Last week’s snowstorm must have left sports columnist Bob Ryan with an unusual case of cabin fever. How else can one explain his column asking whether America would be “better off” without football?
In “Considering the case against football” (Sports, Feb. 10), Ryan bases his argument on the premise that football is violent and unsafe, and diminishes the sport’s coaches as ignorant advocates. Tell that to the coaches across America who become role models for fatherless young men.
Comments
This whole issue is just another chicken little example of media hyped scare tactics. Most of the players autopsied, and used as proof of long term damage, also had other factors, like alcohol and drug abuse, depression and other symptoms. Those symptoms were not caused by the head injuries. They are all behavior related. Imagine the hoopla if the conclusion was made later that drug and alcohol consumption causes long term brain damage. No more beer ads? Like Rodney Harrison players are unnecessarily being scared out of their wits by half done studies. Plus there are plenty of therapies and methods to combat side effects. Leaving players with a long term paranoia about their future is immoral. Millions upon millions of men have played football over the last 100 years. Long term debilitating effects would have been noticed long ago. There isn’t any sport that doesn’t carry a risk. This is one of those conclusions in search of a study issue. We need a study of the underlying motives and biases of the researchers who come to these conclusions. I suspect that you will find that they will show that they have preexisting attitudes about how terrible football is, and unconsciously went to prove it so.
Your information is out of date, and your conclusion is flat out wrong. Research done in the last five to ten years has shown that sheer repetition of hits is at least as big a problem as the severe hits that lead to concussions. A lineman on each play experiences the equivalent of a low speed car crash. If he's an NFL veteran aged thirty, he has probably had a hundred or more of those collisions a week during games and practices for fifteen years or more. If you get hit in the head thirty thousand times, even if no one of those hits causes obvious damage, thats going to mess up your head.
Respectfully, you have already reached a conclusion, in the absence of long term, controlled studies.
That is an out of date approach.
As Ryan is fond of pointing out, the big three sports in the US used to be baseball, boxing and horse racing. Boxing and horse racing appear on the way to eventual extinction, and while baseball remains important and profitable, its status today is a far cry from the dominance it once enjoyed. What people pay attention to and enjoy inevitably changes. If the sport of football can't find a better way to protect its players, then it will decline too.