rolling American football death spiral thread

"society would look like Night of the Living Dead."

I hate to tell you, but...

"would taking the helmets away from players solve this issue?"

I don't think so, the move to helmets and pads really starts as there was quite a few deaths back in the dawn of the sport at the turn of the last century. Teddy Roosevelt being one of the people that led for changes in the game to make it less violent and deadly.

Yet Rugby players don't have this problem in anything the numbers American football players do

They may not have the forward pass but they do have the forward kick in open play

The nature of the scrum and how the ball moves in rugby is pretty different than American football where the game starts from a set every play with active motion behind the line and having the forward pass. From that you don't get as many full speed blind side hits like you do in American football.

NFL changing the rules to emphasize the pass I think has had unintended consequences on these blind side hits, as clubs study each others plays and there are tons of times defensive players look at a setup and know exactly where the ball might go, as so much of modern passing are timing patterns where the QB is just throwing to a certain spot the field. They just basically wait like an assassin for the ball and receiver to get to that point and just totally unload on the offensive player. Those kind of "helmet to helmet" hits are where the NFL football have been trying to make the changes and on plays where the player gets blind sided like getting hit by a truck.

NFL players are just athletic freaks, the range of size and speed of some of these guys at this point is pretty staggering. Even the average college offensive line will have five guys averaging 300 pounds each. Back in the 80s when the Fridge played, he was huge, now he would be just a bit over average and some of these huge men are amazingly fast for their size.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/01/health/jenkins-nfl/index.html?c=homepage-t

Illegalize zone defenses. Massive blow up hits don't happen in man to man

Did Javid best sue cal and the PAC-12 too? The guy was basically a vegetable before he got to the League due to concussions.

yeah the cal play when he got injured was one of the roughest things i've watched

i was watching some episodes of friday night tykes + it's pretty horrifying and I no longer believe organized tackle football should be legal, at least in that age bracket

http://www.theonion.com/articles/totally-irresponsible-parents-remember-to-drop-son,34610/

re: Rugby, I read something that suggested concussions have been under-diagnosed.

Reading and enjoying the fascinating Against Football right now. Paints a good picture of the sport as an exploitative business and a cultural sickness.

a week ago i heard that Seattle won the last Super Bowl, and laughed

people flipped a shit around here that's for sure

when they had a victory parade I think the whole blighted countryside of western Washington crowded into five square blocks

@DennisThePerrin
When I see #NFL fans fight in the stands, I think: 1) Yes, dance to your masters' tune! 2) Why spill a perfectly good $18 lite beer?

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/09/nfl_players_life_spans_and_domestic_violence_rates_could_pro_football_actually.html

@DennisThePerrin
When I see #NFL fans fight in the stands, I think: 1) Yes, dance to your masters' tune! 2) Why spill a perfectly good $18 lite beer?

― son of a lewd monk (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, September 24, 2014 3:20 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When I see "Dennis Perrin" i see a massive pussy

i see a guy who tweets like english is his second or third language.

I never heard of the guy so I tried to research him on the Internet. Unfortunately all that came up is his twitter account. Apparently some non-entity

so you guys could bond over that

Perrin is a pretty big NFL fan

fuck your motherfucking asshole sport btw

stop c+ping his stupid tweets, thanks

cosign

heywood jablome

(good tight end for Notre Dame in the '70s)

no

i can't figure out at this point if morbz posts them bc he legit thinks they're clever/witty and ilx needs to see them, or if he's just trolling us bc he knows no one thinks they're clever or witty.

fuck your motherfucking asshole sport btw

^easy, killer

I used to be able to throw a pretty good American football death spiral. Bad shoulder now.

It's now known as the "Sanchez"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/sports/football/actuarial-reports-in-nfl-concussion-deal-are-released.html

so three HS kids die at/after practice in one week, a couple weeks ago

NYT story about the Tallahassee police cleaning up FSU players' messes was sickmaking

but on it rolls

@DennisThePerrin · 21h
To make this wretched season complete, New England must win. The Patriots deserve to be the NFL's standard bearer. #SuperBowl

@DennisThePerrin · 21h
On a positive note, the NFL had a bad PR year. Nothing that would sink the ship, but you have to start somewhere. #SuperBowl

As part of their $400 million renovation of Sun Life Stadium, the (Miami Dolphins are) installing 32 “living rooms” in the lower bowl of the stadium that come in groups of four with 30-inch wide recliners and an 18-inch television in front of each seat.

“We’re out to give a fan the very best seat and the very best experience they could possibly have,” Dolphins president and CEO Tom Garfinkel, via ESPN.com. “There are enough people in this marketplace that, if you can do that, (you) don’t care what it costs.”

This is the future of the NFL: Private rooms for people who can afford to pay $75,000 per season (that’s 160% of Miami’s median income!) to sit and watch the game at TV like they were at home, but in the same building as the actual game.

they should live there

And when they die, they should be buried underneath the field.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/concussion-watch/new-87-deceased-nfl-players-test-positive-for-brain-disease/

96 percent

Voluntary donors are a biased sample of course but that's a dramatic number even so, especially given that CTE isn't found in people who don't hit each other in the head.

http://usatodayhss.com/2015/no-colquitt-county-coach-rush-propst-headbutts-player-opens-bloody-gash-in-middle-of-playoff-game

This was bizarre. Someone in my family is coaching a HS football team and they played on Friday night. The opposing team's coach had a freakout where he was yelling at one of his kids and went up and headbutted him so hard that he started bleeding. He seems to be a pretty controversial pick for a coach too w a dodgy history. Seems to keep getting jobs for some reason or another...

Just imagining a math or english teacher coming up and hitting a kid, they would lose their job in a heartbeat.

What if you wore a helmet to math class?

literally disband all HS football teams and fire all head football coaches

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/12/the_truth_about_will_smith_s_concussion_and_bennet_omalu.html

But are we actually watching players kill themselves before our eyes? No, not on average: A 2012 study of several thousand NFL retirees, conducted by researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, found that the former football players lived significantly longer than race- and age-matched controls. They were much less likely to die from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, accidental falls, or homicides than anybody else. That doesn’t mean that taking hits improved their health, of course; surely the opposite is true. But still this study gave the lie to a fundamental intuition about football and one that’s touted almost everywhere. There’s zero evidence that playing professional football shortens lives on average. Those are the facts. Take ’em or leave ’em.

This is the best study that we have on NFL players and mortality, yet its findings never seem to enter public consciousness. The simple truth, that former players aren’t dying—that in lots of ways they’re much healthier than you or me—smacks against the screen-ready version of history, in which a team of underdog physicians, led by heroes like Bennet Omalu, risked their livelihoods to expose a hidden slaughter.

^This is just changing the subject. He pretends the discussion was a concern about longevity rather than about degenerative brain disease. His facts don't refute the concerns about brain disease. Those facts don't even address the real subject.

there's some good points in there but his ending it basically saying, despite his protestations, that cte basically isn't a substantial thing, seems very iffy.

and nfl players' relative longevity makes sense surely? they're wealthy, do a lot of exercise during their careers, and retire in their 30s.

been thinking about brain injuries lately, an acquaintance had a bike accident without a helmet on, and sustained a brain injury. while he can already walk normally, talk properly, etc. he's very, very clearly altered in some major and deleterious way that is really affecting to see

Part of the discussion has been overall longevity - every now and then I'll see someone quote another study that said football players lived ten years shorter than peers (controlled for ethnicity, body type/size, etc.).

yes, it's definitely something ive came across, and believed tbh.

Sad, poorly argued defenses of still watching this insipid sport are a leading indicator imho (or rather, a trailing indicator of the peak)

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/01/why-we-need-football

https://newrepublic.com/article/124409/necessity-football

Also, the college playoffs ratings totals dropped by a full third from last year. What do you think ESPN's chances are of transforming New Year's Eve into College Football Playoff Night? Hubris, anyone?

I saw a bar/restaurant in my neighborhood that had scrawled "We Love That Captain Kirk! HTTR" on the chalkboard outside this morning; I immediately resolved to stop patronizing them and openly talk shit about their poor menu, lackadaisical service and mediocre beer selection whenever the opportunity strikes.