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Good for him. I stopped following football after watching League of Denial on PBS. If I'm at the bar or something and it happens to be on, I might passively wa

by kpwags 9y ago

Good for him. I stopped following football after watching League of Denial on PBS. If I'm at the bar or something and it happens to be on, I might passively watch it, but I haven't sought it out since. I just can't support the NFL. I do feel torn though because I love hockey. I know they're dealing with similar controversies. My justification, however flimsy it might be is that I don't like the fighting (I might be in a minority, but I'd have no issue if the NHL eliminates fighting altogether), and the big hits aren't why I watch...I enjoy the stick work, the dangling and skills getting to the net. I can also appreciate that the NHL does seem to be doing a better job at cracking down on the dirty hits. I also play hockey (in a non-check beer league) and am very aware about the risks. I'm also an adult who is old and mature enough to accept these risks. I don't know how much that can be said for the elementary/middle/high school kids playing sports like hockey and football.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
1. Willingly plays 5 years in the league, makes $10,000,000, has 50% chance of reduced health in the future. 2. Willingly works 5 years in the factory, makes $10,000, has 50% chance of reduced health in the future. Why does the first situation bother us so much more than the second? Most products we use are built via the second, but you're probably still using those products. The NFL seems like better employment than Foxconn, and I'll still use an Apple computer. People make sacrifices all the time, if someone wants to willingly do it as a professional, why not?
- Bud 9y ago
  You're leaving out the fact that most of these players never get to the NFL, and they have a very high risk of brain injury, but they get paid $0.00, even though their work is generating billions for the NCAA, for ESPN, for basically every large university in the country, etc. College football players need to be paid fair market value.
  - eropple 9y ago
    Hell--high school players need to be paid fair market value. Which, in many parts of the country, is not a trivial amount.
    - Bud 9y ago
      A high school in Texas just built a $72 million football stadium. That's right. A fucking high school stadium. http://www.wacotrib.com/sports/high_schools/central_texas_football/m-texas-high-school-football-stadium-to-hold-first-game/article_1aa2067a-87c5-11e7-b84d-07d364c5bbed.html http://www.wacotrib.com/sports/high_schools/central_texas_fo...
      - MandieD 9y ago
        And it's in Katy, a relatively well-off suburb of Houston. I really hope they haven't built all the rest of the stuff in that enormous school bond issue yet. That school bond issues, which are voted on directly by residents of a school district, are the main funding mechanism for school construction in Texas goes a long way towards explaining the ridiculous stadiums.
  - skewart 9y ago
    Yup. There seems to be a lot of focus on the NFL mistreating players, but college football seems far more exploitive.
  - mysterydip 9y ago
    Don't they essentially get paid with free tuition and such? Not that it's fair market value, but it's not $0 either.
    - dcole2929 9y ago
      The problem is with the demands of being a D1 athlete it's pretty ridiculous for any player to hope to get a great education and be successful in their sport. And given the obvious payoffs of being a successful football player (Millions of $ at age 22 in the nfl) that's where they focus. It's a rare, rare individual who is a top performer while also pursuing a degree in a demanding field. Below is an interesting article I read that describes the day of a d1 football player at a top school. Note, it is a 15 hour day and only includes 1.5 hours of studying which wouldn't be enough to even cover hw for most engineering degrees. https://www.alligatorarmy.com/2015/6/9/8752711/florida-gators-football-players-daily-schedule-graphic https://www.alligatorarmy.com/2015/6/9/8752711/florida-gator...
- maxerickson 9y ago
  We directly spend billions of dollars on occupational safety. And people raise issues with buying goods from countries with lower standards all the time. I would say it is at least as big an issue in the public consciousness as the danger to the players of professional sports.
  - apoverton 9y ago
    Agreed. See this quote from the OSHA website. Under the OSH Act, employers are responsible for providing a safe and healthful workplace. OSHA's mission is to assure safe and healthful workplaces by setting and enforcing standards, and by providing training, outreach, education and assistance. Employers must comply with all applicable OSHA standards. Employers must also comply with the General Duty Clause of the OSH Act, which requires employers to keep their workplace free of serious recognized hazards.[1] https://www.osha.gov/law-regs.html https://www.osha.gov/law-regs.html
- mikeash 9y ago
  The big problem with the NFL is that they keep trying to suppress the information and act like the risks are far lower than they really are. You can't fairly describe it as "willingly do it" if they don't have all the facts, and the other party to the transaction is intentionally hiding facts that make it look worse. And as for the factory worker, it does bother us a great deal. Dangerous working conditions get a ton of attention, and attempts to cover up workplace dangers are criticized severely.
- skewart 9y ago
  Very few NFL players make $10M over 5 years - most careers don't last that long, and/or compensation isn't that high. Then consider that few elite college players make it to the NFL, and very few high school players make it to elite college programs.
cdolan 9y ago
Fellow hockey fan here. Can you share some information about Hockey's concussion risks? I was not aware it is "dealing with similar controversies". There are certainly head injuries in Hockey, but I was not aware that people had the same life-altering issues brought on by years of head trauma from football.
- kpwags 9y ago
  There's currently a lawsuit alleging the NHL hid the risks to the players, much like the NFL lawsuit. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/05/nhl-concussion-lawsuit-could-threaten-future-of-league https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/05/nhl-concussion... And the rates of CTE in former NHL players aren't exactly low. 9 of 16 (albeit a small sample) showed signs of CTE. http://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/20498726/nhl-players-reluctant-donate-brains-concussion-studies http://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/20498726/nhl-players-relu...
- takk309 9y ago
  Sidney Crosby is a good example of a high profile player that has had multiple concussions. [1] The risk in hockey does not come from the fighting, those are less common than most people think, rather it comes from taking big hits that knock the person off balance and send them head first into the wall. I have been playing hockey the majority of my life and one of the first things that I can remember being taught was to keep your head up and never go head first into the boards. Hockey helmets are different than a football helmet. For starters, the shell of a hockey helmet is much softer than that of a football helmet. This can help to attenuate some of the energy from a hit. The other huge difference is the mass of the helmet. Hockey helmets are light compared to a football helmet. Another large difference between the sports is the rules covering head contact. While it is illegal in both sports to hit with your head, football tends to see a much higher rate of "incidental" contact. Hockey players are not taking hits to the head every play [1] http://www.espn.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/131681/sidney-crosbys-concussion-history-a-concern-for-the-pittsburgh-penguins http://www.espn.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/131681/sidney-c... Edit: Minor Typos
Pxtl 9y ago
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 culpable because they had more options to fix the problem than football does.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  American football is also obsessively measured. The difference of a few yards at any point in time can be the difference of a game. Players are also obsessively measured for their performance, so every second counts towards a professional player's career - and their compensation. Players are highly incentivized to "give it their all", and that's how people end up getting injured or receive massive head trauma. Hockey can be just as violent, but it's a much more fluid sport, so the pressure isn't on as much for the extra exceptional effort.
  - gotthemwmds 9y ago
    s/difference of a few yards/difference of 1 yard/ signed, this totally not still upset Seahawks fan. (re: 2015 Superbowl)
  - geebee 9y ago
    I don't understand Rugby, Australian rules, or Gaelic football especially well (or US football for that matter, though I've watched it casually over the years), but my understanding is that tacking in these sports has a different purpose and that tackling technique reflects this. You may be on to something with you comment about yards - in American football, it can even be a game of inches. As a result, tackling isn't a way to halt play or stop someone, or to transition during flow of play - you need to essentially completely halt that person's forward movement without even giving an inch. I've thought this may be why American football has more of the full body collision, where two (very large and powerfully built) men collide at high velocity almost horizontal to the earth. They're trying to gain as little as a few inches in the collision. I've heard complaints from Australian rules players who come to the US about tackling - that the way US players have learned to tackle doesn't have much strategic value and greatly increases the possibility of injury, buy they continue to tackle this way when they join Australian rules leagues. That's what I've heard and thought about, I do want to be clear that I don't know too much about all this - what I've written is more of a question in case someone in the know could weigh in.
guiomie 9y ago
I'm on the same side as you about the fights. I'm just not a fan of the hypocrisy of letting people fight their anger away on national TV when someone doing the same in a public space would get arrested. I've played hockey, I get the whole aspect of being emotionally invested in the game, but I still don't think it's the right thing to do. Otherwise, I always thought the concussion aspect was much less worst in the NHL than NFL, but maybe im wrong about that...
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  I've heard arguments that fights in hockey reduce the overall level of violence through changing incentives. Basically, it means that rough play will get you punched, so people are less willing to futz around on the ice.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    I've heard that before - like the reason that Crosby spends so much time laid out is that the Pens refused to use an enforcer to punish the guys who were roughing him up. That, to me, sounds like anarchy on the ice. Like the game is either impossible to properly referee or the referees are incompetent or the refs simply have been told to ignore a certain level of violence.
    - Jeremy1026 9y ago
      Hockey is a contact sport, and because of that the referees can't issue a penalty everytime someone gets hit. There are hits that are illegal, and they are called (most of the time). Hits where the principle contact point is the head is illegal, hits directly from behind are illegal, and hits where the hitter takes more than two strides into the hit are illegal. Anything else is fair game and because of that, the puck carrier needs to keep their head up and be proactive to the play.
      - Coincoin 9y ago
        It's more than that, in the NHL at least. Why are scuffles around the net tolerated? They are disgraceful. Almost every game you will see someone get punched or cross checked in the face with no consequence, as long as it's after the whistle or the victim is an asshole. Which leads to my next point. Why is general assholery tolerated and even celebrated? There is a thing called sportsmanship and there is none of it in the NHL until they put someone on a stretcher. They bang their stick on the boards for 5 seconds then it's open season for the other guy. Why are fights only 5 minutes penalty? Any other sport they would get suspended for even half attempting to punch someone. The NHL and PA say it's some sort of anarchy-on-ice bullshit but we all know it's because it sells tickets and have otherwise poor players make the cut.
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
>I just can't support the NFL. I'm not sure what the NFL does that's wrong. Their players get significant fame, are consenting adults, and get pay checks that many would trade even more of their health for. It is the college level, and especially the high school level, that I see the major problems at. When you have kids, or even people who aren't paid, risking their health it crosses a significant line. If college players were paid, and if playing below 18 (or even 16) was banned, it wouldn't be a big problem for me. Edit: As someone else pointed out, the suppressing information is wrong. I wasn't considering that side of things.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kpwags 9y ago
  My main issues with the NFL and why I can't support them are 1) NFL knew about the risks and hid them and in some cases deliberately deceived the players about said risks. I seem to recall that only a couple years ago the NFL told the players that with adequate rest, there will be no long-lasting effects from a concussion -- something that has been shown to not be the case. 2) The NFL will go after anyone who releases medical research raising questions about football and CTE. And I don't mean just refuting the evidence, they've gone after the doctors and scientists personally I don't fault any player in the NFL for wanting the fame and fortune, or playing. But they should also receive all the information that's available as to the risks and dangers associated with playing so they can make their own decision.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Can you provide a few examples of the NFL going after doctors and scientists, and clarify what that means?
    - mricordeau 9y ago
      See Dr Omalu research about CTE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennet_Omalu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennet_Omalu There is a movie (biopic not totally accurate) : Concussion
rconti 9y ago
I'm not there yet, but may be some day. I turned to football because I just can't be bothered to follow the countless games in baseball anymore. Football is a great way to get a weekly sporting fix, a day or two a week, for a fraction of the year. But yeah, who can't shake their head at the "NFL's greatest hits volume 39" VHS sitting in the back of the cabinet. Hopefully the game can change and adapt, I feel like the longer they drag their heels, the more likely it is to just completely collapse.
X86BSD 9y ago
I don't follow rugby as close as I should to ask this question but I don't recall having heard or read anything regarding that sport and head trauma. And it is just as contact driven as football. Is it just not as popular and hence doesn't get the same level of scrutiny?
- lostlogin 9y ago
  It's pretty bad and has had an increase in scrutiny of late here in New Zealand, in part because of some of the countries great teams and players appear to be suffering severe consequences. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11603857 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...
flashdance 9y ago
Most kids in elementary/middle/high school (at least where I grew up) play non-contact hockey. You're not allowed to fight or bodycheck, but incidental contact is fine. Only the super high (competitive) levels had hitting. Non-contact hockey players are three times less likely to be severely injured and three times less likely to be concussed while playing.[1] That's the direction hockey should be going, IMO. Contact is fun and all but I know too many people who are seriously messed up from concussions--I'm glad my parents put me in a non-contact league. [1] http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/c609/practicum2011/bodyCheckingFullText.pdf http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/c609/practicum2...
- Jeremy1026 9y ago
  My adult league is non-contact from the "never played in my life" level up through the "D-I/Semi-Pro" level.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Hockey is going that direction. There is increasing emphasis on strict enforcement of penalties for "intimidating infractions." While body checking is still allowed, it is more narrowly defined than in the past. I think within 10 years we will see the elimination of body checking from hockey. http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0131/9802/Standard_of_Play_-_Body_Checking.pdf http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0131/9802/Standa...
Rapzid 9y ago
I never really followed it but could enjoy a game every now and then. Now I have a distaste for it. My biggest issue by far is how embedded football is into our public school system. They are essentially feeder leagues for the NFL that the public pays to operate. We glorify the sport to little kids and then shove them into the head trauma pipeline. We should absolutely not be a party to that at the public level. I'm aware of the issues with drawing a line on dangerous sports, but I'm sure something a ton of people can agree on is that wherever the line ends up, football is on the wrong side of it. It's position is relative to the line.
- dhimes 9y ago
  The parents are the problem. It's ridiculous to see them. Football is the most important part of their life and damn if their kid isn't going to play. Could you imagine if our schools and home cultures emphasized putting that kind of work into math rather than football?
  - moriarty-s3a 9y ago
    I have seen a few environments like that and they can be just as corrosive. I have seen middle school kids that were great artists or writers or musicians told that they were failures at life because they weren't one of the 15 best math students in their school.
  - Rapzid 9y ago
    That's a lot of stuff though to be fair. This On Point episode seems very timely: http://tpr.org/post/big-business-youth-sports http://tpr.org/post/big-business-youth-sports . I didn't catch the entire thing but they were discussing some pretty shocking dollar amounts parents spend on sports that are not football.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      Great post, thanks. Indeed- we can generalize beyond football. These kids have no time for intellectual curiosity any more. It's really a shame. Again, I blame the parents. They should know better. But the kids' sports become part of the parents' ego and there's no going back. Source: am parent of three almost grown boys. Two were sports kids, one is not.
BurningFrog 9y ago
I'm a Swede who grew up loving European hockey. NHL Hockey bores me. You can think of the difference either as physical or mental. Physical: The European rink is 100 feet wide while the NHL rink is 85 feet. This gives a lot more space to skate around people rather than through them, more space and time for a passing and placement game, more time for smart play over brute force play. Mental: Each continent plays hockey as it plays "football". That is soccer vs NFL mentality. My whining aside, in reality the two hockey cultures have grown closer. NHL teams no longer have full time enforcers, and play is much cleaner, while European hockey has become more "physical", as the goal of everyone is to become an NHL millionaire. Still, whenever I try to swallow my pride and watch some hockey I get bored. Unless Pavel Datsyuk is playing!
- soperj 9y ago
  Europe has no standard size rink. Finnish league is different from the Swedish league etc.
  - chmars 9y ago
    Finland is actually the exception, the rest of the non-NHL world uses the IIHF rink size.
    - soperj 9y ago
      Untrue. Even KHL arena's like Prague O2, Bratislava, KHL Medveščak Zagreb in Croatia, Admiral Vladivostok, have smaller rinks, some are NHL sized.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  What is it about Pavel Datsyuk? BTW, if you have an iPhone, ask Siri 'Who is the magic man?'. (I don't know if that still works.)
  - BurningFrog 9y ago
    He's the Messi of hockey. Or is he the Zlatan?
yeswecatan 9y ago
I just watched "Ice Guardians," a documentary about enforcers in hockey. They claimed that only a small percentage (can't remember off the top of my head, maybe 5%) of concussions in hockey were due to fights. The majority come from the high speed nature of the game, especially after 2005. The game became a lot faster then. Big, slow players were replaced with smaller, speedier guys. The trapezoid was introduced which results in tons of defenders getting plastered behind the net while trying to retrieve the puck.
- wyattk 9y ago
  The problem of defencemen getting plastered was not just the trapezoid. A lot of it had to do with the way icing worked. It used to be the d-man had to "touch" the puck for it to be icing, this always resulted in d-men and forwards going nearly full speed after the puck to either get the icing call or to beat it out. The NHL has done away with this and has "no touch icing" where the d-man only has to skate to the hash marks (middle of the circles), that's removed a considerable amount of the high-speed collisions
  - yeswecatan 9y ago
    Well sure, no touch is much safer, but the introduction of the trapezoid still made things much more dangerous. Icing worked the same way before and after (until a couple years ago) 2005. You didn't have defensemen getting drilled as often before 2005. No touch icing was introduced because the rule changes in 2005 made the game faster and more dangerous.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  The issue for hockey is players got faster AND bigger. You are right that average weight has dropped from the peak of 206 in 2005 to 201 today But in the 70's it was as low as 183. The slowest 200+ pound skater today would probably be in the top 20% of skaters back then. Larger players also lead to more shoulder to head hits, just because of size disparity (see: Crosby, Kariya). The other thing that is hard to capture statistically, is that teams used to have big guys that rarely would see much ice time. Now you have many legit skilled players at 220+ pounds who are regulars.
brm 9y ago
The thing for me is, I never watched it for the contact. Its always been a rooting interest type of sport and if I wanted contact I'd go watch boxing or MMA. The thing they don't seem to get(The NFL) is that most people don't care about the hits and they could eliminate them. I'd watch highly skilled athletes from my university or city play FLAG FOOTBALL at the highest levels of skill and athleticism as often or more often than I watch them now. We need to think a bit about why people watch team sport as a society and realize that if flag football was the highest level we'd ever known we probably wouldn't lose a viewer. Skills are skills and team rivalries and rooting interests remain regardless of whether its hockey or football or whatever.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Plenty of people like the hitting in football, both people who play and and those who watch. Lots of people have complan about how quarterbacks are protected nowadays. In fact, I've never heard a football fan say they would like to get rid of the hitting. Not once.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    It's similar in hockey, take away the contact and people complain. They still watch, though. People complain about a lot of stuff they don't actually care about.
- _dark_matter_ 9y ago
  We have plenty of alternative sports that don't offer the hits, they just haven't gotten as popular. I would argue that goes against your point.
  - olau 9y ago
    According to this list, you're wrong about popularity, once you look outside the US: http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.htm http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.h... Soccer is really huge in many parts of the world.
- 9y ago
rsync 9y ago
"I stopped following football after watching League of Denial on PBS." The reason I cannot stop watching football is that the combination of enormous economic incentives and ruthless selection process has produced individuals that are performing at near-superhuman levels. It is arguable that when you watch a quarterback or a cornerback play well in 2017 you are watching someone do something better than anyone has ever done anything. I find that fascinating and extremely compelling. Further, this is the reason that I no loner have any interest in college football - the professional game winnows that population down so much and so dramatically that the level of skill is no longer comparable. Consider: after all of these years and all of this fame and outreach and development, there are still only 8-10 people in the entire world that can competently play the position of starting quarterback. If you can perform this task with even middling competency there is an immediate 8 figure paycheck waiting for you. This (totally arbitrary and otherwise useless) combination of speed, agility, strength, resiliency and lightning-fast-OODA-looping is amazing to watch. And that's just the quarterback ... I can't get enough of it.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > It is arguable that when you watch a quarterback or a cornerback play well in 2017 you are watching someone do something better than anyone has ever done anything. I agree that they are incredible athletes, but I don't see why football's players are better athletes than those in other professional sports. The winnowing process is just as brutal in soccer/football, basketball, hockey, baseball, track, swimming, gymnastics (if you want some incredible athletes - wow), wrestling, boxing, etc. etc. Why is Tom Brady a better athlete than Floyd Mayweather? Than Lionel Messi?
- philwelch 9y ago
  I think the best sport for that is actually basketball. NBA contracts are far more lucrative, and NBA rosters far smaller, and injuries are far less common, which makes NBA players more athletic and talented than NFL players by far. Consider also the fact that many great NBA players were also standout high school football players who gave it up for basketball. You don't really see that happening the other way. NBA players (and soccer players) also have to exercise more continual decision making skills, since there's no stoppage between plays or radios for the coach to signal plays.
eighthnate 9y ago
> My justification, however flimsy it might be is that I don't like the fighting (I might be in a minority The fighting isn't what causes damage in hockey no more than fighting in the NFL is what causes damage. It is just the physical nature of the sport. > I enjoy the stick work, the dangling and skills getting to the net. My friend says the same thing, but the truth is that he is a racist who hate the NFL because it is "too black" and he suddenly loves hockey because he can "relate" to it. Both hockey and football are dangerous. Even soccer is dangerous. Nevermind MMA and boxing. Without a doubt, football/hockey/boxing/mma/etc are all highly violent. The question is should we care and if we do, what do we do about it.
philwelch 9y ago
I always had the impression that hockey fights were nerfed by the fact that you're on ice. Most of the power of a punch comes from planting your feet on the ground.
- takk309 9y ago
  It is pretty easy to plant you foot with skates and get a very strong push. The big difference is the stance that you have to take. Remember, the pros are easily the best skaters in the world. Many players have on-ice boxing training at some point during their careers, often during juniors or college.

by kpwags 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago

1. Willingly plays 5 years in the league, makes $10,000,000, has 50% chance of reduced health in the future. 2. Willingly works 5 years in the factory, makes $10,000, has 50% chance of reduced health in the future. Why does the first situation bother us so much more than the second? Most products we use are built via the second, but you're probably still using those products. The NFL seems like better employment than Foxconn, and I'll still use an Apple computer. People make sacrifices all the time, if someone wants to willingly do it as a professional, why not?

Bud 9y ago
You're leaving out the fact that most of these players never get to the NFL, and they have a very high risk of brain injury, but they get paid $0.00, even though their work is generating billions for the NCAA, for ESPN, for basically every large university in the country, etc. College football players need to be paid fair market value.
- eropple 9y ago
  Hell--high school players need to be paid fair market value. Which, in many parts of the country, is not a trivial amount.
  - Bud 9y ago
    A high school in Texas just built a $72 million football stadium. That's right. A fucking high school stadium. http://www.wacotrib.com/sports/high_schools/central_texas_football/m-texas-high-school-football-stadium-to-hold-first-game/article_1aa2067a-87c5-11e7-b84d-07d364c5bbed.html http://www.wacotrib.com/sports/high_schools/central_texas_fo...
    - MandieD 9y ago
      And it's in Katy, a relatively well-off suburb of Houston. I really hope they haven't built all the rest of the stuff in that enormous school bond issue yet. That school bond issues, which are voted on directly by residents of a school district, are the main funding mechanism for school construction in Texas goes a long way towards explaining the ridiculous stadiums.
- skewart 9y ago
  Yup. There seems to be a lot of focus on the NFL mistreating players, but college football seems far more exploitive.
- mysterydip 9y ago
  Don't they essentially get paid with free tuition and such? Not that it's fair market value, but it's not $0 either.
  - dcole2929 9y ago
    The problem is with the demands of being a D1 athlete it's pretty ridiculous for any player to hope to get a great education and be successful in their sport. And given the obvious payoffs of being a successful football player (Millions of $ at age 22 in the nfl) that's where they focus. It's a rare, rare individual who is a top performer while also pursuing a degree in a demanding field. Below is an interesting article I read that describes the day of a d1 football player at a top school. Note, it is a 15 hour day and only includes 1.5 hours of studying which wouldn't be enough to even cover hw for most engineering degrees. https://www.alligatorarmy.com/2015/6/9/8752711/florida-gators-football-players-daily-schedule-graphic https://www.alligatorarmy.com/2015/6/9/8752711/florida-gator...
maxerickson 9y ago
We directly spend billions of dollars on occupational safety. And people raise issues with buying goods from countries with lower standards all the time. I would say it is at least as big an issue in the public consciousness as the danger to the players of professional sports.
- apoverton 9y ago
  Agreed. See this quote from the OSHA website. Under the OSH Act, employers are responsible for providing a safe and healthful workplace. OSHA's mission is to assure safe and healthful workplaces by setting and enforcing standards, and by providing training, outreach, education and assistance. Employers must comply with all applicable OSHA standards. Employers must also comply with the General Duty Clause of the OSH Act, which requires employers to keep their workplace free of serious recognized hazards.[1] https://www.osha.gov/law-regs.html https://www.osha.gov/law-regs.html
mikeash 9y ago
The big problem with the NFL is that they keep trying to suppress the information and act like the risks are far lower than they really are. You can't fairly describe it as "willingly do it" if they don't have all the facts, and the other party to the transaction is intentionally hiding facts that make it look worse. And as for the factory worker, it does bother us a great deal. Dangerous working conditions get a ton of attention, and attempts to cover up workplace dangers are criticized severely.
skewart 9y ago
Very few NFL players make $10M over 5 years - most careers don't last that long, and/or compensation isn't that high. Then consider that few elite college players make it to the NFL, and very few high school players make it to elite college programs.

cdolan 9y ago

Fellow hockey fan here. Can you share some information about Hockey's concussion risks? I was not aware it is "dealing with similar controversies". There are certainly head injuries in Hockey, but I was not aware that people had the same life-altering issues brought on by years of head trauma from football.

kpwags 9y ago
There's currently a lawsuit alleging the NHL hid the risks to the players, much like the NFL lawsuit. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/05/nhl-concussion-lawsuit-could-threaten-future-of-league https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/05/nhl-concussion... And the rates of CTE in former NHL players aren't exactly low. 9 of 16 (albeit a small sample) showed signs of CTE. http://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/20498726/nhl-players-reluctant-donate-brains-concussion-studies http://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/20498726/nhl-players-relu...
takk309 9y ago
Sidney Crosby is a good example of a high profile player that has had multiple concussions. [1] The risk in hockey does not come from the fighting, those are less common than most people think, rather it comes from taking big hits that knock the person off balance and send them head first into the wall. I have been playing hockey the majority of my life and one of the first things that I can remember being taught was to keep your head up and never go head first into the boards. Hockey helmets are different than a football helmet. For starters, the shell of a hockey helmet is much softer than that of a football helmet. This can help to attenuate some of the energy from a hit. The other huge difference is the mass of the helmet. Hockey helmets are light compared to a football helmet. Another large difference between the sports is the rules covering head contact. While it is illegal in both sports to hit with your head, football tends to see a much higher rate of "incidental" contact. Hockey players are not taking hits to the head every play [1] http://www.espn.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/131681/sidney-crosbys-concussion-history-a-concern-for-the-pittsburgh-penguins http://www.espn.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/131681/sidney-c... Edit: Minor Typos

Pxtl 9y ago

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 culpable because they had more options to fix the problem than football does.

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
American football is also obsessively measured. The difference of a few yards at any point in time can be the difference of a game. Players are also obsessively measured for their performance, so every second counts towards a professional player's career - and their compensation. Players are highly incentivized to "give it their all", and that's how people end up getting injured or receive massive head trauma. Hockey can be just as violent, but it's a much more fluid sport, so the pressure isn't on as much for the extra exceptional effort.
- gotthemwmds 9y ago
  s/difference of a few yards/difference of 1 yard/ signed, this totally not still upset Seahawks fan. (re: 2015 Superbowl)
- geebee 9y ago
  I don't understand Rugby, Australian rules, or Gaelic football especially well (or US football for that matter, though I've watched it casually over the years), but my understanding is that tacking in these sports has a different purpose and that tackling technique reflects this. You may be on to something with you comment about yards - in American football, it can even be a game of inches. As a result, tackling isn't a way to halt play or stop someone, or to transition during flow of play - you need to essentially completely halt that person's forward movement without even giving an inch. I've thought this may be why American football has more of the full body collision, where two (very large and powerfully built) men collide at high velocity almost horizontal to the earth. They're trying to gain as little as a few inches in the collision. I've heard complaints from Australian rules players who come to the US about tackling - that the way US players have learned to tackle doesn't have much strategic value and greatly increases the possibility of injury, buy they continue to tackle this way when they join Australian rules leagues. That's what I've heard and thought about, I do want to be clear that I don't know too much about all this - what I've written is more of a question in case someone in the know could weigh in.

guiomie 9y ago

I'm on the same side as you about the fights. I'm just not a fan of the hypocrisy of letting people fight their anger away on national TV when someone doing the same in a public space would get arrested. I've played hockey, I get the whole aspect of being emotionally invested in the game, but I still don't think it's the right thing to do. Otherwise, I always thought the concussion aspect was much less worst in the NHL than NFL, but maybe im wrong about that...

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
I've heard arguments that fights in hockey reduce the overall level of violence through changing incentives. Basically, it means that rough play will get you punched, so people are less willing to futz around on the ice.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  I've heard that before - like the reason that Crosby spends so much time laid out is that the Pens refused to use an enforcer to punish the guys who were roughing him up. That, to me, sounds like anarchy on the ice. Like the game is either impossible to properly referee or the referees are incompetent or the refs simply have been told to ignore a certain level of violence.
  - Jeremy1026 9y ago
    Hockey is a contact sport, and because of that the referees can't issue a penalty everytime someone gets hit. There are hits that are illegal, and they are called (most of the time). Hits where the principle contact point is the head is illegal, hits directly from behind are illegal, and hits where the hitter takes more than two strides into the hit are illegal. Anything else is fair game and because of that, the puck carrier needs to keep their head up and be proactive to the play.
    - Coincoin 9y ago
      It's more than that, in the NHL at least. Why are scuffles around the net tolerated? They are disgraceful. Almost every game you will see someone get punched or cross checked in the face with no consequence, as long as it's after the whistle or the victim is an asshole. Which leads to my next point. Why is general assholery tolerated and even celebrated? There is a thing called sportsmanship and there is none of it in the NHL until they put someone on a stretcher. They bang their stick on the boards for 5 seconds then it's open season for the other guy. Why are fights only 5 minutes penalty? Any other sport they would get suspended for even half attempting to punch someone. The NHL and PA say it's some sort of anarchy-on-ice bullshit but we all know it's because it sells tickets and have otherwise poor players make the cut.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

>I just can't support the NFL. I'm not sure what the NFL does that's wrong. Their players get significant fame, are consenting adults, and get pay checks that many would trade even more of their health for. It is the college level, and especially the high school level, that I see the major problems at. When you have kids, or even people who aren't paid, risking their health it crosses a significant line. If college players were paid, and if playing below 18 (or even 16) was banned, it wouldn't be a big problem for me. Edit: As someone else pointed out, the suppressing information is wrong. I wasn't considering that side of things.

deleted 9y ago
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kpwags 9y ago
My main issues with the NFL and why I can't support them are 1) NFL knew about the risks and hid them and in some cases deliberately deceived the players about said risks. I seem to recall that only a couple years ago the NFL told the players that with adequate rest, there will be no long-lasting effects from a concussion -- something that has been shown to not be the case. 2) The NFL will go after anyone who releases medical research raising questions about football and CTE. And I don't mean just refuting the evidence, they've gone after the doctors and scientists personally I don't fault any player in the NFL for wanting the fame and fortune, or playing. But they should also receive all the information that's available as to the risks and dangers associated with playing so they can make their own decision.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Can you provide a few examples of the NFL going after doctors and scientists, and clarify what that means?
  - mricordeau 9y ago
    See Dr Omalu research about CTE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennet_Omalu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennet_Omalu There is a movie (biopic not totally accurate) : Concussion

rconti 9y ago

I'm not there yet, but may be some day. I turned to football because I just can't be bothered to follow the countless games in baseball anymore. Football is a great way to get a weekly sporting fix, a day or two a week, for a fraction of the year. But yeah, who can't shake their head at the "NFL's greatest hits volume 39" VHS sitting in the back of the cabinet. Hopefully the game can change and adapt, I feel like the longer they drag their heels, the more likely it is to just completely collapse.

X86BSD 9y ago

I don't follow rugby as close as I should to ask this question but I don't recall having heard or read anything regarding that sport and head trauma. And it is just as contact driven as football. Is it just not as popular and hence doesn't get the same level of scrutiny?

lostlogin 9y ago
It's pretty bad and has had an increase in scrutiny of late here in New Zealand, in part because of some of the countries great teams and players appear to be suffering severe consequences. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11603857 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...

flashdance 9y ago

Most kids in elementary/middle/high school (at least where I grew up) play non-contact hockey. You're not allowed to fight or bodycheck, but incidental contact is fine. Only the super high (competitive) levels had hitting. Non-contact hockey players are three times less likely to be severely injured and three times less likely to be concussed while playing.[1] That's the direction hockey should be going, IMO. Contact is fun and all but I know too many people who are seriously messed up from concussions--I'm glad my parents put me in a non-contact league. [1] http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/c609/practicum2011/bodyCheckingFullText.pdf http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/c609/practicum2...

Jeremy1026 9y ago
My adult league is non-contact from the "never played in my life" level up through the "D-I/Semi-Pro" level.
ams6110 9y ago
Hockey is going that direction. There is increasing emphasis on strict enforcement of penalties for "intimidating infractions." While body checking is still allowed, it is more narrowly defined than in the past. I think within 10 years we will see the elimination of body checking from hockey. http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0131/9802/Standard_of_Play_-_Body_Checking.pdf http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0131/9802/Standa...

Rapzid 9y ago

I never really followed it but could enjoy a game every now and then. Now I have a distaste for it. My biggest issue by far is how embedded football is into our public school system. They are essentially feeder leagues for the NFL that the public pays to operate. We glorify the sport to little kids and then shove them into the head trauma pipeline. We should absolutely not be a party to that at the public level. I'm aware of the issues with drawing a line on dangerous sports, but I'm sure something a ton of people can agree on is that wherever the line ends up, football is on the wrong side of it. It's position is relative to the line.

dhimes 9y ago
The parents are the problem. It's ridiculous to see them. Football is the most important part of their life and damn if their kid isn't going to play. Could you imagine if our schools and home cultures emphasized putting that kind of work into math rather than football?
- moriarty-s3a 9y ago
  I have seen a few environments like that and they can be just as corrosive. I have seen middle school kids that were great artists or writers or musicians told that they were failures at life because they weren't one of the 15 best math students in their school.
- Rapzid 9y ago
  That's a lot of stuff though to be fair. This On Point episode seems very timely: http://tpr.org/post/big-business-youth-sports http://tpr.org/post/big-business-youth-sports . I didn't catch the entire thing but they were discussing some pretty shocking dollar amounts parents spend on sports that are not football.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    Great post, thanks. Indeed- we can generalize beyond football. These kids have no time for intellectual curiosity any more. It's really a shame. Again, I blame the parents. They should know better. But the kids' sports become part of the parents' ego and there's no going back. Source: am parent of three almost grown boys. Two were sports kids, one is not.

BurningFrog 9y ago

I'm a Swede who grew up loving European hockey. NHL Hockey bores me. You can think of the difference either as physical or mental. Physical: The European rink is 100 feet wide while the NHL rink is 85 feet. This gives a lot more space to skate around people rather than through them, more space and time for a passing and placement game, more time for smart play over brute force play. Mental: Each continent plays hockey as it plays "football". That is soccer vs NFL mentality. My whining aside, in reality the two hockey cultures have grown closer. NHL teams no longer have full time enforcers, and play is much cleaner, while European hockey has become more "physical", as the goal of everyone is to become an NHL millionaire. Still, whenever I try to swallow my pride and watch some hockey I get bored. Unless Pavel Datsyuk is playing!

soperj 9y ago
Europe has no standard size rink. Finnish league is different from the Swedish league etc.
- chmars 9y ago
  Finland is actually the exception, the rest of the non-NHL world uses the IIHF rink size.
  - soperj 9y ago
    Untrue. Even KHL arena's like Prague O2, Bratislava, KHL Medveščak Zagreb in Croatia, Admiral Vladivostok, have smaller rinks, some are NHL sized.
forapurpose 9y ago
What is it about Pavel Datsyuk? BTW, if you have an iPhone, ask Siri 'Who is the magic man?'. (I don't know if that still works.)
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  He's the Messi of hockey. Or is he the Zlatan?

yeswecatan 9y ago

I just watched "Ice Guardians," a documentary about enforcers in hockey. They claimed that only a small percentage (can't remember off the top of my head, maybe 5%) of concussions in hockey were due to fights. The majority come from the high speed nature of the game, especially after 2005. The game became a lot faster then. Big, slow players were replaced with smaller, speedier guys. The trapezoid was introduced which results in tons of defenders getting plastered behind the net while trying to retrieve the puck.

wyattk 9y ago
The problem of defencemen getting plastered was not just the trapezoid. A lot of it had to do with the way icing worked. It used to be the d-man had to "touch" the puck for it to be icing, this always resulted in d-men and forwards going nearly full speed after the puck to either get the icing call or to beat it out. The NHL has done away with this and has "no touch icing" where the d-man only has to skate to the hash marks (middle of the circles), that's removed a considerable amount of the high-speed collisions
- yeswecatan 9y ago
  Well sure, no touch is much safer, but the introduction of the trapezoid still made things much more dangerous. Icing worked the same way before and after (until a couple years ago) 2005. You didn't have defensemen getting drilled as often before 2005. No touch icing was introduced because the rule changes in 2005 made the game faster and more dangerous.
WillPostForFood 9y ago
The issue for hockey is players got faster AND bigger. You are right that average weight has dropped from the peak of 206 in 2005 to 201 today But in the 70's it was as low as 183. The slowest 200+ pound skater today would probably be in the top 20% of skaters back then. Larger players also lead to more shoulder to head hits, just because of size disparity (see: Crosby, Kariya). The other thing that is hard to capture statistically, is that teams used to have big guys that rarely would see much ice time. Now you have many legit skilled players at 220+ pounds who are regulars.

brm 9y ago

The thing for me is, I never watched it for the contact. Its always been a rooting interest type of sport and if I wanted contact I'd go watch boxing or MMA. The thing they don't seem to get(The NFL) is that most people don't care about the hits and they could eliminate them. I'd watch highly skilled athletes from my university or city play FLAG FOOTBALL at the highest levels of skill and athleticism as often or more often than I watch them now. We need to think a bit about why people watch team sport as a society and realize that if flag football was the highest level we'd ever known we probably wouldn't lose a viewer. Skills are skills and team rivalries and rooting interests remain regardless of whether its hockey or football or whatever.

goatlover 9y ago
Plenty of people like the hitting in football, both people who play and and those who watch. Lots of people have complan about how quarterbacks are protected nowadays. In fact, I've never heard a football fan say they would like to get rid of the hitting. Not once.
- freehunter 9y ago
  It's similar in hockey, take away the contact and people complain. They still watch, though. People complain about a lot of stuff they don't actually care about.
_dark_matter_ 9y ago
We have plenty of alternative sports that don't offer the hits, they just haven't gotten as popular. I would argue that goes against your point.
- olau 9y ago
  According to this list, you're wrong about popularity, once you look outside the US: http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.htm http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.h... Soccer is really huge in many parts of the world.
9y ago

rsync 9y ago

"I stopped following football after watching League of Denial on PBS." The reason I cannot stop watching football is that the combination of enormous economic incentives and ruthless selection process has produced individuals that are performing at near-superhuman levels. It is arguable that when you watch a quarterback or a cornerback play well in 2017 you are watching someone do something better than anyone has ever done anything. I find that fascinating and extremely compelling. Further, this is the reason that I no loner have any interest in college football - the professional game winnows that population down so much and so dramatically that the level of skill is no longer comparable. Consider: after all of these years and all of this fame and outreach and development, there are still only 8-10 people in the entire world that can competently play the position of starting quarterback. If you can perform this task with even middling competency there is an immediate 8 figure paycheck waiting for you. This (totally arbitrary and otherwise useless) combination of speed, agility, strength, resiliency and lightning-fast-OODA-looping is amazing to watch. And that's just the quarterback ... I can't get enough of it.

forapurpose 9y ago
> It is arguable that when you watch a quarterback or a cornerback play well in 2017 you are watching someone do something better than anyone has ever done anything. I agree that they are incredible athletes, but I don't see why football's players are better athletes than those in other professional sports. The winnowing process is just as brutal in soccer/football, basketball, hockey, baseball, track, swimming, gymnastics (if you want some incredible athletes - wow), wrestling, boxing, etc. etc. Why is Tom Brady a better athlete than Floyd Mayweather? Than Lionel Messi?
philwelch 9y ago
I think the best sport for that is actually basketball. NBA contracts are far more lucrative, and NBA rosters far smaller, and injuries are far less common, which makes NBA players more athletic and talented than NFL players by far. Consider also the fact that many great NBA players were also standout high school football players who gave it up for basketball. You don't really see that happening the other way. NBA players (and soccer players) also have to exercise more continual decision making skills, since there's no stoppage between plays or radios for the coach to signal plays.

eighthnate 9y ago

> My justification, however flimsy it might be is that I don't like the fighting (I might be in a minority The fighting isn't what causes damage in hockey no more than fighting in the NFL is what causes damage. It is just the physical nature of the sport. > I enjoy the stick work, the dangling and skills getting to the net. My friend says the same thing, but the truth is that he is a racist who hate the NFL because it is "too black" and he suddenly loves hockey because he can "relate" to it. Both hockey and football are dangerous. Even soccer is dangerous. Nevermind MMA and boxing. Without a doubt, football/hockey/boxing/mma/etc are all highly violent. The question is should we care and if we do, what do we do about it.

philwelch 9y ago

I always had the impression that hockey fights were nerfed by the fact that you're on ice. Most of the power of a punch comes from planting your feet on the ground.

takk309 9y ago
It is pretty easy to plant you foot with skates and get a very strong push. The big difference is the stance that you have to take. Remember, the pros are easily the best skaters in the world. Many players have on-ice boxing training at some point during their careers, often during juniors or college.