OT: The Future of Football

[lamafist]

NFL doctor says CTE is being “over-exaggerated”

Call the source biased if you will, but these are my feelings.

My understanding is that the main issue with CTE is when people continuously sustain concussions (even minor ones) and play through them. Quite simply, don't do that.

I know it might be hard to believe that the NFL would stoop so low as to pay scientific or medical expert to claim something that every other expert in the field not being paid by the NFL says is the literal opposite of the truth, but, well... here we are, again.

Actually, in this case, even the NFL tried to distance itself from the comments Dr. Maroon made that prompted the PFT post you linked to, especially when, a few months later, he got in trouble for failing to disclose his 30-year relationship with the NFL when submitting a meta-study on concussions in sports for publication -- a study he's since been forced to make corrections to twice for leaving out studies that didn't support his conclusions. And the guy's track record has only gotten worse since then.

As for your understanding of the issue with CTE, you're actually spot-on about the issue being continuous exposure -- the problem is that the main culprit for CTE appears to be the repetitive subconcussive brain trauma from the kind of collisions that numerous players experience every snap of the game.

That's what doctors have been saying for years, and yet most football fans still think it's the big concussion-causing hits that are the problem. Why? For the same reason most fans still think there was damning evidence on Brady's phone.

 

[archstanton543]

Interesting (long) read over at SBNation.

The TL;DR version is that the author thinks the game is going to be forced to change a lot.

Football 3.0 is coming. This is what it will look like

tl;dr

 

[mosslost]

I know it might be hard to believe that the NFL would stoop so low as to pay scientific or medical expert to claim something that every other expert in the field not being paid by the NFL says is the literal opposite of the truth, but, well... here we are, again.

Actually, in this case, even the NFL tried to distance itself from the comments Dr. Maroon made that prompted the PFT post you linked to, especially when, a few months later, he got in trouble for failing to disclose his 30-year relationship with the NFL when submitting a meta-study on concussions in sports for publication -- a study he's since been forced to make corrections to twice for leaving out studies that didn't support his conclusions. And the guy's track record has only gotten worse since then.

As for your understanding of the issue with CTE, you're actually spot-on about the issue being continuous exposure -- the problem is that the main culprit for CTE appears to be the repetitive subconcussive brain trauma from the kind of collisions that numerous players experience every snap of the game.

That's what doctors have been saying for years, and yet most football fans still think it's the big concussion-causing hits that are the problem. Why? For the same reason most fans still think there was damning evidence on Brady's phone.

correct. The real issue with respect to the survival of football really in most of it's envisioned forms, (if it is going to even resemble the sport we have now) is going to be society's willingness to tolerate and enjoy a past time that contains such violence. Many players will choose to play this game anyway, as a way to get rich and have fun. I think we are beginging to see part of the answer as participation in Pop Warner football is thinning. They are never going to make football "safe" from head injury. Hockey and Basketball and even baseball there are some risks too though. Sports are aggressive by nature obviously. I mean are we just going to have ping pong teams to root for in the future?
PS: Many more players actually died on the field back in the day when players were little, smaller, slower players.

 

[mosslost]

Serious question:
Let's imagine you were tasked with coming up with just one idea to make the game safer (not perfect but an improvement) but it does not ruin the sport, what would your idea be?

I read about the "Sprint Football" idea (you can't weigh more that 178 pounds any position) but without collision rule changes I don't see why that would make it safer.

 

[Hammer of Thor]

Serious question:
Let's imagine you were tasked with coming up with just one idea to make the game safer (not perfect but an improvement) but it does not ruin the sport, what would your idea be?

I read about the "Sprint Football" idea (you can't weigh more that 178 pounds any position) but without collision rule changes I don't see why that would make it safer.

Form tackling. A player isn't downed unless he is properly form tackled.

 

[maineman209]

I think the exact opposite is closer to the case -- if the NFL doesn't figure out that it needs to reverse its present strategy of containment, trying to hide, downplay and distract from the seriousness of the CTE issue, it will be the wholesale abandonment of the game by casual viewers that will sound the NFL's death knell.

"Casual viewers" aren't peripheral to the NFL or any other major sport, and haven't been since the licensing of their television rights became every sport's primary source of revenue. Currently, about half of all Americans consider themselves fans of the NFL to some degree. That's where the money comes from.

If the nation's stomach turns on football the way it did on boxing, the NFL won't survive the dry-up of its main revenue stream -- for obvious reasons, a multi-team sports league's structure and overhead won't allow it to down-scale as rapidly as boxing did.

I hear you, but I think you're underestimating the effect of fantasy footballers. Overwhelmingly youngish, white males making, on average, about double the median U.S. income, they generated about $19bn in revenues last season, up from about $11bn in 2013. CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and the NFL itself are now partaking in a majority of that revenue.

Generally speaking, fantasy footballers don't know a whole lot about strategy, tactics, schemes or anything else that doesn't generate easily-defined stats - and they don't care, either. They also don't care much about long term health issues (CTE) suffered by players. What matter is only whether or not their guys are playing (and generating fantasy points for them) this week.

While I certainly don't dispute the point about injury liability insurance potentially "shutting down" the pipeline of under-18 players, I think it will more likely be catering to the participants in the the now-fastest-growing revenue stream at the corporate/professional level that alters the NFL game.

 

[MassPats38]

Agreed. Let them wreck each other for our pleasure. As long as they know they will be vegetables by 60, I guess it is ok.

That paternalistic view, offered with the best of intentions, typically presumes that the lives of those involved would be better without the benefits of the game.

If the NFL loses its audience, then do you see the players who don't make millions there as the next Mozart, Einstein or Warren Buffet? From reading the player bios, I am not seeing many silver spoon affluent kids playing the game. If you save them from that fate at 60 in order to hand them death at 19 after taking 4 shots in the chest, then can you say you saved them at all?

In both cases there are probabilities, not certainties. We know little of CTE, other than the force component of the condition. If people bump their head twice in a lifetime, does it cause CTE? Is there genetic resistance? We don't know. We do know the correlation between poverty and crime.

If you haven't read it, then I do recommend reading The Blind Side (the movie was not nearly as good). If you feel guilt over watching the game, then that might change your mind a bit.

 

[maineman209]

Let them wreck each other for our pleasure

That's pretty much the attitude of a lot of the fantasy-footballers I've met.

Guy can't walk 10 years after retiring from the NFL? "Too bad. So sad. The Jags better run Fournette a lot this week!"

 

[miloofcroton]

I know it might be hard to believe that the NFL would stoop so low as to pay scientific or medical expert to claim something that every other expert in the field not being paid by the NFL says is the literal opposite of the truth, but, well... here we are, again.

Actually, in this case, even the NFL tried to distance itself from the comments Dr. Maroon made that prompted the PFT post you linked to, especially when, a few months later, he got in trouble for failing to disclose his 30-year relationship with the NFL when submitting a meta-study on concussions in sports for publication -- a study he's since been forced to make corrections to twice for leaving out studies that didn't support his conclusions. And the guy's track record has only gotten worse since then.

As for your understanding of the issue with CTE, you're actually spot-on about the issue being continuous exposure -- the problem is that the main culprit for CTE appears to be the repetitive subconcussive brain trauma from the kind of collisions that numerous players experience every snap of the game.

That's what doctors have been saying for years, and yet most football fans still think it's the big concussion-causing hits that are the problem. Why? For the same reason most fans still think there was damning evidence on Brady's phone.

According to the link that I posted, there is not a strongly predictive element in that equation yet. In other words, just because you play football (and undergo a normal amount of contact), that doesn't guarantee your brain to a life of CTE. Supposedly CTE can happen or not happen based upon genetic vulnerabilities, and if it does happen, brain damage is still not guaranteed to occur either. Care to comment on that?