Welcome to The New Coffee Room. We hope you enjoy your visit.
You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.
Autumn, which is bearing down upon us like a menacing linebacker, is, as John Keats said, a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Actually, Keats, a romantic, did not mention that last part. He died before the birth of the subject of a waning American romance, football. This sport will never die, but it will never again be, as it was until recently, the subject of uncomplicated national enthusiasm.
CTE is a degenerative brain disease confirmable only after death, and often caused by repeated blows to the head that knock the brain against the skull. The cumulative impacts of hundreds of supposedly minor blows can have the cumulative effect of many concussions. The New York Times recently reported Stanford University researchers’ data showing “that one college offensive lineman sustained 62 of these hits in a single game. Each one came with an average force on the player’s head equivalent to what you would see if he had driven his car into a brick wall at 30 mph.”
Boston University researchers found CTE in 110 of 111 brains of deceased NFL players. In 53 other brains from college players, 48 had CTE. There was significant selection bias: Many of the brains came from families who had noticed CTE symptoms, including mood disorders and dementia. A Boston University researcher says, however, that a 10-year NFL linebacker could receive more than 15,000 sub-concussive blows.
Football’s kinetic energy — a function of the masses and velocities of the hurtling bodies — has increased dramatically in 50 years. On Alabama’s undefeated 1966 team, only 21 percent of the players weighed more than 200 pounds. The heaviest weighed 223; the linemen averaged 194. The quarterback, who weighed 177, was Ken Stabler, who went on to a Hall of Fame NFL career — and to “moderately severe” CTE before death from cancer. Today, many high school teams are much beefier than the 1966 Crimson Tide. Of the 114 members of Alabama’s 2016 squad, just 25 weighed less than 200 and 20 weighed more than 300. In 1980, only three NFL players weighed 300 or more pounds. Last season, 390 weighed 300 pounds or more, and six topped 350.
Players love football, and a small minority will have lucrative post-college NFL careers. Many will make increasingly informed choices to accept the risk-reward calculus. But because today’s risk-averse middle-class parents put crash helmets on their tykes riding tricycles , football participation will skew to the uninformed and economically desperate. But will informed spectators become queasy about deriving pleasure from an entertainment with such human costs?
A major study out Tuesday, July 25 found that nearly 90 percent of former football players studied had CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (Reuters)
No. They will say: Players know the risks that they, unlike the baited bears, voluntarily embrace, just as smokers do. Notice, however, that smoking, which is increasingly a choice of those least receptive to public health information, is banned in all NFL stadiums and is severely discouraged on all college campuses, including those that are football factories. And football fans will say: Better equipment will solve the problem of body parts, particularly the one in the skull’s brain pan, that are unsuited to the game.
Perhaps evolving standards of decency will reduce football to a marginalized spectacle, like boxing. But the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s burgeoning popularity is (redundant) evidence that “evolving” is not a synonym for “improving.”
Besides, as disturbing scientific evidence accumulates, NFL franchise values soar (Forbes says the most valuable is the Dallas Cowboys at $4.2 billion and the least valuable is the $1.5 billion Buffalo Bills) and annual revenues reach $14 billion. The league distributes $244 million to each team — $77 million more than each team’s salary cap. Local revenues are gravy. The appendage of higher education that is called college football also is a big business: The Southeastern Conference’s cable television channel is valued at almost $5 billion. Universities, which find and develop the NFL’s players, pay their head coaches well for performing this public service: Twenty head coaches make more than $4 million a year. Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh earns $9 million.
It has been said (by Thomas Babington Macaulay) that the Puritans banned bear baiting — unleashing fierce dogs on a bear chained in a pit — not because it gave pain to bears but because it gave pleasure to Puritans. But whatever the Puritans’ motives, they understood that there are degrading enjoyments. Football is becoming one, even though Michigan’s $9 million coach has called it “the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men.” That thought must amuse the Marines patrolling Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.
This combination of photos provided by Boston University shows sections from a normal brain, top, and from the brain of former University of Texas football player Greg Ploetz, bottom, in stage IV of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (Ann Mckee, Md/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
The prevalence of CTE seems to me to be caused by a very simple thing: Newtonian physics. That which is in motion will stay in motion, and that which is at rest will stay at rest. In this case "that" refers to the brain.
A major study out Tuesday, July 25 found that nearly 90 percent of former football players studied had CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (Reuters)
I'm too lazy to look it up but didn't tncr decide that "major" study was flawed?
Would that make it a minor study?
The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
Death of NFL inevitable as middle class abandons the game
John Kass
To witness the death of the multi-billion dollar National Football League, you really don't need to see sportswriters wringing their hands over the moral dilemma of covering America's Roman circus of brain trauma.
And you don't need to watch multi-millionaire football stars, pampered for most of their lives, ostentatiously disrespecting the American national anthem, kneeling, their raised fists in the air.
You don't need to see the desperation in the NFL's television commercials: actresses in team gear, holding snack trays to feed their (virtual) extended team-gear-wearing families, as the NFL begs middle-class women to mother their game before it dies.
You don't have to do any of that to see how football is dying.
All you have to do is go out to a youth football field, as I did on Sunday morning, and talk to parents and coaches.
"Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level," says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.
"And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one."
Out on the field, the Wheaton Rams and the Lyons Tigers were going at it, having fun. Parents and grandparents watching, sipping lattes, a few dads nervously pacing the sidelines as dads always do, willing prowess on their sons.
But what do the numbers from the hometown of the "Wheaton Ice Man," the great Red Grange, tell us about football in America?
"If dropping from five teams of fourth-graders to one doesn't tell you what's happening, nothing will," Herrera said. "Football is such a great game, it teaches great lessons to young men. But I've got a sense of dread for this game of football that I love."
Herrera cares about the lessons the game can teach. He and other coaches are deadly serious about instilling "heads up" tackling techniques to protect the heads of their players.
"But it's the parents," he said. "They're worried about the brain."
It is all about the brain. The brains that are injured in the game, yes, but also about how the human mind works, as the American middle class withdraws from football, a cultural trend that will cut the NFL away from American virtue.
What is virtuous about brain damage? I'd prefer to watch prizefighters. At least prizefighting is honest about its violence. It doesn't wrap itself up in mom and apple pie.
Four years ago I wrote a column saying that football was dead in this country, as dead as the Marlboro Man, though it didn't know it yet.
Putting your kids in football would be akin to giving them cigarettes, and leave you to face the withering judgment of your friends and neighbors.
I was hated for it, accused of wussifying American boys. Some even called me a liberal. Now though, years later, the water is warm and others have jumped in, as the feeding frenzy around the NFL becomes undeniable.
Without that feeder system to provide fresh meat and fresh brains for the NFL meat grinder, the NFL as we know it is doomed.
There is still enough talent and size to fill the ranks. And gambling drives the game along. But without its connection to the middle class, the NFL loses what it can't afford to lose — market share.
You really think the NFL is worried about young athletes? If so, they'd have changed the rules years ago, abandoning face masks, enlarging the ball to make it difficult to throw, switching to one platoon football.
But they're not worried about players. They're worried about their money.
Parents read the news, they know about concussions and CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. While a recent study wasn't random — brains were donated by concerned families — the analysis by Boston University of brains from dead players showed that of 111 brains from NFL players, 110 suffered CTE, a condition causing depression, psychosis, dementia, memory loss and death.
And what does science tell us?
It's not the concussions that are killing football. Every sport has danger in it, and concussions can happen in basketball, soccer, perhaps even badminton, for all I know.
And as a soccer dad — with two sons playing in college — I've spent my share of nights in emergency rooms. Concussions happen when brave athletes collide at speed, and mostly, it's the brave ones who get hurt.
There has been a pathetic and desperate spin by football to lump soccer and other contact sports into the discussion to save itself.
But it can't. Because what makes football different from the others is the design of the game — sending bodies crashing in high speed, high impact collisions. It is what makes it awesome and dangerous and fun to play.
Heads get in the way. And football provides not only concussions, but by design, multiple hits to the head. There is no getting around this.
"Sure I'm concerned," said one of the moms at the game, a lawyer who is no stranger to courtroom debates about liability. "But he loves the game so much. We haven't made a decision as to how long he'll play. At this level, they're just learning, they're not big enough to hurt each other. Later? I'm thinking about it."
Parents of youth football players are already feeling pressure and social stigma.
"It's not like smoking, yet," said a dad. "But it's getting there."
I enjoyed the game. A lot. Only played high school, not enough size or talent for college (close, but no cookie for a Div II school). Broken arm, torqued knee, some stitches here and there, staph infection (bled for a season with that one. Used to get down in a three-point and flick blood at the guy across from me), one honey of a concussion (only time I've ever spent the night in a hospital).
Even at that level, there's nothing like laying on a big hit and hearing the crowd go "Oohhhhh!
Absolutely stupid, I know. But when you are that age, you're ten feet tall and bullet-proof. I guess that's why I have Rice Krispy Disease. When I sit for awhile in a chair, as I get up you can hear snap, crackle and pop. I can't even imagine what an NFL guy feels like at my age...
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
And it's not just football, any contact sport and some non-contact can provide concussions.
The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
Death of NFL inevitable as middle class abandons the game
John Kass
To witness the death of the multi-billion dollar National Football League, you really don't need to see sportswriters wringing their hands over the moral dilemma of covering America's Roman circus of brain trauma.
And you don't need to watch multi-millionaire football stars, pampered for most of their lives, ostentatiously disrespecting the American national anthem, kneeling, their raised fists in the air.
You don't need to see the desperation in the NFL's television commercials: actresses in team gear, holding snack trays to feed their (virtual) extended team-gear-wearing families, as the NFL begs middle-class women to mother their game before it dies.
You don't have to do any of that to see how football is dying.
All you have to do is go out to a youth football field, as I did on Sunday morning, and talk to parents and coaches.
"Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level," says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.
"And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one."
Out on the field, the Wheaton Rams and the Lyons Tigers were going at it, having fun. Parents and grandparents watching, sipping lattes, a few dads nervously pacing the sidelines as dads always do, willing prowess on their sons.
But what do the numbers from the hometown of the "Wheaton Ice Man," the great Red Grange, tell us about football in America?
"If dropping from five teams of fourth-graders to one doesn't tell you what's happening, nothing will," Herrera said. "Football is such a great game, it teaches great lessons to young men. But I've got a sense of dread for this game of football that I love."
Herrera cares about the lessons the game can teach. He and other coaches are deadly serious about instilling "heads up" tackling techniques to protect the heads of their players.
"But it's the parents," he said. "They're worried about the brain."
It is all about the brain. The brains that are injured in the game, yes, but also about how the human mind works, as the American middle class withdraws from football, a cultural trend that will cut the NFL away from American virtue.
What is virtuous about brain damage? I'd prefer to watch prizefighters. At least prizefighting is honest about its violence. It doesn't wrap itself up in mom and apple pie.
Four years ago I wrote a column saying that football was dead in this country, as dead as the Marlboro Man, though it didn't know it yet.
Putting your kids in football would be akin to giving them cigarettes, and leave you to face the withering judgment of your friends and neighbors.
I was hated for it, accused of wussifying American boys. Some even called me a liberal. Now though, years later, the water is warm and others have jumped in, as the feeding frenzy around the NFL becomes undeniable.
Without that feeder system to provide fresh meat and fresh brains for the NFL meat grinder, the NFL as we know it is doomed.
There is still enough talent and size to fill the ranks. And gambling drives the game along. But without its connection to the middle class, the NFL loses what it can't afford to lose — market share.
You really think the NFL is worried about young athletes? If so, they'd have changed the rules years ago, abandoning face masks, enlarging the ball to make it difficult to throw, switching to one platoon football.
But they're not worried about players. They're worried about their money.
Parents read the news, they know about concussions and CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. While a recent study wasn't random — brains were donated by concerned families — the analysis by Boston University of brains from dead players showed that of 111 brains from NFL players, 110 suffered CTE, a condition causing depression, psychosis, dementia, memory loss and death.
And what does science tell us?
It's not the concussions that are killing football. Every sport has danger in it, and concussions can happen in basketball, soccer, perhaps even badminton, for all I know.
And as a soccer dad — with two sons playing in college — I've spent my share of nights in emergency rooms. Concussions happen when brave athletes collide at speed, and mostly, it's the brave ones who get hurt.
There has been a pathetic and desperate spin by football to lump soccer and other contact sports into the discussion to save itself.
But it can't. Because what makes football different from the others is the design of the game — sending bodies crashing in high speed, high impact collisions. It is what makes it awesome and dangerous and fun to play.
Heads get in the way. And football provides not only concussions, but by design, multiple hits to the head. There is no getting around this.
"Sure I'm concerned," said one of the moms at the game, a lawyer who is no stranger to courtroom debates about liability. "But he loves the game so much. We haven't made a decision as to how long he'll play. At this level, they're just learning, they're not big enough to hurt each other. Later? I'm thinking about it."
Parents of youth football players are already feeling pressure and social stigma.
"It's not like smoking, yet," said a dad. "But it's getting there."
It's already there, dad. It's there.
Now, let me tell you why this guy is full of crap.
Middle class people do not provide most of the players for an elite program. Most of those kids are black and most of their families are far from rich, sometimes not even lower middle class. Playing ball is their ticket to a college education, maybe even the big money in the NFL.
Middle class people sit in the bleachers, rich people sit in the luxury boxes. And everybody watches the gladiators who salute them, prepared to die.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
Will the NFL's P&L hurt when the middle class stops watching football on TV? Is the brain damage issue enough to drive the middle class to stop watching football on TV?
Will the NFL's P&L hurt when the middle class stops watching football on TV? Is the brain damage issue enough to drive the middle class to stop watching football on TV?
The reason that numbers are down, is overexposure.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
Will the NFL's P&L hurt when the middle class stops watching football on TV? Is the brain damage issue enough to drive the middle class to stop watching football on TV?
The reason that numbers are down, is overexposure.
Not what I asked, but be that as it may ...
Will the NFL's P&L hurt when they cut the NFL's exposure on TV?
Will the NFL's P&L hurt when the middle class stops watching football on TV? Is the brain damage issue enough to drive the middle class to stop watching football on TV?
The reason that numbers are down, is overexposure.
Not what I asked, but be that as it may ...
Will the NFL's P&L hurt when they cut the NFL's exposure on TV?
I already said why the middle class will not abandon the game. As for the next question...
Not in my opinion.
I'm old enough to remember when Monday Night Football was must see tv. Now you've got Monday night games, Sunday night games, Thursday night games and even Saturday games when the regular college season is over. You can oversaturate a product, which is what I think the NFL has done. Cut back a bit and leave them wanting more.
For other business moves...Personally, I'd like to see them go back to a developmental league in the spring, such as NFL Europe. I think it helps some players develop their talent while also broadening the game's appeal. When the league was still viewed as developmental, attendance was surprisingly good and stars like HOF Kurt Warner and Jake Delhomme were quarterbacking in the league. It died because the talent level declined, because of NFL owners not using the league for what it was intended for.
Secondly, if they could get a domed stadium, I could see a team in Mexico City. And while the Canadians do have a good league of their own, I would think a NFL franchise could make it up there in a dome. And, the situation in L.A. is inexplicable. The NFL has never figured out why they shouldn't have multiple teams in that town and now they have two, going on three. Bad business, especially when some cities such as San Antonio or St. Louis are without. San Antonio alone has an area population of around 2m, counting Austin and I think a franchise would do well there, especially since you have built-in rivalries with the Texans and the Cowboys.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy