> Many things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of mil

> Many things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of millions of dollars and the praise of millions of people like sports can. This article is about USC linebackers, meaning NCAA sports athletes, which means no millions of dollars. They are unpaid student athletes. > So all of these articles and hand wringing - so what? Don't watch. Don't pay money. Let those who like it continue to. It's everyone's right to make their own decisions. Many students are encouraged to play football throughout the US. Critiquing social norms is important and shouldn't be minimized as "hand wringing." It's important to surface the dangers of sports like these to help folks make better decisions for their lives. Society can come together and be like "hey kids are losing their dads over these sports, either to death or horrible symptoms e.g CTE-induced violence" -- maybe the value of these sports doesn't exceed the damage they do to the folks involved, even if equitable compensation was possible. Personally I don't think it's worth it. You can have sports that don't cause these problems (e.g basketball, baseball), and you can make sports safer if they do cause harm (e.g fouls in basketball in the 80s vs today).