Rugby is probably the best example for comparison.
I believe the players know the risk and they take it of their own free will.
Agreed. When I put on pads and a helmet, I would hit guys who, without pads and helmet, would’ve tried to stay on the other side of the street for.
To reduce concussions and car crashes... Increase DEATH
Stupid.
We used to play unorganized, padless football as kids after school. I don’t recall ever getting hurt.
Once the southern invasion is complete, football will be banned entirely to clear the way for fútbol.
I used to wear a hardhat for work and became so used to my head bouncing off objects that I was careless and smacked my head on things when I was out of work.
In NASCAR, restrictor plate tracks are a constant source of controversy while shorter flatter unrestricted tracks like Michigan and California have higher top speeds without the big crashes. The knowledge of danger is a great safety device.
More students have committed suicide at my local school since 2000 then NFL football players. Fact is, more teens that never even played the game have committed suicide then all in NFL history.
This new “concussion” issue goes back to when I played in the 1970’s. Everyone playing the game knows the risks - this is just an attack on yet another American tradition.
Most head injuries in Football occur when the player’s head hits the ground.
Their heads would continue to hit the ground if they weren’t wearing helmets.
What’s an “unsolved suicide”?
“unsolved suicide”
Huh?
“Johnny Unitas once owned the most dangerous right arm in the NFL. Today he barely has use of the hand attached to it. Unitas, who is considered by many to be the greatest field general to play the game, is still paying for a hit he took more than three decades ago as a Baltimore Colt. That day in 1968, Unitas was drawing back his arm to throw a pass when a Dallas Cowboy mashed the inside of his elbow. Unitas came back to play again—the arm seemed fine up through his retirement in 1974—but by the mid-1990s he was having problems with the nerves that controlled his hand and fingers. He lost strength and feeling in the hand and became unable to rotate the thumb back and grasp objects. The symptoms only got worse. Now Unitas cannot close the hand that made Raymond Berry famous.
Unitas’s two knee replacements work perfectly well—cartilage and ligaments in the right knee were torn in a collision with two Bears in 1963, while the left wore out from years of favoring the right—but when he plays golf, which is about all the exercise he can get with those new knees, he has to use his left hand to close the fingers of his gloved right hand around the grip, then strap the hand fast to the shaft with a Velcro strip. He goes through this tedium on every shot. “I do it putting, too,” says Johnny U, who’s 68.
Forty years ago Unitas was the toughest and smartest quarterback in the game, calling the plays and running the show in a way that inspired both fear and awe among teammates and opponents alike. Mentally, he always seemed a step ahead of everyone else. If a situation looked ripe for a pass, Unitas would throw a pass. If it called for a pass and his opponents, trying to outguess him, set up for a run, he’d throw. Unitas perfected the two-minute drill, and no one since—not Montana, not Elway—has run it better.
Setting an NFL record that seems as unassailable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, Unitas threw a touchdown pass in 47 consecutive games between 1956 and 1960. In the years since, only Dan Marino has come anywhere close to that mark, throwing scoring passes in 30 straight games from 1985 to ‘87.
Unitas has demanded disability compensation from the league but says he has been turned down for various reasons, among them that he didn’t apply by age 55—though his right hand didn’t fail him until he was 60—and that the league pays him a pension of $4,000 a month. The NFL adds that, in its opinion, Unitas is not “totally and permanently disabled.”
Meanwhile, of that magical hand that spun footballs like strands of gold, Unitas says, “I have no strength in the fingers. I can’t use a hammer or saw around the house. I can’t button buttons. I can’t use zippers. Very difficult to tie shoes. I can’t brush my teeth with it, because I can’t hold a brush. I can’t hold a fork with the right hand. I can’t pick this phone up.... You give me a full cup of coffee, and I can’t hold it. I can’t comb my hair.”
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1022464/1/index.htm
I don’t think the author of “Memo To The NFL” knows much about what the NFL was like in the old days...
The main difference between the NFL now and what is was like a long time ago is the size of the players. If you watch a video of an NFL game played before 1980, the players seem skinny by today’s standards.
There have been professional athletes for thousands of years, probably going back to ancient Greece, and the standards for size and strength were probably consistent for thousands of years. But starting in the mid 1980’s, NFL players started getting bigger and stronger. It wasn’t their diet or their exercise programs: They started using drugs to increase their muscle mass. Body builders had been using such drugs for a few years already, and other athletes learned about the results and decided to give themselves an edge.
Professional leagues today have good P.R. programs, and they like to make us think the are serious about testing for performance-enhancing drugs. But I believe the drug designers have learned how to stay one step ahead of the testing procedures, and the P.R. scam continues.
The NFL generates so much money, the league and the TV networks have become corrupt. Nobody wants to change the status quo, and risk losing any of the revenue. Fans probably wouldn’t pay $200 to see skinny players, or a less aggressive game changed by the addition of a new set of safety rules.
I'm old enough to have played with a single bar in HS and later a full “bird cage” in college. I put my head where it didn't belong when I had all that metal and rubber in front of my face. (one concussion)