On a day where a mass baseball-style exchange occurred in Philadelphia (it wasn't that much of a brawl -- it was more a bunch of players trying to get in a two-man fight after a defenseless-player cheapie and not doing much while doing so), Dan Le Betard of ESPN asks the question which, frankly, could end football:
Does football itself contribute to bad behavior NFL can't prevent?
For anyone who's been paying attention, this is the question which no one wants to answer at any level of football, because the only real answer to the question ends football at all levels.
If anyone does not believe that some of these injuries do contribute (not in the style that Jim Nantz tried to use to defend Ray Rice, but, more, in the style of what, for example, killed Nancy Benoit) to some of these players literally going murderously insane, you have a mounting pile of evidence which indicates you are wrong!
I've begun, after years of talking with ex-NFL fans about it, to use the same term Ralph Nader used to use about certain cars for the sport of football: "Unsafe at any speed."
Le Batard's first paragraph says volumes:
"Football has gotten too big and too strong and too violent, and maybe the collateral damage can't be controlled or governed, not even by the most punitive commissioner in the history of sports, who this week was reduced to a public piñata by his league. America's favorite bloodsport continues to sell the nobility and strength of the human spirit while every limping week, as bodies pile up on the sidelines, we learn a little more about how the sport has outgrown the limits of the human body and the human brain."
That's players hopped up on steroids, HGH, and God knows what else to make them bigger, faster, stronger, etc.
It all comes down to Newton's Second Law. If you make an athlete bigger and faster, he will exert more force.
Enough force, and it doesn't matter whether the hit is legal or not, it will injure the opponent.
Enough such injuries, and you may create a monster.
One of the only disagreements I have is the "evidence" given that the amount of domestic violence of football players pales to the rest of America. Especially if we start to understand the sport's role in the disease of CTE, and then CTE's role in maddening levels of instant insanity...
Le Batard makes the point again later in the article:
"There is no winning argument on the other side of that Rice elevator video or a photo of a beaten 4-year-old or the visceral and sick reaction America had to seeing them. But is it at all possible at least some of these crazy criminals being handcuffed in football are, in fact, being made crazy and criminal by all these brain-altering collisions?
Before you dismiss that football itself might be an accomplice when it comes to some violent and erratic behavior you don't see with the same regularity in other sports, before you rail with judgment about personal accountability and those millionaire punks, remember that old warriors such as Junior Seau and Andre Waters and Dave Duerson killed themselves to stop all the pain and darkness, with their choice seeming rational to them amid their evidently altered brain chemistry, ending life a better idea than living it, suicide as solution."
Le Batard is already on the outs with the network as it is.
This article, probably, is another example of ESPN getting "too close" to actual investigative reporting for
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