I cannot believe the amount of violence (both within and in-the-name-of) with respect to football.
George Will wrote a column for The Washington Post in which he said:
Football's problem with danger on the field is not going away.
There's a painful fact that this country, in it's blind religious addiction to this sport, will refuse to admit:
Football is America's new blood-sport. And those who play it are expected to pay with their very lives.
Will, after making reference to the brain-trauma/football-related deaths of Junior Seau, Ray Easterling, and Dave Duerson:
"Football is bigger than ever, in several senses. Bear Bryant’s 1966 undefeated Alabama team had only 19 players who weighed more than 200 pounds. The heaviest weighed 223. The linemen averaged 194. The quarterback weighed 177. Today, many high school teams are much bigger. In 1980, only three NFL players weighed 300 or more pounds. In 2011, according to pro-football-reference.com, there were 352, including three 350-pounders. Thirty-one of the NFL’s 32 offensive lines averaged more than 300."
(Links are from the quote itself.)
I read a quote like this, and I'm reminded of a high-school game I came across on ESPN networks one Friday night as I was in a hotel, attending a convention.
I know it was a California game, and I believe that the player I recall was from Long Beach Poly.
The kid was a junior lineman, something like 6-4 and 315 pounds!
There's three problems with that:
- I am basically convinced he's on steroids.
- There's no way that can be safe for the other kids involved.
- The players, at all levels, are getting too big and too fast not to do this kind of damage.
"Various unsurprising studies indicate high early mortality rates among linemen resulting from cardiovascular disease. For all players who play five or more years, life expectancy is less than 60; for linemen it is much less."
The fact is, teams are building literal human walls around their quarterbacks.
And then battering rams to break through the other team's walls.
Will has studies which indicate that a five-year NFL career (and all that leads up to it) takes over eighteen years off the average life expectancy, compared with the 78.2 years that an American is expected to live, according to the World Bank.
Will notes that the number of plaintiffs against the NFL and football with respect to concussion-related injuries and deaths is now over three thousand. But one fact is true:
"We are, however, rapidly reaching the point where playing football is like smoking cigarettes: The risks are well-known."
And, at that point, one has to believe that it will be similarly regulated, and outlawed in many cases.
He certainly has little hope for the future of American sport, or the intelligence of it's fans, if this statement of his is to be believed:
"Degenerate prizefighting, or prizefighting for degenerates — called mixed martial arts or “ultimate fighting” — is booming."
Though I will say that, at least at the major levels, MMA is making far more attempts than some might believe to ensure that it's as safe as possible.
Far more than what boxing ever did, that's for sure!
But Will does believe that football, especially at the professional level, is going into serious decline in the next generation or so:
" [...] in this age of bubble-wrapped children, when parents put helmets on wee tricycle riders, many children are going to be steered away from youth football, diverting the flow of talent to the benefit of other sports"
There will be certain hotbeds (Texas, Florida, etc.) where this won't take place. But in areas where schools have to cut every dollar they can (and who don't exist simply to field a football team every autumn Friday night -- which more and more of them effectively DO!), you might see teams reduce their liability risk.
"In the NFL, especially, football is increasingly a spectacle, a game surrounded by manufactured frenzy, on the grass and in the increasingly unpleasant ambiance of the fans in the stands."
"Manufactured frenzy"...
Remember, in all of this, that since sports (and especially football) is nothing more than a business venture, that the outcomes must be tightly controlled: for money for the league, for whatever legal gambling interests the leagues (professional and otherwise) are married to (which witness the effects by these leagues to sue the state of New Jersey to prevent Gov. Christie from creating legal sportsbooks in the state), for the sponsors, or for whatever political agendas the leagues might have.
"Football on the field is a three-hour adrenaline-and-testosterone bath. For all its occasional elegance and beauty, it is basically violence for, among other purposes, inflicting intimidating pain. (Seau said his job was “to inflict pain on my opponent and have him quit.”) The New Orleans Saints’ “bounty” system of cash payments to players who knocked opposing players out of games crossed a line distinguishing the essence of the game from the perversion of it. This is, however, an increasingly faint line."
There is no line, Mr. Will. There is no essence of the game which does not pervert it. Look at that football coach in Frisco, Texas, as a great example -- pounding this mentality into a bunch of eight year-olds so he can continue the pipeline for the glory of the only thing which gives boys in many communities any sort of importance.
"Decades ago, this column lightheartedly called football a mistake because it combines two of the worst features of American life — violence, punctuated by committee meetings, which football calls huddles. Now, however, accumulating evidence about new understandings of the human body — the brain, especially, but not exclusively — compel the conclusion that football is a mistake because the body is not built to absorb, and cannot be adequately modified by training or protected by equipment to absorb, the game’s kinetic energies."
The players are too big and too fast, Mr. Will. Much of this is chemically-enhanced, yes -- but the fact is that the players have gotten too big and too fast for the safety of anyone involved.
It is that simple.
It is that direct.
And the fact that the games and outcomes are tightly controlled makes it even worse.
"After 18 people died playing football in 1905, even President Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and gore generally, flinched and forced some rules changes. Today, however, the problem is not the rules; it is the fiction that football can be fixed and still resemble the game fans relish."
And there it is in a nutshell:
It is FICTIONAL to believe that football can be feasibly repaired, especially given the medical realities we now know.
Needless to say, Mr. Will's correct comments have not been received very well in the blogosphere:
Terence Jeffrey of "The Patriot Post":
"A group of researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health -- including Sherry L. Baron, M.D., Misty J. Hein, Ph.D., Everett Lehman and Christine Gersic -- conducted a study of mortality among 3,439 men who had played at least five years in the NFL between 1959 and 1988. Their report appeared in Volume 109, Issue 6 of the American Journal of Cardiology.
"Overall," the study concluded, "retired NFL players from the 1959 through the 1988 seasons showed decreased all-cause and (cardiovascular disease) mortalities compared to a referent United States population of men."
Which, of course, conveniently attempts to dodge the present realities of the game by limiting the study to players who played the game more then TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Mr. Jeffrey.
One of Mr. Will's central theses is that the players are now too big and too fast. In 1980, near the end of your quoted survey period, only three NFL players weighed over 300 pounds. Last year, each team had an average of ELEVEN such players. On every team.
Try again, Mr. Jeffrey.
A Washington Times community, the Tygrrr Express (oh gee, where do you think that mentality arises?), goes further, and asks that, for the preservation of football, the Post silence Mr. Will!
Eric Golub:
"What is not in dispute is that where there is a George Will, there is a badly written column offering nothing of value to society."
Of course not -- when society is so religiously attached to football that not even death can separate them...
"Mr. Will is that rare combination, an elitist snob who knows absolutely nothing. This may explain why nobody has seen him and Barack Obama in the same room at the same time."
Well, there's another reason: Obama is the current head cheerleader for said National Religion.
"George Will wants to ban football."
He disclaims it. I believe the evidence is mounting as to why.
"First of all, he is not a football fan troubled by a game he loves. He has never liked football, and therefore has clouded judgment. Like many incredibly boring individuals, Will worships baseball. He is qualified to speak about the sport of the early 19th century. He can wax poetic about Honus Wagner and Mordechai "Three Finger" Brown. He does not know football."
You don't need to know football to know how dangerous it is and tie a string of deaths (as well as religious-conspiracy-level coverups -- Penn State, anyone?) to the sport.
(Oh, and Mr. Mark Emmert, you've now had three evidences that Penn State's "culture of football" will fight you tooth and nail to outlast you. Kill the damn program, or the NCAA will die.)
In stating that Mr. Will does not know football, Mr. Golub counters:
""Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease."
Wrong. Yes there is excitement when a quarterback gets belted to the ground, but nobody wants to see that quarterback stay down. In fact, the glory of the game is ruined by injuries. The expression in football is that "offense is entertainment, but defense wins championships." Fans want to be entertained. They do not want to see 0-0 ties. They want to see pinball-machine scoring. They celebrate touchdown passes, touchdown receptions, and brilliant touchdown runs."
Which the current concussion-awareness waves will probably enforce. I predict that at least 12 of the 16 games in Week One of the NFL will go over the posted Vegas number -- in fact, one of the premises I enter this season with is the de facto outlawing of defense as it has been known in the National Football League.
That said, if it were simply that, why did the Arena League fail (and had to be reconstituted)? The "fifty-yard war", as it was known, is all about pinball-machine scoring.
Because that's not all what people want to see. They want to see the bone-jarring hits, etc. And many of the fans DO want to see the other QB stay down. (Consider how much QB's like Tom Brady and the like are pivotal to Super Bowl championships -- not to the exclusion of other players, but still pivotal...)
So that doesn't work either. If fans simply wanted to be entertained by scoring, defense would exist solely as a means to create "unforced errors" on the part of opposing offenses. Actually stopping same would be outlawed.
"Football fans are much more sophisticated than Will could ever possibly understand. Brain damage is caused by helmet-to-helmet hits, which fans dislike. They dislike injuries, and they dislike concussions. They like clean hits from a shoulder to a chest. They stand in silent prayer when a player is injured and cheer loudly when the player gets back up. No true football fan likes injuries."
You're right on that last sentence. Now, how many "true football fans" exist today, especially in the age of ESPN glorifying Ronnie Lott spearing someone like a missile across the center of the field?
I thought so... There's your problem. You assume that a football fan, being a "true football fan", has a conscience. And therein lies your fatal flaw!
What they, and players, do when you say they do these things is, at best, a social requirement, and at worst disingenuous! If the football fraternities of fans and players did not want to see injuries like that, they'd have changed the game long before now to, more, resemble the Arena League of old.
They only don't want their team to be injured. What their team does to the others, the more violent and brutal, the better...
"Mr. Will pretends to truly care about the toll football has on the human body. The real truth is he just has contempt for the game of football. He sees it as a game for the plebeians not erudite enough to read his columns."
And what if he's right? See the comment I just made... At best, football fans are doing the right thing only because it's the right thing to do and socially required. At worst, it's disingenuous. You don't think a Chicago Bear fan wouldn't like to see someone run over Aaron Rodgers with a truck?
"I was at the NFL Owners meetings this past March. A panel of fans made it clear that what they wanted most was that the integrity of the game be maintained. This meant increasing player safety, since head injuries are often the result of being hit outside the rules of the game."
Unless you were on that panel, I would not say that the "integrity of the game" concerns had to do with player safety -- nor do I think Roger Goddell is interested in either side of that one iota.
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