirit and personal work ethic, superior athletic prowess (did YOU manage to play first string in 5 different varsity sports as a teen, much less in a championship Class 5A high school, drkrick?) and is fully aware of the risks of playing football it’s not my belief that I should treat him like a piece of vintage glass and forbid him from making that decisions. It’s was a fucking high school sport he wanted to do, not drugs or criminal activity.
Ahh, the delusions of the snobby helicopter parent. gotta love em.
TheHalfrican
@Thymezone:
Denies? Oh, you mean the reprehensible actions of the owners in covering it up. Yeah, I kinda hold those people responsible for that more than The Sport Itself. Selfish Caucasian Billionaires exploiting poor colored people, wow shocking, footage at 11.
TheHalfrican
@Thymezone:
Of course, a Pro-Wrestling career will savage the body worse than any “real” sport. Chris Benoit was actually my wake-up call for concussions. They said he had the brain of a 80 y/o Alzheimers patient. At age 40. Damn. God bless Blumenthal and Murphey for mopping the floor w/ Linda like they did. The look on Vince’s face during that concession speech was priceless. He really did blow more money on that than the XFL, which is pretty amazing. LOL oh god the “Obama/McMahon” t-shirts. Priceless.
Thymezone
@TheHalfrican:
Yeah, what are they doing about it?
Thymezone
@TheHalfrican:
Obviously you know nothing about lady mud wrestling.
Thymezone
@TheHalfrican:
I agree, things like this are so ubiquitous we should just stop baying at the moon about them and just enjoy it. It was good enough for my great great grandfather Augustus Cornpone, it’s good enough for me.
Cassidy
@Ella in New Mexico: Not more assholish than being a self-righteous bitch to everyone here for not wanting to put their kids on the fast track to brain damage. Suck it up, buttercup. My advice, be happy you raised your kids and are lucky enough to not be the ones grieving because your son died from a traumatic head injury or improper use of supplements or heat stroke after two a days in the summer sun. Don’t denigrate others for making different decisions.
Pen
@Ella in New Mexico:
Drkrick may not meet your “first string in 5 different sports” metric but I did: soccer, wrestling, basketball, football, track (went to State in 8 events), and cross country. Since high school I’ve participated in the 2011-13 Oklahoma D-Day scenario paintball tournaments. I’ve also run 3 triathalons, 3 Tough Mudders, 2 Spartan Races, and attend a Crossfit gym 4-5 days a week.
That a fucking good enough pedigree for you? You used a quote from me where I stated that my son won’t be playing contact football, so you can take your “I’m a better parent than you helicopter morons” attitude and shove it up your ass. CTE isn’t a joke, and if you think your teenager is mentally mature enough to decide risking brain injury for a sport is worth the risk you obviously don’t know jack shit about brain development or developmental psychology.
Let me give you a little clue: your teenager doesn’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Their ability to see consequences, make judgments, and anticipate negative outcomes? Incomplete.
Maybe your special snowflakes were the odd ones out, maybe they developed early and knew what they were getting into (probably not) but as the parent it’s your job to look out for your child. There are other avenues for developing team building and you, coming here, to shit on parents who are actually doing their job doesn’t make you a better parent.
The job of a parent isn’t to be your child’s friend. It’s to guide them, prepare them, and if necessary tell them “no”. CTE wasn’t a known issue when I was in football in high school. It is now.
Go ahead, call me a helicopter parent. I’ll just keep telling dumbasses like you to fuck off.
eyelessgame
While watching the halftime show at pep night, I found myself next to the dad of a student my kids know. Chatted. His comment:
“My son’s on the football team, and he rides the bench. And let me tell you I am so glad. He gets the exercise and the camaraderie and the discipline, and I don’t have to worry he’s going to get an injury he doesn’t come back from.”
I was there to see the band anyway, because my daughter was there playing her heart out on the trombone. My son will be marching with a Sousa in two years. They’ll also get the exercise and the camaraderie and the discipline, and they put the field to a better use.
Ella in New Mexico
@Pen:
Hey, fuck you too. You just don’t want to think anyone else but you has an opinion on this topic. And guess what? I not only have an advanced degree in mental health but one in a medical field too, and I actually worked with brain injured patients in my career, so I know a fucking hell of a lot about brain development and developmental psychology, asshole. I am totally on board with concerns about TBI’s and CHI’s in football, and quite frankly and grateful my kid never suffered from one. I’d outlaw boxing if I could.
I’d like to seriously ask you what you would have done if YOUR parents had been ridiculous enough to tell you no to all those sports you mastered? Would you be the person you are today? I doubt it.
And did you EVEN read the sports all these parents in the comments were adding to the list of “not safe enough” to allow their kids to participate in? I mean seriously, my comment was about people becoming so obsessed with creating a perfect, safe little cocoon for their kids that they are ruling out pretty much any sport or physical activity that could scratch them–not to get you all fucking riled up.
@Cassidy:
Self righteous? Not really. A bitch? Only when I encounter assholes. So same to you, Butter-fucking-cup. Go take a Xanax or something, that hostility is gonna kill you.
Really, I’ve been a BJ fan for almost a decade, but lately the people I encounter her are so frigging narrow-minded, hostile and aggressive towards differences in opinion that it’s not the same blog anymore. You two are exhibit A.
Cassidy
@Ella in New Mexico: Go fuck yourself with something rusty. You came in here, offered up some ignorant, dumbass shit and got called on it. That’s what happens to judgmental, low information jackasses.
Cassidy
@Ella in New Mexico: Also, since you clearly
Have no clue how to be a fucking parent, keep your dipshit advice to yourself. Go outsource another part of their upbringing since you couldn’t bother to do the basics.
Thymezone
I have no dog in your present fight … but just one comment on that last point:
Darrell.
Heh.
Pen
If you don’t think this is the same blog atmosphere as it was when you started you weren’t paying attention for the last few years.
As for the rest of your post… what the fuck do you think the reaction is going to be when you insult peoples parenting ability? You didn’t voice an opinion, you lumped us in with your fanciful “put your kids in a bubble if they trip over their shoelace” strawman, climbed on top of your high horse, and then proceeded to talk down to every person you quoted.
You attacked me; I’m just returning the favor.
Paul in KY
The only ways to fix the problem would be to either:
1) No helmets at all (won’t be no leading with head then)
3) Make tackling like rugby, where you have to wrap up an opponent, cannot use force of collision only to bring them down.
MCA1
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: What, precisely, in my post makes me a “nannystater?” Have I called for a ban on American football? This thread is about the increasing awareness of the public to the longterm dangers of playing football, mostly at the very high levels. Some posters said they’d never let their kids play football, and others are expressing some remorse at how much they enjoy watching football because it makes them complicit. To which you expounded on the great things your son has gained by playing football. My response, to boil it down, is that those are all great, but if you’re going to try to dissuade people from a staunch opposition to ever allowing their children to take up the sport, you’ll need to aver that it gives them something that playing [insert team sport] doesn’t, or you won’t overcome the fear of serious injury and/or a distaste for swimming in a stream that eventually feeds into the NFL. I won’t namecall back and call you illiterate the way you so casually did me, but I will submit that you’re projecting some anger at the wrong targets here, and did not actually read my post very closely and consider it in ithe context of the overall discussion to that point before responding, rudely, out of passion.
MCA1
@feral and G&T: Uh huh. Sorry. While it’s fun to play, it’s very boring to watch, imo (and that of, I would venture, a lot of people), whatever offensive setups and defensive counters are being employed. The fitness required to play well is extremely high, but that in no way translates to a sport that will ever engage a mass audience. Cycling, water polo, and other sports also require an extreme amount of fitness, but that doesn’t make people who don’t play or participate in them want to watch. And you cannot convince me that the skill level and variety, or tactical sophistication, even approaches a lot of other sports. Greater than pure endurance sports like running and cycling, yes. But not in the same ballpark as basketball, baseball, hockey, golf, tennis, etc. Perhaps the closest analogue in terms of skills is soccer, as one of you noted, and in terms of tactics and strategy, they’re pretty similar in a lot of ways. But you’d have to eliminate dribbling and shooting, leaving passing and receiving, to make it a closer analogy. And maybe it’s just me, but doing stuff with your feet seems harder than doing it with your hands – we were evolved to throw stuff, not to kick it. I don’t know, maybe I’m biased because my background is mostly baseball, tennis and basketball, where I’ve built up a level of hand-eye coordination that translates to figuring out how to throw a frisbee a long distance to a spot, and not have it turn over sideways, while taking the wind into account. And the idea of players cutting in different directions to get open for passes (and anticipating where they’re going, both as a passer and a defender) is second nature for people who’ve played any number of sports. Let me ask this: if an international competitor in ultimate were to try to crack the lineup of a D-I college hockey team (and had never played the sport before), and a collegiate hockey player were to try to make it on an elite ultimate team, who would get there first? How about a football or baseball or basketball player?
If you want to boil it down for an answer to the question someone posed upthread that started this discussion, why hasn’t the sport taken off, I think it’s pretty basic: you can’t run with the frisbee. Handball is the only other goal scoring team sport I can think of where the player with the primary object of the game in their possession cannot move, and even there they’re just limited, not prohibited. And unless a sport is sufficiently exciting for a lot of people to want to watch it, it will never attract enough people to grow particularly large. I’m not saying ultimate should incorporate tackling or anything – people like playing it just how it is, and that’s fine. But it will never have enough “game speed” (does not = “speed of players”) to be very fun for most people to watch.
Anyway, thanks for engaging. I knew I’d get someone all fired up, but I just have a weird interest in the taxonomy of sports and breaking down their appeals and weaknesses. Please note that I’ve not at any point said ultimate is not a sport, is just a humorous white people activity, or is for stoners and hippies. Nor have I contended that in my current state of fitness I could hang for more than 10 minutes with conditioned players.
Ella in New Mexico
@Pen:
Oh, my. Someone who knows something disagrees with me. I must kill them, or I’ll have to change my view of the world. .”
@Cassidy:
Wow, really classy. Keep it up, Butch.