I doubt football will end anytime soon, but it should.
Especially thinking about universities -- to me, college football is not much more than a tragic exploitation system. Kids are recruited from age 14 and get promised the moon by coaches/staff, spend 5 years getting banged up (concussions etc) for life, and most wind up scraping through with a useless degree if they graduate at all. A tiny percentage go pro and the rest are left out to dry with few career prospects having missed out on their education. Most pros don't make that much during their career and don't have great quality of life after it's over (run out of money, lack of marketable skills, head damage).
The big media companies love it, and heads of universities like the "school spirit" and brand appeal (even though most schools lose money on football). But for the players involved, it's basically a scam. Even though they're getting a free education.
You might make similar arguments for other college sports (not sure how I feel about that having been part of one), but for football I think it's the most clear-cut.
I don't think it's as dismal as you make it look. My brother just accepted a football scholarship at a highly academically rated BCS school. I think there are 66 BCS schools and each one gives out about 20-24 scholarships each year. It's a huge opportunity to get a free education, play a sport he loves and make lifelong relationships with his teammates. A football locker room at the highest levels is about as exclusive a club as there is. I don't know how much tuition is or the other things the scholarship includes, but I wouldn't be surprised if it approaches $200k.
He can be a fool, get beat up and leave without a degree or he can take advantage of an opportunity many people only dream of. The coaches aren't telling him what classes to take. He can take whatever he wants. He can choose a useless program, a great program or anything in between. He can choose to meet the minimum requirements to stay on the team and keep his scholarship or he can choose to excel academically.
On the field, he can choose to hide a concussion or take some time off. He won't lose his scholarship over it. Most players feel pressure to play through injuries, and although it can come from peers and coaches, they often place most of it upon themselves. They are incredibly competitive and don't want to be sidelined for anything.
My point is all the choices are his to make. The same applies to other players. There are few victims in this who aren't victims of their own decisions. If a kid washes out of some dumbass cake walk program for kids who don't give a shit about school, sustains injuries in a sport he would play with or without a scholarship and has zero career prospects is that the fault of the system? I don't think so.
There are ways to twist it around to make it look like a scam, and it's true there are plenty of things wrong with college football, specifically the BCS. It's a feeder system for the NFL, a bunch of people make piles of money and the kids don't make anything. It may be all of those things, but it is also an opportunity for the lucky recipient of a football scholarship to change his life, either for good or bad.
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer but much of what you say is completely inaccurate, some of it factually, the rest logistically.
First, scholarships aren't guaranteed. They are only for 1 year and renewed at the team's discretion. A team can cut you if you get permanently injured. They typically don't because that would look bad to future recruits but if you can't continue with school they aren't going to keep you on scholarship. They can move you to a medical scholarship but that happens less often than you'd think.
Second, I don't think you realize the amount of time it takes to play a college sport. There's a reason a lot of athletes take something like General Studies, and it's not because they are all 'dumb jocks'. The college and university will be accommodating but the fact is that there's a lot of practice time (4+ hours a day) and travel. The football season is longer than most, even longer if the team is good (bowl games). Any hard science that has a lab or field work is probably out.
I just don't think you are realistically looking at what your brother is getting himself into and your expectations seem way off. He'd have to be one of those rare individuals to get a high-end degree and play a scholarship sport. Choosing to be a scholarship athlete is choosing to work on a sport instead of working on a degree of 'substance'.
Completely inaccurate? Are you speaking from experience or pretty much making this up based on what you think happens?
I read through the paperwork for the scholarship that was provided to my brother by the university so I understand how it works. He's spent the past year visiting schools and talking to various people about this. People have visited the house and his school to go over it all. I've been hearing all about it the whole time. This is exciting for the whole family. It's not like a letter showed up in the mail out of the blue one day saying he could go to school for free. I understand the year to year thing and how it works with injuries. In practice, it is uncommon to lose a scholarship unless you are a screwball.
I also realize that it takes time to play a college sport. Four or more hours of practice every day is nothing new. My brother has been doing it for the past four years at a school that demands a high academic level. He also has his own personal coaches that he works with. Half of the games he played in required travel-- quite a few of them three or four hours each way on a bus. This is all piled on top of hours of homework that always got done. Hell, his days are longer than mine and I have a full time job and a toddler. Granted, he never had to stay overnight anywhere, but playing football was still a huge time commitment. He made many sacrifices to do it.
My brother loves playing football and also places a high value on education and future career opportunities. I think it's every college football player's dream to play in the NFL, but he is realistic about the possibility and planning to make his money doing a regular job like everyone else.
There are plenty of kids that make this work. There are also many that don't. For some of them it's too difficult. Others didn't care much about school in the first place.
In the end, I'm just not buying the argument that the whole system is a scam designed to make a ton of money off the hard work of these kids that get nothing. Both sides benefit. One side gets the money. The other gets the opportunity of a lifetime. Besides, no one is forcing these kids to accept scholarships, and if they are playing at the kind of level to even be considered for one they know damn well how hard it is.
I'll give you the short answer. I did NOT play D1 football, I didn't play football at all. I did do IT work for a D1 university and talked with the athletic administration folks many times. I know a lot about the athletic scholarship process. But don't just take my word for it:
I'm sure your proud of your brother, I get that. And I'm sure he's a smart individual. But how many of us skated through high school? I played 3 sports in high school and graduated at the top of my class without even trying. College ain't high school.
Take the money out of the equation. Let's talk about time because that's all that matters. The coach will come by the house and tell you you can be pre-med and play football. Consider them as car salesmen. They need to sell you a product and will say just about everything to make that happen.
But one of two things will happen with a heavy class load AND a season of D1 football: either grades will suffer or the sport will. Do you think the coach is going to tell you to skip a couple practices to catch up? Nope, he's going to ask you to take some easier classes and you'll have to to keep your scholarship, otherwise you'll get replaced by someone who will.
Here's a great article about the athlete turnover even at a school like Stanford:
>> But for the players involved, it's basically a scam. Even though they're getting a free education.
Sure, universities make money off college football, but let's not call this a "tragic exploitation system."
The players aren't forced to play. They 'love' football. That's why they're playing.
The far majority of college players (in all sports) know that they're not going to be playing professionally. But yet they still play. Because it's their dream to play.
The fact that they volunteer doesn't stop it from being a scam or an exploitation. Especially when you consider that they're being talked into it at 16, 17 years old and their parents often don't have all the facts.
It can be your dream to play, but in many cases it's about trading 5 years of "living the dream" for a reduced quality of life, for the rest of their lives. Job prospects, marketable skills, physical and even mental health. The current system offers kids the chance to live their dream, yeah, but in doing so it runs them through the mill and tosses them out the other side.
Not true in all cases or for all sports, but true in football far too often.
I truly enjoyed football and the friends I made playing it. I've played many other sports and IMO there's no other team sport like it: no room for ego, a lot of pain and a lot of perseverance and discipline required. But I got my bell rung a lot and I was just a "skill" player. Several times I walked back to the huddle after getting hit on an across-the-middle route, not really sure where I was. Injuries happened all the time. It's a fast and violent game.
Part of the point made by some of the ex-players that are contemplating suing the league is that the risks have been concealed from them, systematically.
I use to feel retrospective fear whenever I think about the things I did when I was that age... even knowing the risks.
American football is totally unknown to me, but in my country there's that bullfighting thing. People that likes it doesn't seem to realise that it will disappear anyway in less than fifty years, probably much less. So I've found the article very interesting because the similarity.
Interesting read. But the authors assume that most people would move from obsession with football to watching no sports at all. It seems more likely to me that people would simply replace football with some other sport.
I saw this firsthand in Seattle when the Sonics left for Oklahoma City. Several of my friends who were lifelong fans swore they would never watch NBA basketball again and became hardcore MLS (Major League Soccer) fans.
FTA: "One of the biggest winners would be basketball. To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy), high-octane basketball is the natural substitute. On the pro level, the season can stretch out leisurely, ticket prices rise, ratings rise, maybe the league expands (more great athletes in the pool now), and some of the centers and power forwards will have more bulk. At the college level, March Madness becomes the only game in town."
The authors cover this twice. Once when they briefly mention soccer, may perhaps, take more prominence among Americans, and much more thoroughly, when they posit that the collapse of football would most benefit basketball, as it would be the next substitute.
But regardless, their points about the potential resulting benefits outside of the sporting world still has merit in my eyes. For example, there are large universities that derive much of their funding and student enrollment based heavily on the marketability of their football programs. Schools like Ohio State, Oklahoma, Alabama, and LSU come to mind. Without the marketing strength of their football teams, perhaps the schools would be forced to put more effort into enhancing and promoting academic achievement.
The schools you named have it good -- the football revenues in some cases help fund academic programs.
But for most universities, the opposite is true. The football team runs a big deficit and is subsidized by the university (as are most sports, but football is by far the most expensive). Those smaller or less successful schools are the ones really hurting themselves by devoting so many resources to football.
I actually laughed out loud when the author said, "Heck, just getting rid of fantasy football probably saves American companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually." Yeah, fantasy football might disappear, but that doesn't mean that the phenomenon of fantasy sports would disappear too. It'd just be replaced with other fantasy sports.
I'm not so sure about that. Have you ever played fantasy baseball? Or fantasy hockey? Most other fantasy sports are a pain in the butt. They're too involved.
Fantasy football has a nice rhythm: Peak at your team on Thursdays half-way through the season because of the handful of Thursday night games, adjust your team at lunch on Friday, check your scores on Monday.
At least for casual people. Maybe those hard-core will move to fantasy golf...
I've gotten some of my coworkers involved in fantasy NASCAR. Ridiculous, right? But you pick your drivers, you get points based directly on NASCAR scoring (so you know exactly what you'll get), and during the Chase, you pick just one driver for the whole "playoff" season. It's turned some people from a "they just make left turns..." to a "that was a wicked maneuver when they were racing three wide and he got loose through the corner!"
More likely, the NFL will gradually transition to a safer game that resembles flag football. It may lose some of its audience, but there's too much brand value to fold completely.
The US would finally pay attention to soccer, like the rest of the world? That's practically the only other thing we can use the stadiums for, and since we've collectively invested billions of dollars in public funds to build the damn things it wouldn't make much sense to just demolish them.
Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system.
The addition of helmets, shoulder pads and downs which evolved rugby into American football meant harder hits and higher likelihood of concussions. Rugby doesn't have these problems because the fast non-stop fluid nature of the game means you can't tackle someone hard enough to cause the same level of damage because you have to be able to get up and run again right away. The stop-start nature of American football promotes tackling someone as hard as they can because you can always recover between plays.
"Rugby doesn't have these problems because the fast non-stop fluid nature of the game means you can't tackle someone hard enough to cause the same level of damage because you have to be able to get up and run again right away."
Rugby doesn't have these problems because there are very specific rules about what constitutes a legal tackle and what doesn't.
You can't:
- Tackle a player without the ball
- Tackle a player in the air (e.g. a full-back going up to catch a high ball)
- "Lifting a player from the ground and dropping or driving that player into the ground whilst
that player’s feet are still off the ground such that the player’s head and/or upper body come
into contact with the ground is dangerous play."[1]
Or you can be replaced on the field by another player while you wait for the blurry vision to go away. I have always wondered what football would be like if you changed just one thing: Limit substitutions to one per half like Soccer and thus, obviously, force all players to play offence, defence, and special team plays.
American Football was always this violent, even before the pads. They managed to kill 19 (NINETEEN) people playing it in 1905, well before the helmets came in (1939ish, although: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_football_helmet).
Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system.
Going off track, but by finally are you saying that's a positive thing?
I'm a nerd. I've always been a nerd. I had the absolute minimum mandatory participation in sports during school. That is one of my biggest regrets. Sports have incredible importance in so many ways.
Youth sports are a great thing, I just don't think they're a great use for public education funding. Physical education is good. Having a high school football team with tons of expensive equipment and coaching that sucks up money while the actual schooling goes to waste, not so much.
I feel the same way except that I changed my ways in college.
How old are you, because you probably have time to make sports a part of your life.
My mother, never having run more than five kilometers at once, ran her first marathon at 66 -- http://joshuaspodek.com/redefining_possibility -- and she talks about running more. Plenty of other sports are available to people of every age.
I'm proud to have inspired her. I'd love to inspire others!
Totally off topic, but what about team sports? I played teeball when I was six and flag football in the 5th grade, but other than that, I totally missed out on organized sports as a kid. (I played a lot of "unorganized" sports in the back yard though). I run, but that's an individual thing.
Where would an adult go to learn to play baseball, basketball or football? I know there are after-work adult leagues, but do they let people with no talent and experience play? What about coaching?
Physical and team activities are important. Sports and sport stars are less so. It's nice to have the "team" to look up to in school, since we are social creatures and demand to belong to something greater than ourselves (and alpha males demand attention from the lessers), but there aren't many people who participate in the high school football team. It'd be nice to transition those funds into a more well-rounded physical/team activities department.
The post I replied to opined that "Maybe without football, we'd be closer to finally decoupling youth sports from the education system.": Their issue wasn't just with football, and instead football was the beachhead to try to excise physical activity.
In my high school there were a large number of prominent sports, with participation covering a hefty percentage of the student base. Wrestling, basketball, football, swimming, badminton, track and field, volleyball, among others. There was something for almost anyone, and it was a fundamental part of the social, learning, and physical wellness recipe. The school heavily promoted and celebrated academic excellence as well (and, contrary to the common bigotry, many of the academic leaders -- the ones who I competed with -- excelled at sports as well).
If a particular school focused only on football, then of course that would be a problem.
I think you and I read that sentence differently. I don't believe the author of that post meant that physical exercise is a bad thing in schools, but rather sports stars should not be "better" or "different" from any other student. At my school (and a lot of schools judging from people I met in college), we had dozens of sports but only football and basketball players were routinely excused from class for practice, drills, and travel to games. Only football had their travel expenses paid for by the school. You were at a severe disadvantage if you decided to play any other sport.
What I read that post as saying is "sports should be extracurricular activities that do not interfere with or take the place of education". This doesn't necessarily preclude your normal PE classes.
I live about 30 minutes from Clemson (the football town mentioned.) Football is huge in the south. I'm not used to it, and have, in fact, never been to a football game. Except maybe once, but that was for the girls.
It's quite crazy though how much these football towns rely on a sport. The rivalries, the competition, and the booze. I always said if you wanted to rob a house, a friday night would be ideal because literally 50% of the town is at a football game. I really think it's just something everyone can relate to. In these towns where textiles and industry are prominent and there isn't much innovation, looking forward to that friday night football game with the guys is something that gives peoples lives meaning. I'm not sure my point, but I figured I should but in and say that there are such things as these towns and football is very real in the south and without it I would be very interested to see what people cling to next.
Basketball is big-ish, but most schools either have one or the other. I'm a big fan of Kentucky basketball, but everyone knows their football team sucks. That's usually how it goes. So maybe it would go like the article said and basketball just gets huge and more rounded in all towns.
I was just about to say the same thing about Basketball here. I'm in KY and our local high school team always does well, and our college team, while never great, had a good season last year, as well, and has a few bright stars amongst its roster. March is crazy here. It's nothing but basketball, basketball, basketball, and my Facebook and Twitter feeds fill up with commentary every time there's a game. The local community gets behind it, even at the high school level. The school district closes school for the day if the team has an out-of-town game in the state tournament, so people can attend, etc. (As a parent, I don't agree with this action, but none the less, it is interesting from a social perspective).
I'm not a huge fan of the sport, but even I find it hard not to get sucked in.
I go to school at Mississippi State, and I've been to a lot of at-home football games. It's definitely tightly ingrained in the culture down here, and not just for the lower classes- game days are major social events for a large portion of the students and alumni. Some people spend thousands of dollars a season to drive up every weekend, socialize with friends and family, grill out, and tailgate (more like a picnic, actually.) Some of my friends' families don't bat an eyelash at dropping upwards of $500 a weekend if you add in the cost of tickets, gas, food, and alcohol.
I think the big draw of football, though, especially among low-income people, is that it's an accessible way for your average fan to engage in analysis without actually being responsible for failure.
Of course in the north, you get places like Michigan/Michigan State, where they have hugely successful football, basketball, hockey, and baseball teams.
Concussions aren't going to cause the "end of football". A lot of people forget that football used to be a MUCH more dangerous sport. Take for example that in 1905 there were 18 football related deaths with 20 times fewer players than there are today. If it weren't for Teddy Roosevelt pushing for rule changes and the use of leather helmets then we probably wouldn't have football today.
Football is a dangerous sport, I'm not denying it. But the players know the risk when they start playing. The risk is why they make as much money as they do.
The risk isn't why they make so much money. It's the crowds. If tomorrow everyone started watching soccer in America instead of football, then the players would make a lot less money, despite the risk to bodily injury.
I would just like to quote Evan Mathis who recently did an AMA on reddit:
>Linemen are constantly banging their heads. Each of those sub-concussive impacts is having some negative effect on the brain. I really don't know how long I expect to live but it's been a great 30 years. I'm kind of willing to sacrifice a decade or two for the chance of not having to work in my 40's or 50's.
The crowds and risk might actually be linked, though, i.e., it's more fun to watch because it looks riskier. I think the reason sports are popular is because they provide an outlet for warlike instincts, and football provides an exceptionally good war simulation, short of paintball or airsoft.
Then why isn't the rest of the world just as enamored by American Football as Americans? It's an almost non existent sport anywhere outside the US. If it really were more fun to watch than soccer or rugby, it would surely be more fun to watch in the UK, Germany, Brazil, etc.
It's only more fun to watch because you're used to it and your sporting culture is built around it.
Wars tends to be a tad more dynamic than gridiron. Out of the major ball sports it's by far the most dragged out: 5 seconds of mayhem, 60 seconds of faffing about. Repeat for 3 hours.
Soccer, god rot its socks, is probably a better model. Hours of furious sprinting and jogging, lots of posturing and almost nobody ever wins convincingly.
Wars tends to be a tad more dynamic than gridiron. Out of the major ball sports it's by far the most dragged out: 5 seconds of mayhem, 60 seconds of faffing about.
I have never been to war, but I have friends who have, and your description of gridiron sounds just like their description of war. 2 month faffing around at base, 2 hours all out mayhem and intense fire fights, repeat for 12 month.
I think international soccer is a better analog for war, not least because there are actual rivalries between countries that have gone to war with each other. Every time England plays Germany, the English play it up as a rematch of the World Wars; every time Argentina plays England, it's revenge for the Falkland Islands.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by either point. Lots of things were more dangerous a hundred years ago, and people did many more things that were dangerous routinely. I've also heard many people make the exact opposite point about football, complaining that it's become more dangerous over time as the players have gotten more and more armor.
It's not about the adult players, it's about the parents of high-school players that might become more risk-averse or litigious, which might make the high-school recruiting dry up, which in turn lowers the quality of the college-level games and in turn the NFL. And that is a spiral of death: Lower quality -> less prestige and sponsors -> less kids going into the sport -> even lower quality.
One combination of rule change along with technology that I see helping is shock sensors in the helmets. If the problem is that players receive a number of micro-shocks instead of a small number of concussion level ones, I could see a rule that a player can have no more than a given level of shock (with a formula that calculates intensity of the hits with quantity, kind of like how radiation exposure is measured). After a certain level, a player would be required to be taken out of the game for the week/month/etc. This could probably be implemented at the highschool and college levels fairly easily, but I'm sure that it would take quite a while to develop the formulas needed to determine a safe level of hits x severity of hits.
This rule would only seem to encourage players to hit the best players on the other team as hard as they possibly can.
At which point the number of hits required to knock someone out of the game tends to decrease over time, the length of time during which a game contains the best players tends to decrease over time, and the desire of anyone to keep playing this game tends to approach zero.
Ah, that can be solved with penalties for bad hits, just like there is a major penalty for face masking. Also, from what I can tell, the major hits are helmet-to-helmet, so any purposeful infliction on one player may have an equal infliction on the other.
Also, I wasn't proposing that this would have an immediate effect of taking a player out of an in-progress game (actually, re-reading what I wrote it kind of sounds that way), but I was thinking more post-game analysis, where the cumulative hits to the skull determines a player's eligibility to play (similar to if a player had a cracked rib or fracture in the spine, etc).
The NFL is already perhaps overprotective of quarterbacks, because quarterbacks are bigger superstars than defensive ends and linebackers. Oddly, this is one of the biggest things actual fans complain about.
Yep, player safety is one area that is constantly evolving with technology. I think concussions will be solved eventually, allowing football players to play without risking their brains.
Beyond that, maybe robot football would take off instead. Sort of like in the movie Real Steel, where robots brought boxing back to prominence.
I think this is great point. Transition the game to avatar like mode with skilled players at the controls. Human element still present using players pilots and NASCAR like sponsorship of individual robots and drivers. Think of CS, AI, Engineering programs that would have a boost. Also, video game training of players starting in grade school which Madden already has a "lock" on. Doesn't FOX have that Cleatus Mascot that already is a fan favorite of this type of thinking. Now to the question becomes home come we don't remove the drivers from NASCAR and replace with Avatars.
If you say something is 20 times less. It means you take the original value and multiply it by 20, then subtract the new value from the original. This will always give you a negative value.
x-(x * 20)
What you want to say is that it's one 20th of the original value :)
The thing that American football provides that is absent in most other sports is the strategic match up on every down between offense and defense. That strategic part adds a whole other level to the game which adds huge depth to the analysis that fans can dig into. The game that the coaches are playing by selecting plays against each other is more involved than in any other sport. Any replacement sport that I know of would be missing this important element.
Given that baseball does not have special teams, there is no point in the game where it is not offense v. defense, and compared to baseball, football statistics are pretty shallow.
Furthermore, one issue with football from a spectator standpoint is that the coaches so often seek the limelight at the expense of the players - there's more emoting than a amateur production of A Streetcar Named Desire. It is hardly something which attracts fans.
What is unique is the level of violence for a team sport - it is the rare college or professional game in which someone is not carted off with an injury that puts them out for at least several weeks.
Futbol has continuous scrolling advertising along the boards in the stadium and often advertising next to the score when broadcasting. And of course there is advertising on the player's jerseys and other apparel - something which is anathema to American football.
For NFL games, there are exactly three commercial breaks per quarter by broadcast contract - college is similar. After the contractual number of breaks, the broadcasters simply do not cut away.
Soccer has a lot of tactical sophistication too, probably even more given that there are hundreds of competing professional teams in the world and not just 32, and out of that competition and diversity there have simply been more tactics that have been developed and attempted and put in competition against each other. Certainly there's more for the fans to dig into, because most of the interesting tactical information--not just the playbooks but also the overhead footage the NFL distributes to coaching staffs but doesn't make available to fans--is a trade secret of the NFL.
Also, while there are certainly plenty of fine points in the game to obsess over, it's a less open game in general so there's less room for tactical variation. There's no way to turn attack into defense, defense into attack, or possession into both at the same time, but there are plenty of ways to make the opposing middle linebacker take a misstep and leave him two seconds late to react to the play and hence win an extra few yards.
When reading the headline I thought for a second they were talking about the 'other' football...the one that 90% of the world are infatuated with. I imagine the end of that would occur roughly the same time as the extinction of the human race.
Plenty of other contact team sports exist (Rugby, AFL etc) - how is American Football different? How does an American Football player get tackled differently to say a Rugby Union player?
Having played both, there are some key differences:
- American Football allows blocking, whereas rugby does not. This means it's perfectly legal to blindside someone as hard as you can, often helmet to helmet.
- Football allows tackling above the waist without wrapping your arms around the other player, whereas rugby does not. This means people can launch themselves at the other player as hard as they want without wrapping up, basically turning themselves into large projectiles. The goal, up until recently (since the league started cracking down), was to have a helmet-to-helmet collision in order to knock the other player out (most often happening to wide-receivers). Knocking out another player is a point of pride and a strategic advantage as well.
- Football has armor, Rugby does not. This actually works against Football. It encourages harder hits and head-to-head collisions. Football helmets protect against skull fractures but not concussions. The brain moves independent of the skull in a high impact collision despite how shock absorbant the helmet may be. In rugby, players are a LOT less likely to crack each other's heads together because of the risk of fracture.
I played rugby for 7 years through high school and college, and Football 2 years in high school. I never received any concussions in Rugby (let alone any serious injury at all), but did receive them in my short experience playing football, and at the Junior Varsity level no less.
If I ever have a son, as much as I love the sport, he is banned from playing American football.
For people that never played, it might be interesting to hear that at all levels, many programs institute reward systems for hard hits, amongst other accomplishments. It's mostly pride based, coming in the form of a sticker on the helmet, but it's part of the ethos of the game. When watching game film, coaches will replay hard sticks over and over to the great amusement of the whole team. Most embarrassing is being on the other end of one of those hits.
In pre-college football a certain class of players form their part of their identity around the ability to inflict and take hard hits, amongst their other duties. These also tend to be some of the most athletic kids. I'd assume just about any non-kicking NFL player has at some point in their life been one of those guys.
Oh I have no doubt it's endemic to almost all contact sports, I was just pointing out that programs across the country down to the ones that 12 year old kids start playing in, often will introduce formal reward systems for the behavior.
from my understanding of rugby, another big difference is rules regarding how a team keeps possession of the ball. In rugby (to the best of my knowledge) it's important to fall properly so that your team can ruck over you and keep possession. There is little to no incentive to try to ram forward at full speed, especially if it means falling improperly, which would just lead to a turnover.
In football it's the opposite, every yard is fought for because the team maintains possession after being tackled, and the way you keep possession long term is by moving 10 yards in 4 downs.
In rugby this means 2 players slamming directly into each other at full speed happens very rarely, while in football it happens all the time, and is in fact practiced.
In football, if you don't fall on the ball properly, you might fumble it and turn over possession prematurely. It's not exactly the same but more similar than you're making it seem.
really? I played running back for 5 years (through high school), and the only thing they taught us about falling was to fall forward. The moment your knee, hip/butt, or elbow hits the ground the play is over, so you don't have much to worry about.
protecting the ball is different than how you fall. Protecting the ball is practiced, and there are fundamentals for it (covering both tips of the ball, pressing the ball tight to your body, putting 2 hands on the ball in traffic, and transferring the ball from one hand to the other safely), so commentators are correct to judge a player for not protecting the ball properly.
Blocking and blindsiding are pretty separate things, right? Blindsiding is when you tackle someone from behind, which is why a right-handed quarterback needs a more reliable blocker on his left side. But without blocking you could still be tackled from behind.
Likewise, while above-the-waist tackles are legal in football, they're certainly not the preferred technique because they aren't as reliable.
Blindside blocks happen on plays like kickoff returns or plays where the receiver or running-back break free on a long run. Often times supporting offensive players will make b-lines toward ensuing tacklers and launch themselves full force into the unaware tackler, causing major damage.
This means it's perfectly legal to blindside someone as hard as you can, often helmet to helmet.
Intentional helmet to helmet hits are forbidden. Indeed, blindside hits are a pretty dangerous ground, with any hits touching the victims head or neck yielding significant penalties. Further there's the concept of a "defenseless" receiver, again bringing major penalties.
They constantly amend the rules to try to make the game safer, while still physical and exhilerating.
In American Football the tackler uses his body more as a missile, typically leading with the head. In Rugby the tackler leads more with the shoulder, making sure the head is out of the way, and it's more of a "wrap-up" technique.
Also, I would think that the velocities and masses involved in American Football are higher - it is more of an anaerobic sport due to the short play duration, frequent breaks between plays, and frequent player substitutions.
Watching this vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhmMU6afIHo
Not sure if those are legal tackles but the number of head high hits, coathangers etc is pretty astounding.
That would see you sent off in Australia with a multiple match ban and other punishment.
Probably about half of them would be illegal under current rules I think. Horse-collars, leading with your head and helmet to helmet contact have been outlawed, but generally all you'll get during the game is a 15 yard penalty, and maybe a $x thousand dollar fine a few days after the game.
the way the impacts happen. in rugby contact rarely happens with players moving in directly opposite directions, usually its at an angle that reduces the impact,and seldom involves the head.
football is the opposite, especially with runs up the middle , receivers cutting across the middle of the field, and the smaller, but constant, impacts experienced by the linemen on both sides of the ball.
Wouldn't institutions just ask players to sign a waivers to indemnify them? Aren't there enough kids in the pipeline dreaming of stardom that will sign such a waiver without thinking twice?
Waivers still have to hold up in court. Just because they're waterproof doesn't mean they're legal. Any contract can be overthrown if it understates the risk or if there was gross negligence on the part of the coach.
Startup opportunity for accelerometers in helmets/pads/shoes and real-time data collection?
I imagine if you came up with the right visualizations, that fans would be interested, e.g., "omg, did you see how the LB lit up that receiver coming over the middle! 150 Gs of impact . . . "
An interesting article, but I can't understand why the author thinks the current football code would wither and die in quite the way he proposes when there are other codes with much better safety records and to which they could transition relatively easily; why would the asset holders voluntarily wind up rather than trying to maximise their returns?
* Rugby Union / Rugby League. USA already has a relatively decent national Rugby Union side - certainly not top drawer, but able to compete at World Cup level. The facilities could be relatively easily converted and while there are certainly game subtleties that are very different (a complete ban on forward passes, for example), it'd likely be an easier player transition than to soccer or basketball.
* International Rules Football. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rules_football) An existing hybrid of Gaelic football (for which I'd be astonished if there weren't east coast teams...) and Aussie Rules Football. Again, American teams exist, the pitches would be relatively easily converted, the skills are based around ball carrying and throwing...
Universities make too much money from football to just kill it. Too many large franchises make enormous sums from it, too many towns have it as a significant percentage of GDP. No transition to a new code would ever be easy but, if the writing was on the wall, the financial incentive for (say) one of the large conferences to give 3 years notice of transition to a new code in preference seem enormous in comparison with simply shuttering.
(Now, speaking as a Brit sports fan, if North America could only switch from Baseball to T20 Cricket then.... ;-))
There are probably too many vested interests for that to happen from the top down. One issue the article raises is that the decline would be mostly from the bottom-up as insurance cost and perceived risk respectively diminish high school leagues, and participation. This decline would occur over a long enough timeline that, by the time such a drastic action could be contemplated, football would have transitioned from a cultural institution to an also-ran (as the current soccer and rugby leagues).
Insurance and incidents of the sort outlined could push a turnaround in 2-3 years, quite easily IMHO. Insurance changes could make it extremely expensive in the space of a single year if they're on annual policies. If school boards are given the sudden option of running football at a substantial loss, pulling athletics programmes altogether and losing their value while mothballing their assets or trying to switch code, I'd bet on the latter.
Instinctively the elephant in the room is the different college conferences. Varied enough to go in different ways if push came to shove, big enough that they could impose a code change on their feeder systems. Plus, a big enough bottom-line contributor that if the numbers turned around fast enough I suspect administrators would try a roll of the dice rather than a mothballing.
(And I still want to see a greater uptake of cricket! :-))
The problem with cricket is, first, that it's absolutely beyond most Americans' comprehension, and second, that we already have an incomprehensible sport that involves throwing a ball and hitting it with a stick.
Oh, I know, I just think it's more fun than Baseball :-) ISTR that MLB had a lock-out a while back which ended up with Cricket filling some of the broadcast slots. Speaking as a cricket fan with any luck they can similarly shoot themselves in the foot in the future and T20, as a faster form of the game, can develop a foothold. One has to have dreams!
(Honestly, I've tried watching baseball and, well, incomprehensible covered it well. Trying to work out what was and wasn't a strike a) confused and b) bored me, what with the slowing effect on the game. Then, they keep doing hits which get easily stopped and they're out before even making first base! Gimme T20 every day.)
Hockey is having its own CTE crisis. The NHL has had a few drug deaths and suicides recently that were likely caused by CTE. Hard hits and fighting are a big part of the game. They don't have to be, but they are.
I'm not so sure about that. I think they would watch more basketball and baseball first. It's part national pride, part familiarity. Basketball, baseball, and football are all "American" sports. Baseball and football evolved from cricket and soccer, and basketball was created in the US. There are professional soccer and hockey leagues in the US, but neither sport has really taken off. I'm not so sure that would change in the unlikely event that the NFL folds.
American football actually evolved from rugby, which was always more or less separate from soccer. Though basketball was probably more influenced by soccer.
MLS is growing fast in most of the metropolitan areas that have it, average attendances for MLS exceed those of the NBA, and TV ratings for the UEFA Champions League final last year almost doubled over the year before.
Professional soccer, true. But professional hockey is pretty big in a lot of northern cities. Not at the same level as football or baseball, but big enough. It's limited in cities where kids don't actually play the sport in any numbers though.
Definitely. I'm from the Northeast, hockey has become HUGE in every city from DC to Philly to NYC to Boston, as well as Pittsburgh. The Pens have been selling out every game for years, Flyers fans are rabid, Caps fans are new to the hockey scene, but still sell out games. Try getting a Wizards or Nationals game to ever sell out...
To add to your point, of the original six NHL teams, four were American. Hockey is a very American game, at least for the upper half of the country (it is a big country).
One of the main points from the author is that high school and college players will sue the school for injuries sustained in football, causing insurance agencies to not insure the school, causing the death of football.
This is not possible because if this started to happen schools would require you to sign a contract before being allowed to play. The contract will forbid you from suing the school for any injuries. This will then become standard practice.
They already make you sign those contracts, yet schools carry insurance anyways. Those contracts make it harder to successfully sue, but they do not make it impossible.
It would be interesting to see how this affected the MLS and therefore world soccer as a whole. The best players in the world could move to the MLS rather than the european leagues, and America could start to dominate at a national level.
The world club championships would be more interesting, that's for sure.
I think that football has too much value to the American military-industrial complex to go away without a similar sport replacing it. Highschool football is the real ROTC, where students learn to obey orders and sacrifice their bodies for a common goal. In addition to being huge moneymakers, NCAA and NFL are aspirational advertisement for highschool play.
I don't think football is going away. It's by far the most popular sport in the USA and it's gaining fans all over the world.
All my friends in the UK are obsessed with the NFL.
Concussions are a major concern. This will lead to better helmets and more rules changes to protect player's heads. It will not mean the end of football.
"In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction."
> That argument, however, doesn't actually square with reality. Rugby, as it turns out, has plenty of problems with head injuries. According to one study, in South Africa about 14% of high school rugby players and 23% of professional and club players annually are diagnosed with concussions. Further, Michael Keating, the medical director for USA Rugby, says that a review of the scientific literature indicates that the number of incidences of concussions among rugby players and American-football players are similar.
Rugby (Union) does not have the same incidence of head on head clashes which is what the article focuses on.
The mouthguard is actually the key safety gear for reducing the likelihood and severity of concussion injuries. The soft headgear sometimes worn is primarily for protecting the ears during the breakdown and scrum.
That said, the whipsaw effect of hitting the ground still causes concussions and traumatic blows. Neither code of rugby is gentle; Union is particularly brutal.
Unsubstantiated, un-sourced theory: football players are helmeted, and that helment makes them feel as if 1) they are risking no head damage to themselves, and 2) there is no risk of head damage to others. Thus, lots and lots of targeting of the head and/or usage of the head as a lead component in making or breaking tackles.
On top of that being probable, players try to hide concussions (resulting in compounded head injuries the next time), and players rebel against the NFL's attempts to legislate fewer dangerous head-related hits and tackles. Actually, even fans and the media have the tendency to pine for skull-crushing, cringe-inducing hits at high-velocity.
I could probably have summarized the problem in one word: "culture".
Especially thinking about universities -- to me, college football is not much more than a tragic exploitation system. Kids are recruited from age 14 and get promised the moon by coaches/staff, spend 5 years getting banged up (concussions etc) for life, and most wind up scraping through with a useless degree if they graduate at all. A tiny percentage go pro and the rest are left out to dry with few career prospects having missed out on their education. Most pros don't make that much during their career and don't have great quality of life after it's over (run out of money, lack of marketable skills, head damage).
The big media companies love it, and heads of universities like the "school spirit" and brand appeal (even though most schools lose money on football). But for the players involved, it's basically a scam. Even though they're getting a free education.
You might make similar arguments for other college sports (not sure how I feel about that having been part of one), but for football I think it's the most clear-cut.