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> adults making decisions for themselves That's the crux of the biggest issue. The NFL actively covered up/denied evidence that concussions were damaging for d

> adults making decisions for themselves That's the crux of the biggest issue. The NFL actively covered up/denied evidence that concussions were damaging for decades.

criddell 9y ago
Lots of damage has been done that's for sure. I was mostly thinking about the future.
- x0x0 9y ago
  They're not actually well compensated. http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-expose-how-badly-nfl-players-get-paid-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-expose-how-badly-nfl-p... They're not actually protected in any way, because NFL contracts aren't guaranteed. Imagine what you would do if your doctor worked for your boss, and when your doctor asked if you were injured, telling the truth would allow your boss to fire you on the spot with zero compensation. Every time the subject comes up there's lots of whining by the NFL, but somehow the NBA, NHL, and MLB survived with essentially guaranteed contracts. NFL players also don't actually have options. Scholarships are a joke and most of them learn virtually nothing. They started down the path to the NFL well before they were adults capable of making decisions, and by the time they're eligible for an NFL career, they typically don't have the academics to do much else. (Obviously there are exceptions, but Richard Sherman is not your average NFL player.)
  - softawre 9y ago
    Are you making the argument that a $million+/year is not "well compensated"? You can play for 2-3 years and never work again if you're smart with your money.
    - x0x0 9y ago
      1 - many players are not making millions a year. eg in 2017, two rookie quarterbacks in the playoffs were making $450k, the league minimum. All those average salary facts include eg Tom Brady. 2 - even at $1m/year, you may collect $550k after tax. Three years of that is not never work again money.
      - ska 9y ago
        Three years of that is not never work again money. It's worth noting that three years of that gets you a bit over median household income at safe extraction (i.e. 4%) rate. It's not FU money, but as an emergency fall back it is obviously plausibly never work again money.
      - criddell 9y ago
        The median salary is $700,000. The average career lasts 3 years. Therefore you could say a typical player makes around $2 million playing football. That's gross. The net is probably about half of that. To most of America that will make an order of magnitude less than that in the same time, that sounds pretty good.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Most players make closer to the league minimum ($500k) for just 2-3 years. After taxes that’s about $500-750k. Even if you’re smart about your money, you’re saving maybe $350-500k. That’s not “never work again” money.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        $500k/yr for 3 years is "never work again" money for me. That's $1.5 Million. If you pull out what many financial advisors recommend, 4%, that's $60k/yr for the rest of your life. That's above the US median household income.
        macintux 9y ago
        $60k/year won't get you very far in 20 years, and even today won't get you far at all if you have to pay medical expenses on the damage you received playing the game.
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        The 4% rate is chosen specifically because it's low enough for your retirement savings to continue to grow with inflation. I don't really see your point about $60k not getting you far at all since it's more than half the country makes. I understand you might have a more privileged view of what kind of lifestyle you expect to live, but you'd be doing better than half the country. You'll be fine.
        macintux 9y ago
        You're a NFL player. By definition you're among the, what, best 1% of players in college. You, of course, go in planning to have a short career, because you're young and invincible and the best. So of course after 3 years of living like a monk you have $1.5 million stashed away...contrary to all rational expectations. Well, less, because after income taxes and because as a young, invincible man among the best to play sports you spend money, maybe you have $300k left. If you're lucky. But you're now unemployed, so you need healthcare. And the mortgage on your house is at least half that $60k/year because you're a young invincible sports hero. You've been earning a half million dollars up to this point, so it's a safe bet it'll be very hard to scale your expenses down to $60k/year. Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, except that your expectations of what an NFL player can/will do after being physically tortured for several years (high school, college, NFL) with hidden mental damage and having been a young, invincible man told you're the best of the best and surrounded by people eager to piggyback on your success...may be optimistic.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      if you're smart with your money. Achieving this goal usually requires you to avoid serious brain damage. Repeated concussions and wisely living off the wealth you acquired in a few short years while still very young by managing it extraordinarily well for decades to come are probably mutually exclusive.
      - smsm42 9y ago
        I don't think the damage there is as immediate as NFL players being basically legally incompetent and unable to take conscious decisions. It's probably more likely that they have no experience of managing a budget, saving for long term and planning their future - a trait shared by many people who never ever put a foot on a football field. And when you get $ton-of-money and have no experience in managing your finances, pretty soon you're broke. Look up the statistics of the gold rushes - a lot of people coming into sudden wealth got broke pretty soon, and didn't need any hitting on the head for that to happen. The percentage of people that got wealthy and were able to keep it long term is depressingly low.
        fpig 9y ago
        Every person I know who got wealthy is still wealthy except one (stocks). None of them blew any significant part of their money on consumption. I assume this holds in general, too, if you count all people who get rich, not just lottery winners, athletes, etc. This "no experience managing a budget" stuff is hilarious, you don't need special knowledge not to blow millions. It is not hard. Let's call it what it is for most people - being trash, living extravagantly, and not thinking about the future. It's far more about character than about financial knowledge.
        smsm42 9y ago
        Statistics proves it is harder than you think.
        fpig 9y ago
        That's a worthless post without sources. I don't believe statistics would prove that, I am guessing they would prove the opposite, that most wealthy people don't blow their money.
    - roguecoder 9y ago
      The average lifetime earnings of a programmer are higher than professional athletes: http://www.businessinsider.com/better-to-be-a-software-engineer-than-a-pro-athlete-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/better-to-be-a-software-engin... And my job doesn't expect me to sacrifice my mental and physical health, setting me up for a shortened lifetime of degenerative neurological disease in exchange for that cash.
      - JamesBarney 9y ago
        They didn't discount future earnings. i.e. You wouldn't buy a T-Bond that will pay you 10,000 in 30 years for $10,000 today. If you discount future earnings at 6% you get 1.8 millions for software engineering versus 2.67 million for NFL.
        x0x0 9y ago
        An safe investment with a 6% return is a fantasy. 30 year treasuries pay roughly 3% before inflation.
        JamesBarney 9y ago
        A career is not as safe of an investment as a t-bond.
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        Average lifetime earnings are a terrible metric for entertainers, whose earnings are extremely exponentially distributed.
      - avip 9y ago
        How so? Isn't sitting still for 9h/day way less healthy than playing professional sport?
        gbear605 9y ago
        Many (most?) NFL players walk away with horrific brain damage and extreme physical injuries. Sitting still for 9h/day certainly isn't great for your health, but there are things you can do to counteract it - go to the gym, for example. NFL players can't avoid those injuries.
    - watwut 9y ago
      Part of it is also reward for risk - you have to train very hard for years before you can get to NFL. There is opportunity cost (to learn something else for example) with very low chance of getting in. Compare it to programmers who are pretty sure to get job once they finish school, have plenty of time for activities outside of programming and have much lower pressure on them either at the job (NFL equivalent) or while preparing for it.
w0m 9y ago
This is one of the key points to me - NFL actively hid the fact from their own fans and players for years. That should have been a much bigger deal I think, criminal negligence.
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  >should have been a much bigger deal Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco). I think it's a playbook. They string out the lies over a long period, then let the suspicion trickle out slowly. So, there are moments of muted outrage along the way, but by the time the full story comes out the pressure build-up has already been relieved. Beyond that, the finally-admitted truth is something we already knew for so long that our outrage has waned. Basically, a PSYOP.
  - gameswithgo 9y ago
    >Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco) And fossil fuel
conductr 9y ago
Big tobacco did the same but many people reasoned that inhaling burnt leaves multiple times a day was probably not a smart idea even if lacking full clinical research saying so. It's bad that they hid it, no doubt. But couldn't people reason that taking thousands of blows to the head over a career was not a smart idea?
- evan_ 9y ago
  it's not just that the tobacco companies covered up reports, they literally put out ads with actors dressed as doctors saying "smoking is good for you". e.g.: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=fm_st001.php&token1=fm_img0002.php&theme_file=fm_mt001.php&theme_name=Doctors%20Smoking http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=f... Even if you were able to "reason" that smoking was bad, there was a whole dedicated culture jamming operation to push the message "you're wrong and foolish if you think smoking is bad" and it worked very well. Every NFL team had (has?) a bunch of doctors telling players that they can shrug off concussions and other serious injuries, and a deeply-engrained (and specifically engineered) culture to back up that message.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    Hell, when I was growing up (not that long ago!) the NFL used to produce and tout official videos of the biggest / hardest hits in a season. Looking at them now, you can literally see the stiff arms sticking in the air that is a symptom of brain trauma, and people getting up concussed as fuck.
  - conductr 9y ago
    It's all true and very bad, I agree. My greater point though is that, throughout all time, people live in a society where someone is trying to take advantage/lie/cheat/steal basically they don't care about what is best for you. People need to learn to think independently. Hell, science still can't agree on if an egg is healthy or not. I eat them because I enjoy them and their are no obvious downsides. If there were some correlation that was known and proved unhealthy I might stop eating them. For example, while big tobacco was doing their thing... people knew their family members smoking were unhealthy, coughing like crazy, getting cancer/sick, so their was some clues in society telling you that you're probably being lied to. I have memories of this as a kid, "Joe died at 55 but, you know, he smoked 2 packs a day" was a valid way of thinking. So the health effects were widely known, just not in a measurable & undisputed scientific way. The same thing goes for tobacco, NFL, climate change, ... all kinds of stuff. The anecdotal information around you says one thing, but the scientist can't agree and some of them are biased/being paid to say something regardless of truth. Years later the anecdotal information turns out to be true and people claim they were victims when really they could have just exercised some common sense.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
Frankly, as an observer (which I am) or as a potential employee of the NFL (which I am not), I would consider the question "does playing football cause massive brain damage?" a much bigger issue than "has the NFL tried to cover up evidence that playing football causes massive brain damage?"
- Pxtl 9y ago
  Well, the difference is culpability. "Does football cause brain damage" is an important question for current and future players, but "did the NFL conceal this fact" can be interpreted as the NFL murdered its own players through criminal negligence. Players were not given the chance at informed consent. If I put poison in food and offer you millions to eat the food but don't tell you about the poison, what am I?
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    "Did the NFL stage a coverup" is only relevant to discussions of whether and how much to punish the NFL. "Does football cause brain damage" is relevant to discussions of whether I should play football, whether my friends or family should play football, whether anyone should play football, whether it's ethical to watch football, whether it's more fun to watch football than golf, whether it's appropriate for educational institutions to promote or participate in football... I'll also suggest that if it turned out that football promoted the better functioning of your brain, outrage at the NFL for covering up research suggesting the opposite would be pretty muted. If you believe that, you should also believe that what everyone sees as "the big issue" is the brain damage, not the coverup.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      I've always thought of the brain damage as a given; concussions will cause damage, the brain's a little "iffy" on the healing front, and severe concussions are basically unavoidable in football. If you care about whether you get hurt: Don't play, don't let your kids play, and so on. It was much more interesting to hear how much the NFL had covered up, and the degree to which they directly lied about the evidence of the effects of playing the game. The cover-up is the scandalous part, so of course that's the part that people are going to focus on.

> adults making decisions for themselves That's the crux of the biggest issue. The NFL actively covered up/denied evidence that concussions were damaging for decades.

criddell 9y ago

Lots of damage has been done that's for sure. I was mostly thinking about the future.

x0x0 9y ago
They're not actually well compensated. http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-expose-how-badly-nfl-players-get-paid-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-expose-how-badly-nfl-p... They're not actually protected in any way, because NFL contracts aren't guaranteed. Imagine what you would do if your doctor worked for your boss, and when your doctor asked if you were injured, telling the truth would allow your boss to fire you on the spot with zero compensation. Every time the subject comes up there's lots of whining by the NFL, but somehow the NBA, NHL, and MLB survived with essentially guaranteed contracts. NFL players also don't actually have options. Scholarships are a joke and most of them learn virtually nothing. They started down the path to the NFL well before they were adults capable of making decisions, and by the time they're eligible for an NFL career, they typically don't have the academics to do much else. (Obviously there are exceptions, but Richard Sherman is not your average NFL player.)
- softawre 9y ago
  Are you making the argument that a $million+/year is not "well compensated"? You can play for 2-3 years and never work again if you're smart with your money.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    1 - many players are not making millions a year. eg in 2017, two rookie quarterbacks in the playoffs were making $450k, the league minimum. All those average salary facts include eg Tom Brady. 2 - even at $1m/year, you may collect $550k after tax. Three years of that is not never work again money.
    - ska 9y ago
      Three years of that is not never work again money. It's worth noting that three years of that gets you a bit over median household income at safe extraction (i.e. 4%) rate. It's not FU money, but as an emergency fall back it is obviously plausibly never work again money.
    - criddell 9y ago
      The median salary is $700,000. The average career lasts 3 years. Therefore you could say a typical player makes around $2 million playing football. That's gross. The net is probably about half of that. To most of America that will make an order of magnitude less than that in the same time, that sounds pretty good.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Most players make closer to the league minimum ($500k) for just 2-3 years. After taxes that’s about $500-750k. Even if you’re smart about your money, you’re saving maybe $350-500k. That’s not “never work again” money.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      $500k/yr for 3 years is "never work again" money for me. That's $1.5 Million. If you pull out what many financial advisors recommend, 4%, that's $60k/yr for the rest of your life. That's above the US median household income.
      - macintux 9y ago
        $60k/year won't get you very far in 20 years, and even today won't get you far at all if you have to pay medical expenses on the damage you received playing the game.
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        The 4% rate is chosen specifically because it's low enough for your retirement savings to continue to grow with inflation. I don't really see your point about $60k not getting you far at all since it's more than half the country makes. I understand you might have a more privileged view of what kind of lifestyle you expect to live, but you'd be doing better than half the country. You'll be fine.
        macintux 9y ago
        You're a NFL player. By definition you're among the, what, best 1% of players in college. You, of course, go in planning to have a short career, because you're young and invincible and the best. So of course after 3 years of living like a monk you have $1.5 million stashed away...contrary to all rational expectations. Well, less, because after income taxes and because as a young, invincible man among the best to play sports you spend money, maybe you have $300k left. If you're lucky. But you're now unemployed, so you need healthcare. And the mortgage on your house is at least half that $60k/year because you're a young invincible sports hero. You've been earning a half million dollars up to this point, so it's a safe bet it'll be very hard to scale your expenses down to $60k/year. Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, except that your expectations of what an NFL player can/will do after being physically tortured for several years (high school, college, NFL) with hidden mental damage and having been a young, invincible man told you're the best of the best and surrounded by people eager to piggyback on your success...may be optimistic.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    if you're smart with your money. Achieving this goal usually requires you to avoid serious brain damage. Repeated concussions and wisely living off the wealth you acquired in a few short years while still very young by managing it extraordinarily well for decades to come are probably mutually exclusive.
    - smsm42 9y ago
      I don't think the damage there is as immediate as NFL players being basically legally incompetent and unable to take conscious decisions. It's probably more likely that they have no experience of managing a budget, saving for long term and planning their future - a trait shared by many people who never ever put a foot on a football field. And when you get $ton-of-money and have no experience in managing your finances, pretty soon you're broke. Look up the statistics of the gold rushes - a lot of people coming into sudden wealth got broke pretty soon, and didn't need any hitting on the head for that to happen. The percentage of people that got wealthy and were able to keep it long term is depressingly low.
      - fpig 9y ago
        Every person I know who got wealthy is still wealthy except one (stocks). None of them blew any significant part of their money on consumption. I assume this holds in general, too, if you count all people who get rich, not just lottery winners, athletes, etc. This "no experience managing a budget" stuff is hilarious, you don't need special knowledge not to blow millions. It is not hard. Let's call it what it is for most people - being trash, living extravagantly, and not thinking about the future. It's far more about character than about financial knowledge.
        smsm42 9y ago
        Statistics proves it is harder than you think.
        fpig 9y ago
        That's a worthless post without sources. I don't believe statistics would prove that, I am guessing they would prove the opposite, that most wealthy people don't blow their money.
  - roguecoder 9y ago
    The average lifetime earnings of a programmer are higher than professional athletes: http://www.businessinsider.com/better-to-be-a-software-engineer-than-a-pro-athlete-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/better-to-be-a-software-engin... And my job doesn't expect me to sacrifice my mental and physical health, setting me up for a shortened lifetime of degenerative neurological disease in exchange for that cash.
    - JamesBarney 9y ago
      They didn't discount future earnings. i.e. You wouldn't buy a T-Bond that will pay you 10,000 in 30 years for $10,000 today. If you discount future earnings at 6% you get 1.8 millions for software engineering versus 2.67 million for NFL.
      - x0x0 9y ago
        An safe investment with a 6% return is a fantasy. 30 year treasuries pay roughly 3% before inflation.
        JamesBarney 9y ago
        A career is not as safe of an investment as a t-bond.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      Average lifetime earnings are a terrible metric for entertainers, whose earnings are extremely exponentially distributed.
    - avip 9y ago
      How so? Isn't sitting still for 9h/day way less healthy than playing professional sport?
      - gbear605 9y ago
        Many (most?) NFL players walk away with horrific brain damage and extreme physical injuries. Sitting still for 9h/day certainly isn't great for your health, but there are things you can do to counteract it - go to the gym, for example. NFL players can't avoid those injuries.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Part of it is also reward for risk - you have to train very hard for years before you can get to NFL. There is opportunity cost (to learn something else for example) with very low chance of getting in. Compare it to programmers who are pretty sure to get job once they finish school, have plenty of time for activities outside of programming and have much lower pressure on them either at the job (NFL equivalent) or while preparing for it.

w0m 9y ago

This is one of the key points to me - NFL actively hid the fact from their own fans and players for years. That should have been a much bigger deal I think, criminal negligence.

unclebucknasty 9y ago
>should have been a much bigger deal Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco). I think it's a playbook. They string out the lies over a long period, then let the suspicion trickle out slowly. So, there are moments of muted outrage along the way, but by the time the full story comes out the pressure build-up has already been relieved. Beyond that, the finally-admitted truth is something we already knew for so long that our outrage has waned. Basically, a PSYOP.
- gameswithgo 9y ago
  >Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco) And fossil fuel

conductr 9y ago

Big tobacco did the same but many people reasoned that inhaling burnt leaves multiple times a day was probably not a smart idea even if lacking full clinical research saying so. It's bad that they hid it, no doubt. But couldn't people reason that taking thousands of blows to the head over a career was not a smart idea?

evan_ 9y ago
it's not just that the tobacco companies covered up reports, they literally put out ads with actors dressed as doctors saying "smoking is good for you". e.g.: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=fm_st001.php&token1=fm_img0002.php&theme_file=fm_mt001.php&theme_name=Doctors%20Smoking http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=f... Even if you were able to "reason" that smoking was bad, there was a whole dedicated culture jamming operation to push the message "you're wrong and foolish if you think smoking is bad" and it worked very well. Every NFL team had (has?) a bunch of doctors telling players that they can shrug off concussions and other serious injuries, and a deeply-engrained (and specifically engineered) culture to back up that message.
- x0x0 9y ago
  Hell, when I was growing up (not that long ago!) the NFL used to produce and tout official videos of the biggest / hardest hits in a season. Looking at them now, you can literally see the stiff arms sticking in the air that is a symptom of brain trauma, and people getting up concussed as fuck.
- conductr 9y ago
  It's all true and very bad, I agree. My greater point though is that, throughout all time, people live in a society where someone is trying to take advantage/lie/cheat/steal basically they don't care about what is best for you. People need to learn to think independently. Hell, science still can't agree on if an egg is healthy or not. I eat them because I enjoy them and their are no obvious downsides. If there were some correlation that was known and proved unhealthy I might stop eating them. For example, while big tobacco was doing their thing... people knew their family members smoking were unhealthy, coughing like crazy, getting cancer/sick, so their was some clues in society telling you that you're probably being lied to. I have memories of this as a kid, "Joe died at 55 but, you know, he smoked 2 packs a day" was a valid way of thinking. So the health effects were widely known, just not in a measurable & undisputed scientific way. The same thing goes for tobacco, NFL, climate change, ... all kinds of stuff. The anecdotal information around you says one thing, but the scientist can't agree and some of them are biased/being paid to say something regardless of truth. Years later the anecdotal information turns out to be true and people claim they were victims when really they could have just exercised some common sense.

thaumasiotes 9y ago

Frankly, as an observer (which I am) or as a potential employee of the NFL (which I am not), I would consider the question "does playing football cause massive brain damage?" a much bigger issue than "has the NFL tried to cover up evidence that playing football causes massive brain damage?"

Pxtl 9y ago
Well, the difference is culpability. "Does football cause brain damage" is an important question for current and future players, but "did the NFL conceal this fact" can be interpreted as the NFL murdered its own players through criminal negligence. Players were not given the chance at informed consent. If I put poison in food and offer you millions to eat the food but don't tell you about the poison, what am I?
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  "Did the NFL stage a coverup" is only relevant to discussions of whether and how much to punish the NFL. "Does football cause brain damage" is relevant to discussions of whether I should play football, whether my friends or family should play football, whether anyone should play football, whether it's ethical to watch football, whether it's more fun to watch football than golf, whether it's appropriate for educational institutions to promote or participate in football... I'll also suggest that if it turned out that football promoted the better functioning of your brain, outrage at the NFL for covering up research suggesting the opposite would be pretty muted. If you believe that, you should also believe that what everyone sees as "the big issue" is the brain damage, not the coverup.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I've always thought of the brain damage as a given; concussions will cause damage, the brain's a little "iffy" on the healing front, and severe concussions are basically unavoidable in football. If you care about whether you get hurt: Don't play, don't let your kids play, and so on. It was much more interesting to hear how much the NFL had covered up, and the degree to which they directly lied about the evidence of the effects of playing the game. The cover-up is the scandalous part, so of course that's the part that people are going to focus on.