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ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

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Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#261

Post by jethro_tell »

lojack wrote: post #203
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the rules could get reworked to make it less dangerous for brain injury. Take a cue from Australian Rules Football: remove all padding and make high tackles that endanger the head illegal.

The rules could get reworked, but I seriously doubt if they ever will. Maybe its possible to slowly change the game over time, but completely changing the rules overnight would be too dramatic and risky for any league to really get behind. The best chance is probably for the NFL to come up with a long term plan to fix things, but that'd require them to admit the problem, which I don't think will ever happen.

Go back to leather helmets and cotton pads and it's a different game. No reason we need to turn their heads into sledgehammers. We do that because then they feel more comfortable with the big unsafe hits and the flying around but we could get back to the real game with the ruck style running game and wideouts with hand fighting all the way down the sideline and half the commercials and I bet ratings would start going up.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#262

Post by criddell »

hota_mazi wrote: post #225
Pxtl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hockey has the advantage that the sport could we reworked into something less violent. Hockey could survive a change to the rules that would reduce blows to the head. Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable. Actually, that might be worse... If hockey turns out to have as bad a concussion problem, the leadership of the sport is likely even more culpabl…

> Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable. And yet, rubgy and Australian football have just as much contact and do not suffer from an endemic injury problem. Maybe something related to the padding?

A quick Googling of that suggests otherwise:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/one-seaso...

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#263

Post by vacri »

lostlogin wrote: post #117
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the rules could get reworked to make it less dangerous for brain injury. Take a cue from Australian Rules Football: remove all padding and make high tackles that endanger the head illegal.

Rugby and league have no padding and those rules. It doesn't appear to anywhere close to enough.

Rugby is a much better analogue to gridiron - it's essentially the same game. Two lines of players run at each other, with a certain number of attempts to run the ball downfield, and almost every 'play' has contact of players running in opposite directions. Aussie Rules is much more freeform and has fewer 'opposing hits'.

However, much as we aussies like to mock gridiron for the pads it requires, without the pads, players used to die relatively routinely. Take the pads away from gridiron and it would need to change and loosen up enough that it basically becomes rugby.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#264

Post by jMyles »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #6

What about the sponsorship of daredevil sports like free climbing, wing suits, etc., by consumer companies like GoPro and Redbull. I feel that we are supporting these companies with our purchases, and then they in turn create social media spectacles by giving these people an incentive to do dangerous stunts. Recently a wingsuit daredevil died while livestreaming on Facebook, watched by his young daughter and wife. It…

I think the biggest difference is the equipment. Football players are told that they have a suit of armor to protect them, but we now know that's a huge lie. The equipment is to enable bigger hits, not to prevent damage from them.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#265

Post by bad_hairpiece »

beachy wrote: post #17

Speaking as someone from a rugby-playing nation, where mostly players wear no protection except mouthguards and shin pads, American Football is spectacular but insane. Wearing protective helmets just ups the ante as players launch into each other with full force. In rugby, you don't tackle someone like that as you'll hurt yourself, and fail to stop the opponent. Rugby is a plenty violent sport, and has its own health…

Rugby is a contact sport; football is a collision sport.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#266

Post by dionidium »

EpicEng wrote: post #187
Pxtl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hockey has the advantage that the sport could we reworked into something less violent. Hockey could survive a change to the rules that would reduce blows to the head. Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable. Actually, that might be worse... If hockey turns out to have as bad a concussion problem, the leadership of the sport is likely even more culpabl…

>Hockey has the advantage that the sport could we reworked into something less violent. Hockey could survive a change to the rules that would reduce blows to the head. Could it? I wonder how many people would continue to watch hockey if fights weren't essentially sanctioned as a part of the game. I imagine only the diehards as it's not the most entertaining sport in the world...

I'm a traditionalist; I like the fights. But it's a very, very tiny part of the game. There's basically nobody who actually follows hockey who is doing so primarily for the fights, as you seem to be suggesting. That's an opinion that only someone who doesn't follow hockey could think makes enough sense to say aloud.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#267

Post by vacri »

hota_mazi wrote: post #225
Pxtl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hockey has the advantage that the sport could we reworked into something less violent. Hockey could survive a change to the rules that would reduce blows to the head. Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable. Actually, that might be worse... If hockey turns out to have as bad a concussion problem, the leadership of the sport is likely even more culpabl…

> Football is such an intrinsically contact sport that I don't think a safer game would even be recognizable. And yet, rubgy and Australian football have just as much contact and do not suffer from an endemic injury problem. Maybe something related to the padding?

Aussie Rules has nowhere near as much contact as gridiron, and the kind of contact it has is rarely as full-on as in gridiron. There's no real contact in aussie rules if you're not on the ball, whereas every play in gridiron, more than half the players are slamming into each other, regardless of what's happening.

Most of the contact in aussie rules is tackling from behind, whereas in gridiron on every play you have around nine guys smashing into each other just as the quarterback receives the ball... and then all the additional contact depending on the play, including tackling like in aussie rules.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#268

Post by bkohlmann »

“And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something — something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?” -Robert Coram, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#269

Post by heartbreak »

_wp3r wrote: post #210

I am patiently waiting for the first bellwether Ivy league school to drop football with brain injury being the reason. I think the demise of college and then professional football would cascade after that, still a decade or two but it would be inevitable and possibly faster than people expect.

Yale cutting football has 0 chance whatsoever of convincing a single SEC school to cut football. The SEC would be around sponsoring football even if every other conference was shuttered.

Edit: Okay maybe Vanderbilt would leave.

Re: ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

#270

Post by jMyles »

simplicio wrote: post #44
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #5

Football is America's gladiator sport. For all the fun, the money, the excitement, the money, the drama, the bombast, the cheerleaders, and even the money, we should remind ourselves that American football is a very violent sport rife with injury and long term disability, and our participation as passive spectators and consumers makes us just as responsible for the incentive structure that harms so many young men for…

I disagree. I think Americans are generally pretty intolerant of sports and other activities where death or disability are likely outcomes. The rules of football, boxing, MMA, etc. have been continuously changed to make them safer, even at the cost of abandoning major aspects of the sport (19th century football was much different than the modern sport, and much more frequently fatal). Football has managed to dodge th…

> The rules of football, boxing, MMA, etc. have been continuously changed to make them safer

I disagree, at least in part.

Pretty much all of the rules of boxing make it unsafe, and it seems to have evolved to be increasingly so. Boxers have to ignore every instinct that their body has to protect them, from continuous clinching to grabbing to taking the fight to the ground.

If a boxer falls to the ground, dizzy with head trauma, the referee will literally count to 10, and if that boxer can stand up, they can stand in front of their opponent and be hit in the head some more. Like they're a piece of meat.

MMA is much, much better in this regard, but still has some bad parts, and many of the changes have made things worse and not better.

The original UFC rules banned hand wraps, which allow fighters to throw wide, fastball-style overhand punches that would otherwise be impossible without breaking hands.

The original rules also did not provide for referee stand-ups, which have nothing to do with the sport and are instead a purely subjective move to make the fight more exciting. Leaving the fight on the ground is always safer (and, IMO, almost always more exciting, but that's a different topic).

The system of weight-determination in MMA (typically a single weigh-in, 24-40 hours before the fight) absolutely incentivizes deep weight cuts, and that's disgusting. Changes to these rules have often made things worse instead of better (options for an early weigh-in, a ban on IV rehydration, etc). Although OneFC is doing brilliant work in this field I will say; they are an exception.

MMA is a great sport and almost certainly much safer than Football or Boxing, but it's up to fans to stand up and demand re-examination of some of the rules that have gone in the wrong direction.

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