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EmailThe latest cover story for Time magazine is, ahem, particularly well-timed. My snail-mail version arrived the day before the NFL Pro Bowl game and on the eve of the excesses of Super Bowl week.
The story is ostensibly about football injury but focused almost exclusively on concussions: injuries suffered when the skull abruptly stops but the encased brain continues moving and is damaged by cranial impact. Sensible reforms are offered by author Sean Gregory and others.
It’s a story of Northwest interest if only because it quotes from the anecdotes of a young Port Angeles player and also notes the Zackery Lystedt Law, passed last year in Washington state. The law requires that young athletes suspected of sustaining concussions sit out football until licensed medical providers trained about concussions clear them to play. Interviewed is Seattle attorney Richard Adler, a primary designer of the law.
The author of the not-oppressively lengthy piece dwells almost exclusively on head trauma. The fact is that myriad other injuries are incurred as part of the spectacle of football, the nation’s fan-fave sporting attraction.
A few years ago I asked a well-known, Seattle-bred athlete and decade-long NFL player to recite for me briefly the injuries he incurred during his pro years. He started with the top of his body and eventually, about 10 minutes later, had worked his way down to the ankles (sprained) and toes (broken). Then he observed that football would continue to get more dangerous if only because of the inevitable consequences of physics: bigger, faster athletes in constant contact.
The thought of this occurred to me an hour after finishing the Time article, as I met with parents of a prized high-school player thinking about coming to the University of Washington and becoming a major in the Department of Communication, where I teach. He was among perhaps two-dozen potential recruits. Virtually all of them appeared as big and perhaps as strong as guys I see in the Seahawks locker room, even though the visitors obviously are all still in high school and no doubt getting bigger and faster all the time.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Feb 1, 1:18 a.m. Inappropriate
I don’t see why the NFL owners should lose their anti-trust exemption because they have been slow to act regarding injuries to the old timers? Those old timers get pensions from the NFL, don’t they? And, the equipment was not as good back then so is that the owners fault, too? The NFL players were well paid back then, and the owners did not make as much money back then so they dont have to use any payday loans. Non-football players (like me) are paying exorbitant out of pocket health care costs every day. I have no use for the owners but football players know the risks – especially running backs who generally don’t last many years. Our (out of touch) Congress and the rest of America needs to be concerned about the average men and women out there without jobs; without pensions and without heath care – former football players should fall way down the list of important priorities.
Posted Tue, Feb 2, 4:52 p.m. Inappropriate
In car racing they put limits on engines and wings and other performance drivers so that both safety and competitiveness are achieved. In wrestling they have weight classes for the same reason. No reason not to something similar in the NFL. For example, put an overall limit on the gross weight of the entire football team at say an average of 220 lbs. Or use a handicapping system like horseracing where a team or individual athletes wear extra weighted coats to slow them down depending on their size. E.g., the 250 running back has to wear a hundred pound jacket that makes him slower but the little 180 lb back goes unhandicapped. Then there would be an incentive to not get too big. Or require linebackers and safeties to wear helmets with enormous shock-absorbing pads on their helmets, which in my amateur opinion is the single biggest cause of concussions and life threatening and paralyzing injury. Real football players and coaches will come up with trade-offs that make sense and that don't hurt the game and still provide for hard-hitting football. Think about it: why do you think football players wear helmets? Someone decided long ago that football is intrinsically dangerous and that negative impacts for all players could be mitigated by requiring helmets. Even the most extreme proponents of more violent, let-'em-play-and-we'll-sort-out-the-bodies-later football have no problem with players wearing helmets and pads. Coming up with ways to make football a lot safer is easy. Actually instituting changes in the challenge, just as it is with health care or any other enterprise with a lot of stakeholder groups.