4 ms·

This sounds distrurbingly like gladiator / slave pit fighting. It’s basically a horrible lottery ticket for poor players, most of whom get brain damage and a me

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

This sounds distrurbingly like gladiator / slave pit fighting. It’s basically a horrible lottery ticket for poor players, most of whom get brain damage and a meaningless college degree, but maybe 2% of whom get life-changing amounts of money (and then some of them get fucked up on drugs or involved in crime anyway...). It sure does not sound like a good way to distribute opportunity at life success to poor children..

jedberg 8y ago
I agree, it's a terrible way to distribute wealth. But it is a way that currently exists. Do we take it away without a replacement? Yes, long term I think football wouldn't exist if we had lots of wealth redistribution programs. But we don't.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I am not sure I follow you on this. For example state lotteries are widely known to function like a tax on poor people. Even though some people win the lottery, it’s fairly uncontroversial that most people would be better off if the lottery was simply disallowed, and nobody wins. We don’t need a replacement for the lottery, just to remove it. I don’t see why it’s different for college football.
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    > Even though some people win the lottery, it’s fairly uncontroversial that most people would be better off if the lottery was simply disallowed, and nobody wins. We don’t need a replacement for the lottery, just to remove it. There's a big difference between "disallowed" and "does not exist". The lottery as it stands distributes its poor tax proceeds to the state, often to education. It's heavily regulated, and advertisements contain warnings on the dangers of gambling, and I'd say it's common knowledge that it's a tax on the poor. If it was removed, however, it would leave a vacuum. People are irrational, and the idea that they could get lucky and win is extremely tempting. I don't think you can say with confidence that whatever gambling would take its place would be less harmful than the lottery.
    - zbentley 8y ago
      > If it was removed, however, it would leave a vacuum. For compulsive gamblers, maybe. But I don't think the lottery exists to fill an inherent need. Plenty of industries (harmful and otherwise) exist because someone figured out how to market something/created a lot of their own demand, versus recognizing an existing need.
- dfxm12 8y ago
  Athletes & fans can find other sports. There's plenty of room in professional Baseball for athletes if Football is no longer an option.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    If you're comparing NFL to MLB, then not really -- there are 1696 NFL roster spaces and only 750 MLB ones. If you're comparing college football to minor-league professional baseball, then I agree with you. Really, every sport in the US should be run more like baseball. College baseball is significantly below the level of even the 3rd or 4th tier of the professional minors, and is an optional piece of the overall player development pipeline. The main trajectory of players who eventually make it to the majors is College->Minors->MLB, but High School->Minors->MLB is totally possible. Directly going College->MLB is extremely rare. It'd be even better if college baseball weren't part of the pipeline at all, and an even lower tier of the minors were added instead, but even as it is the baseball system is much better than football or basketball, where College->{NBA, NFL} is the normal path, and as a result college competition is extremely competitive and serious, and prone to massive corruption.
- munificent 8y ago
  The obvious replacement is simply another sport that doesn't involve people running head-first into each other at full speed. Turn every football scholarship into one for soccer, baseball, track, etc. Done. Athletes still get a sport to play, spectators still get something to watch. I'm very much a person that does not say big complex problems have simple solutions. But in this case, it's pretty easy. Play a different damn sport.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    It's really not as simple as you make it sound. You completely handwave over how it could be replaced. Convincing the South-central and Southeast US to start following track instead of American football, is about as realistic as trying to convince Brazil to follow cricket instead of soccer. You are talking about a huge change in culture and customs for many millions of people. Really the only hope would be some sort of legislation banning football, but it's not feasible to pass dramatically unpopular legislation in a democracy (especially a democracy as deadlocked and slow-moving as the federal level of the US, where even relatively widely supported reforms are impossible or extremely difficult to implement). A more realistic (still far-fetched, but maybe not literally impossible) proposal would be to spin off college sports teams. Let Auburn Sports, LLC be a separate organization from Auburn University. Let it pay its players and turn a profit. Don't let it grant degrees. The small percentage of people who are qualified for both institutions could attend both simultaneously if they chose to do so. That's already effectively the situation now. A few academically driven players get serious degrees, whereas the vast majority get fake ones. Why not get rid of the pretense? This wouldn't fix the problem of brain injury, but at least it would eliminate the excuse for exploiting elite sportsmen without pay under the bullshit fig leaf that they're "students". All the college sports which are genuinely amateur in the sense that they don't make any money or have the possibility of leading to a big-league career (i.e., basically everything except football, basketball, and to a much smaller extent baseball and soccer) could continue to be run by universities for people who would have been students anyway but wanted to also compete in track and field or whatever.
    - JakeTheAndroid 8y ago
- ken 8y ago
  It's trivial to come up with replacements for college football, though, which logically sound as if they would work at least as well. Example: take the $15M you would pay to a hot coach, and spend it on scholarships directly. Don't make low-income students get brain damage as a condition of education. It's already been established that many football programs aren't cashflow-positive, anyway.
- zbentley 8y ago
  > it's a terrible way to distribute wealth. But it is a way that currently exists. Do we take it away without a replacement? I think that's a false choice. Without the massive cost sports programs, it's possible (not a given--there's an argument to be made that sports programs attract more money than they spend) that many freed-up resources could be dedicated to helping underprivileged people achieve academic and career success. Also, there's a strong possibility that wealth-redistribution-via-sports-programs (which I'm not convinced is statistically significant, but whatever) is offset or surpassed by the severe health problems faced by redistribution-beneficiaries who end up with brain injuries.
RandallBrown 8y ago
Do most college football players get brain damage? I've met a decent amount of former college football players and none had (obvious) signs of brain damage. I don't think that most smokers die of lung cancer either.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  > Do most college football players get brain damage? FTA: "[...] the Boston University C.T.E. center, which found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of brains obtained from deceased N.F.L. players and 91 percent of college football players and 21 percent of those who played high school football." 91% certainly qualifies as "most" in my book.
  - gwern 8y ago
    Self-selection, though. That's consistent with <50% of players getting brain damage.
  - scott_s 8y ago
    That study has a selection bias; the athletes' families all suspected that their player had CTE. So it's not accurate to say that 91% of college football players will get CTE. But, it's still an enormous indictment of the sport. Enough that when that study came out, I just lost all taste for watching football. (Which was not a stretch, I never followed much, but I did occasionally pay attention or watch with friends.) With those kinds of numbers, I think it's fair to say that if you play college football, your chances of developing CTE are very high. I think of it as similar to smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. I just think it's important to be clear on the parameters of that study, which means being careful when citing the numbers.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  That’s a good point with probably a complex answer that needs a lot more research. From the article, > “the work of the Boston University C.T.E. center, which found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of brains obtained from deceased N.F.L. players and 91 percent of college football players and 21 percent of those who played high school football.” Of course there’s a causality problem here as to whether people who died and thus could have their brains examined are simply more susceptible to the concussive effects, but you may also suggest that, unless we can diagnose those people ahead of time, it doesn’t matter because it represents some fraction of players taking a far more serious health risk without knowing it, especially for the 1/5 number among high school athletes. Further, the article mentions lots of other problems beyond explicit CTE issues, like migraines, nerve damage, shakes and memory lapses. It brings up all kinds of questions about child welfare, acceptable risk, exploitation of poor athletes, association with a college scholarship, and so on.

jedberg 8y ago

I agree, it's a terrible way to distribute wealth. But it is a way that currently exists. Do we take it away without a replacement? Yes, long term I think football wouldn't exist if we had lots of wealth redistribution programs. But we don't.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I am not sure I follow you on this. For example state lotteries are widely known to function like a tax on poor people. Even though some people win the lottery, it’s fairly uncontroversial that most people would be better off if the lottery was simply disallowed, and nobody wins. We don’t need a replacement for the lottery, just to remove it. I don’t see why it’s different for college football.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  > Even though some people win the lottery, it’s fairly uncontroversial that most people would be better off if the lottery was simply disallowed, and nobody wins. We don’t need a replacement for the lottery, just to remove it. There's a big difference between "disallowed" and "does not exist". The lottery as it stands distributes its poor tax proceeds to the state, often to education. It's heavily regulated, and advertisements contain warnings on the dangers of gambling, and I'd say it's common knowledge that it's a tax on the poor. If it was removed, however, it would leave a vacuum. People are irrational, and the idea that they could get lucky and win is extremely tempting. I don't think you can say with confidence that whatever gambling would take its place would be less harmful than the lottery.
  - zbentley 8y ago
    > If it was removed, however, it would leave a vacuum. For compulsive gamblers, maybe. But I don't think the lottery exists to fill an inherent need. Plenty of industries (harmful and otherwise) exist because someone figured out how to market something/created a lot of their own demand, versus recognizing an existing need.
dfxm12 8y ago
Athletes & fans can find other sports. There's plenty of room in professional Baseball for athletes if Football is no longer an option.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  If you're comparing NFL to MLB, then not really -- there are 1696 NFL roster spaces and only 750 MLB ones. If you're comparing college football to minor-league professional baseball, then I agree with you. Really, every sport in the US should be run more like baseball. College baseball is significantly below the level of even the 3rd or 4th tier of the professional minors, and is an optional piece of the overall player development pipeline. The main trajectory of players who eventually make it to the majors is College->Minors->MLB, but High School->Minors->MLB is totally possible. Directly going College->MLB is extremely rare. It'd be even better if college baseball weren't part of the pipeline at all, and an even lower tier of the minors were added instead, but even as it is the baseball system is much better than football or basketball, where College->{NBA, NFL} is the normal path, and as a result college competition is extremely competitive and serious, and prone to massive corruption.
munificent 8y ago
The obvious replacement is simply another sport that doesn't involve people running head-first into each other at full speed. Turn every football scholarship into one for soccer, baseball, track, etc. Done. Athletes still get a sport to play, spectators still get something to watch. I'm very much a person that does not say big complex problems have simple solutions. But in this case, it's pretty easy. Play a different damn sport.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  It's really not as simple as you make it sound. You completely handwave over how it could be replaced. Convincing the South-central and Southeast US to start following track instead of American football, is about as realistic as trying to convince Brazil to follow cricket instead of soccer. You are talking about a huge change in culture and customs for many millions of people. Really the only hope would be some sort of legislation banning football, but it's not feasible to pass dramatically unpopular legislation in a democracy (especially a democracy as deadlocked and slow-moving as the federal level of the US, where even relatively widely supported reforms are impossible or extremely difficult to implement). A more realistic (still far-fetched, but maybe not literally impossible) proposal would be to spin off college sports teams. Let Auburn Sports, LLC be a separate organization from Auburn University. Let it pay its players and turn a profit. Don't let it grant degrees. The small percentage of people who are qualified for both institutions could attend both simultaneously if they chose to do so. That's already effectively the situation now. A few academically driven players get serious degrees, whereas the vast majority get fake ones. Why not get rid of the pretense? This wouldn't fix the problem of brain injury, but at least it would eliminate the excuse for exploiting elite sportsmen without pay under the bullshit fig leaf that they're "students". All the college sports which are genuinely amateur in the sense that they don't make any money or have the possibility of leading to a big-league career (i.e., basically everything except football, basketball, and to a much smaller extent baseball and soccer) could continue to be run by universities for people who would have been students anyway but wanted to also compete in track and field or whatever.
  - JakeTheAndroid 8y ago
ken 8y ago
It's trivial to come up with replacements for college football, though, which logically sound as if they would work at least as well. Example: take the $15M you would pay to a hot coach, and spend it on scholarships directly. Don't make low-income students get brain damage as a condition of education. It's already been established that many football programs aren't cashflow-positive, anyway.
zbentley 8y ago
> it's a terrible way to distribute wealth. But it is a way that currently exists. Do we take it away without a replacement? I think that's a false choice. Without the massive cost sports programs, it's possible (not a given--there's an argument to be made that sports programs attract more money than they spend) that many freed-up resources could be dedicated to helping underprivileged people achieve academic and career success. Also, there's a strong possibility that wealth-redistribution-via-sports-programs (which I'm not convinced is statistically significant, but whatever) is offset or surpassed by the severe health problems faced by redistribution-beneficiaries who end up with brain injuries.

RandallBrown 8y ago

Do most college football players get brain damage? I've met a decent amount of former college football players and none had (obvious) signs of brain damage. I don't think that most smokers die of lung cancer either.

duskwuff 8y ago
> Do most college football players get brain damage? FTA: "[...] the Boston University C.T.E. center, which found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of brains obtained from deceased N.F.L. players and 91 percent of college football players and 21 percent of those who played high school football." 91% certainly qualifies as "most" in my book.
- gwern 8y ago
  Self-selection, though. That's consistent with <50% of players getting brain damage.
- scott_s 8y ago
  That study has a selection bias; the athletes' families all suspected that their player had CTE. So it's not accurate to say that 91% of college football players will get CTE. But, it's still an enormous indictment of the sport. Enough that when that study came out, I just lost all taste for watching football. (Which was not a stretch, I never followed much, but I did occasionally pay attention or watch with friends.) With those kinds of numbers, I think it's fair to say that if you play college football, your chances of developing CTE are very high. I think of it as similar to smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. I just think it's important to be clear on the parameters of that study, which means being careful when citing the numbers.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
That’s a good point with probably a complex answer that needs a lot more research. From the article, > “the work of the Boston University C.T.E. center, which found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of brains obtained from deceased N.F.L. players and 91 percent of college football players and 21 percent of those who played high school football.” Of course there’s a causality problem here as to whether people who died and thus could have their brains examined are simply more susceptible to the concussive effects, but you may also suggest that, unless we can diagnose those people ahead of time, it doesn’t matter because it represents some fraction of players taking a far more serious health risk without knowing it, especially for the 1/5 number among high school athletes. Further, the article mentions lots of other problems beyond explicit CTE issues, like migraines, nerve damage, shakes and memory lapses. It brings up all kinds of questions about child welfare, acceptable risk, exploitation of poor athletes, association with a college scholarship, and so on.