I have been wondering how long the sport of football can maintain its current level of popularity and participation, as this evidence piles up. Will football suffer the same fate of diminished status as boxing, which once had a much more dominant position?
Football has, of course, a huge industry attached, completely with publicly funded stadiums, extensive broadcasting, university involvement, and all of the peripheral industries and businesses. It is an enormous juggernaut. What would it take to slow it down?
What do parents of players think? I gather that the NFL is encouraging changes in how the game is played at the early stages, and that is significant since the NFL supports a lot of development and expansion activity for kids. Do you think that a solution to this problem can be found before the supply of players is choked off? Do you think that the parents of potential players are likely to refuse to allow their kids to play? What would you do if your kid was Pop Warner age now?
Caveats: yes, of course this is not the only sport where injury is an issue, and not even the only sport where head injury is an issue. But I think it is safe to agree that it is the major sport where hitting body to body is an integral part of the game.
This is a complex issue, because football is a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, not just a sport. At the college level, it’s a scholarship machine for talented boys who might not otherwise go to college at all. To little boys looking at the likes of Tom Brady on their TV screens, it’s about aspiring to heroism and adulation. And to many American families, it’s cultural; they either played for generations, or supported their “team” for generations.
At this point, the only positive thing I can see happening is changes to technology to make the game safer, and perhaps changes in the types of hits that are allowed. But a much-watered down version of the game isn’t going to attract the same number of fans or number of dollars. Throughout human history, people have been attracted to violent games. I don’t see this changing.
I have what I believe to be a pretty unique perspective on this issue. I was a kid who would not have attended college or been able to lead the life I have without football. I also have a son who was blessed with more economic opportunity than I was, and who playes football even though he had other opportunities to further his education. We both played at roughly the same level in college, and indeed our schools occasionally play each other. So I have had a pretty up close and educated look at how the game and players have evolved over a fair amount of time.
I think that there have been some very positive changes in the time between our two careers. Helmet technology is light years ahead of where it was in the 1980s. The changes to rules about practice opportunites and defenseless players are on balance a good thing. Education and monitoring is much, much better. I have no idea how many concussions I had, because back in the day if you got your “bell rung” you went on the sideline until you could tell the trainer what stadium you were in and maybe what the score was. Then back at it. Very different today. Field surfaces are another often underappreciated but significant improvement (playing on the original astro turf was like playing on worn out carpet). Even with all of those improvements, the violence in the game today is far beyond what existed a generation ago. With the evolution of training, weightlifting and especially nutrition guys today are far bigger, stronger and faster than a generation ago. My son and his teammates would physically manhandle any of my old teams, not that I would ever admit that to him. At some level, the human body is just not capable of absorbing the force directed at it on a modern D1 or worse NFL field. Add to this the increasing number of games played in both Division 1 and the NFL and no matter how good the technology gets, concussions will happen.
That said, you have to recognize that football is a game often played by those who do not have a lot of economic or cultural opportunity. It is not soccer or lax or swimming. Certainly I would have played even if we were aware of the risks back in the day. There are thousands of kids in the same or worse position who gladly make that same choice today. I don’t think that will change.
As far as the larger culture, I doubt football will lose its position as the dominant form of entertainment any time soon. While I think people do recognize the violent nature of the game, in many ways it is impersonal, because the guys suffering the consequences are for the most part NOKD (not our kind, dear). In this respect, it is important to remember that the corruption among boxing promoters had a whole lot to do with the loss in popularity of boxing, probably more so than Ali’s problems.
Strictly speaking as a parent, I would not have allowed my son to play as a youngster unless he was in a situation where he was getting appropriate coaching and safety equipment. I think that a lot of the problems that occur in football are the result of weekend warrior coaches at the lower levels who have absolutely no idea what they are doing, and are only coaching because they want little Johnny to play quarterback so he can be the next Tom Brady. I think that is where the real danger is, not in the NFL or even college where you now have state of the art equipment and medical personell, and for the most part, adults who are making an informed choice about the risk they are running.
This issue for football is often framed in terms of concussions, which is totally wrong. Concussions (where things have improved significantly) are the big issue in other sports.
But for football, the issue is really about the garden variety, normal, sub-concussive head impacts. There’s a dozen (or more) of those head taps on every single play. Including plays that happen in practice (which far outnumber game plays).
The data in these studies is always the worst for lineman, which are almost half the players on any given snap. Lineman tap/hit heads on every play, and it is the cumulative effect of all those taps which apparently causes most of the brain damage.
Bottom line, football is probably pretty brain safe so long as you diminish the aggregate number of taps. Which can be done in a variety of ways:
Don’t play tackle football before high school. Only play tackle football in high school and not beyond. Don’t play lineman or linebacker. And the single biggest one – severely limit the number of full contact plays allowed during practice.
A lot of teams today have something pretty close to no-contact practices. So it could be that the data on today’s young players will turn out to be very different than what you see in this lagging data set. Which come from guys who did full contact two-a-days beginning in middle school.
I was never a fan of football but rugby, lacrosse and hockey are all based on the same game premise and 2 of my boys played one or more of those sports including football. One son stuck with golf and tennis. Anecdotal is the fact that every “hurt” to my kids was caused when another player broke the rules in terms of legal contact. How players conduct themselves starts at the top. I must say however that ballet and gymnastics also come with large risks to the body and head. Skiing can be dangerous too. And my golfer has had the most concussions of all 3 from his love of bikes and longboards.
I’m not convinced football is necessarily any more dangerous than many other sports. There was one poster here who had a son that got multiple concussions during one season of wrestling. This shows the NHL having 128 concussions compared to the NFL’s 190: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2012/10/11/concussions-nascar-nfl-mlb-nhl-nba/1628129/. The NFL has more players, so you would have to normalize those numbers by the number of players to get a meaningful comparison. This shows high rates of concussions in youth soccer: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/youth-soccer-injuries-soaring-including-concussions-heres-why/. To echo some of what Ohiodad51 was saying, part of what makes football so dangerous at the NFL level is you’re going against guys who are 6’5 and 300lbs. I don’t believe you can directly translate research on the NFL and Div 1 as applicable to your typical high school team.
Football is fundamentally different than every other sport when it comes to the brain.
In football, hitting is the primary activity for the majority of players on the field on every single play. There’s more head hits in one single football play than there is in an entire game of hockey, rugby or lacrosse.
The main problem isn’t the handful of big hits that result in a concussion. The problem is the tens of thousands of head taps that you’d receive over years of practicing.
In old fashioned full-contact practices, a lineman would get maybe 50 head hits in every practice. Which is 100 if you are doing two-a-days. The harm really isn’t the games or the concussions – it is the practicing.
Thankfully, most teams don’t practice that way anymore. The Ivy League, for example, banned tackling in practice a few years ago. TBD what the brain data for today’s players will be 40-50 years from now. But it should be much better.
^That’s a theory, but at this point, there isn’t enough research to say what the prevalence of CTE is among different professional sports. Soccer players don’t even wear helmets and spend a lot of time heading the ball. NHL seems to be the one sport where it’s normal for a fight to breakout every other game.
Just a note – and one that makes me glad that I get my news from NPR – the lead blurb on the NYT article says:
But if you dig further down the page into the article, you come to this:
(On the NPR story, it came across as “most” or “all” families donating the brains specifically because of the CTE symptoms … after all, who else is going to donate the brain of their deceased family member?)
So yes it is a very serious issue, but there is still a big question about how widespread it is:
The reason it is important to draw that distinction is that if, let’s say, 20% of players develop CTE, there may be ways to determine what factors differentiate those who get CTE and those who don’t – things that have been highlighted by others like training regimen, positions played, equipment, whatever. And that can be a basis for meaningful reforms that reduce the overall incidence of CTE in contact sports.
There was a tremendous selection bias. Still any sport involving repeated blows to the head is just not safe. Neither is a sport that risks repeated concussions. I steered my son away from football. I didn’t need any study to tell me that football was too risky.
Ironically as I said the kid that got the most concussions got them biking and longboarding. I was NOT a football mom, didn’t go to the games. Not a fan The one trip to ER was a severe knee injury - noseguard and apparently got hit in the side of a knee in an illegal maneuver, He was a really good player with a high high school GPA and decent test scores and could have probably played in college, but decided he wanted to ski for the rest of his life and not play football. That made me happy. I don’t begrudge people who want to play a sport, any sport, even football…we have too many physically unhealthy young people to argue about sports. No matter what sport, a good coach works on physical strength, healthy diet, etc. - except I’m also not to fond of cutting weight in wrestling - don’t think that’s healthy. I’d have to see much more studies to argue that it is football that is the “worse” sport for concussions per capita.
IME even top HS soccer players did not head the ball, or very, very rarely. Parents, even parents of recruited athletes, did not want their kids to do it.
@momofthreeboys , as @northwesty has patiently pointed out, it is apparently not the big concussion hits that make the big difference in CTE–although those are damaging, of course-- it is the repeated lower level hits, many in practice. It’s good to know that changes are being made, but one of the people in the study was only 27. That’s frightening.
In soccer and lacrosse and hockey, the task of most of the people on the field in every play is not to hit an opposing player, especially not by driving their head into them. Sure, kids get injured, mostly, as momofthreeboys suggests, when the officiating is weak and players are allowed to make illegal, aggressive moves. I certainly saw that at soccer games a few times. For that matter, I know two people who suffered severe, life-changing brain injury skiing, and the godchild of a friend of mine, a top junior skier, was killed. But that is irrelevant to the football industry.
BTW, in defense of the NYT, I hardly think that one had to “dig” for the numbers! They made the terms of the study perfectly clear if one simply read the article.
I think it is good that they are looking into repeated hits to the head and hope they can expand the study to other sports that have higher rates of head injuries per capita. It might be premature to attribute CTE as something exclusive to football. I am in no way diminishing the idea of research on head injuries and aging. If they can improve gear, improve coaching and the rules to minimize injuries I am all for it.
From the author of the Wake Forest study on sub-concussive impacts in youth football:
[quote]
We do not know if there are important functional changes related to these findings, ** or if these effects will be associated with any negative long-term outcomes,** " Dr. Whitlow said. “Football is a physical sport, and players may have many physical changes after a season of play that completely resolve. These changes in the brain may also simply resolve with little consequence. However, more research is needed to understand the meaning of these changes to the long-term health of our youngest athletes.”
There is also recent research on changes in the brain due to Alzheimer’s that seem to show that some people can have significant plaque, or whatever they call it, without having the dementia.
Current neighbor works on this- her former H died in his 40’s secondary to it.
Never let son play football- and he was not into it, thank goodness.
It does not matter if a study had selected 110 players with brain injuries- that is 110 too many. Not worth the consequences for us. Doubt it will change this country’s football culture, though.
A couple of things on soccer, iirc, is that many concussions are due to players hitting the goalposts or each other and not from heading the ball (assuming this could be in practice as well). Though the point that concussions maybe less predictive than repeated hits to the head is a good one. The other thing is that there’s a difference when someone heads the ball meaning they initiate the header vs. getting hit in the head defenselessly as in football.
I agree. They only studied the brains of players whose families thought they were exhibiting signs of CTE.
My D played soccer and basketball. And I also coached AAU/school basketball for a very long time. Over the years, there were plenty of soccer and basketball players who received concussions. Multiple concussions and kept playing.
In fact, Michael Morse of the San Francisco Giants received a concussion during an on-field fight a couple months ago against the Washington Nationals. He still hasn’t returned to play and may never play baseball again. So. it’s just not football, although football is the worst offender for obvious reasons.
Didn’t read all the posts but I have mixed thoughts on this.
Looking back, I probably wouldn’t allow my older son to play tackle football unless it was something he was extremely passionate about.
When I walk by Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, almost every night with my dog, I’m happy for all the opportunity it has provided to players, staff, coaches, the university, etc. Yet I often wonder if the young players are under-compensated (i.e., scholarships, perks only) and undervalued in terms of the literal millions of dollars they haul in every year.
High school and pop warner, et al feed into this juggernaut.
It’s one thing for compensated adults to make decisions to participate. It’s another thing for little kids and minors in middle or high school.
Head injury is real, serious, and can be life-long.
ETA: my throat would always tighten a little seeing that ambulance outside my son’s games.