Junior Seau Found Dead in Home

#201
#201
HSVol said:
As I've said multiple times, I believe football does cause CTE and think some things need to change.

However, there are tens of millions of men living normal lives after absorbing 1000s of hits playing football. Sure, everyone is worked up about Junior Seau, Ray Easterling, and Dave Duerson committing suicide, but we shouldn't let these gruesome examples distract us from the reality that the vast, vast majority of men who played football are capable of living perfectly normal, healthy, successful lives.

There are risks involved with football and every boy that wants to play must be made aware of those risks. The game can also be made a little safer. But I hardly think we should kill a sport that has given so many millions of people so much. We can't just live our lives in a bubble, afraid to never try anything. We're all going to die.

Junior Seau is the extreme exception, not the rule. Let's not overreact here.
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I'm by no means describing what I think should happen; I'm describing what I think will happen, organically, slowly, and inexorably. Fewer and fewer kids will be playing. Better brain scanning technology is coming; that's going to dramatically shorten and/or limit the careers of those kids who do play. (Right now it's a guessing game when you can put a guy who's had a concussion back in; what's going to happen when we can actually see the damage a bad hit causes? Will it be one concussion and your career's over? How will any league short of the NFL be in a legal situation where it can be much else?)

American football as we know it depends on young kids deciding to participate in what medicine is showing to be an inherently destructive activity (not merely a risky one) [1] and then taking part in that activity for free for a bunch of years until they can finally get paid. I just don't see much way that that "you play for free and assume all the risks, kid" foundation of football is going to survive the coming onslaught of A) even better medical science technology and B) lawyers.

The NFL's future would be a lot more secure if it didn't depend on all those kids playing for free for years beforehand. Maybe they'll eventually move to a model where kids sign a waiver, start playing "real" football at 18, play in a developmental league for money, and then either move up or quit. That might be what the NFL needs to do to save the sport.



[1] It's an important distinction. Parachuting, for example, is risky rather than destructive: you can jump out of a plane 10,000 times and you'll still be fine unless something unusual happens. Or bicycling. Or trying to hit a 90 mph fastball. Or a hundred other things. Football is different, in that there is no way to play it without your head getting banged around in a way that we're learning is cumulatively destructive. That's a different kind of "risk" entirely.
 
#202
#202
Each helmet should have a beach ball surrounding it. Problem solved
 
#203
#203
Autopsy results said his brain didn't show signs of trauma. No drugs or alcohol in his system other than aleve and traces of insomnia medicine.
 
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