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Football will be irrelevant in 15-20 years.

SP33Demon

SP33Demon

Lifer
Proof: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/hea...rain-injury/qvJNGvLChiDRQOC0xkIKUJ/story.html

Link to actual study from Brain Journal:
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/con...html?sid=010b634a-f023-430f-8488-2d220d3300f3

ESPN Outside the Lines podcast:
http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=8706798

"The sheer volume of cases I think is going to just overwhelm anybody that wants to be in denial about the existence of this problem," said Robert C. Cantu, a co-director of BU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy and a senior adviser to the NFL on concussions.

Previously, CTE had been found in 18 of the 19 former NFL players whose brains were examined. The 15 new cases in the BU study mean that of the 34 brains of former NFL players that have been examined, 33 had the disease. Linemen made up 40 percent of those cases, supporting research that suggests repetitive head trauma occurring on every play -- not concussions associated with violent collisions -- may be the biggest risk.
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With the recent Chiefs murder + suicide, which is most likely caused by CTE (I would bet money he had CTE), how many more cases like this have to happen before people start to think twice about exposing their kids to the risks of repeated subconcussive (yes, not even concussive as previously thought) hits in sports such as football?

It starts with the kids, and if parents aren't willing to put their kids at risk, the sport will become less and less popular. Over time this will lead to irrelevancy, considering the NFL will have to institute more "pussified" rules to combat such negative publicity. The NFL cannot continue to ignore what the medical world is telling us forever, this is inevitable. Also, how many more lawsuits will the NFL have to pay out to players' families to keep the gravy train rolling?

Let's stop avoiding the elephant in the room and acknowledge that this is a huge risk to our kids.
 
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The BU research, which was funded in part by a $1 million gift from the NFL, has been limited to individual case studies of subjects who were significantly impaired before their deaths, making it impossible to measure the prevalence of CTE or establish conclusively that repetitive head trauma triggered the disease, according to some scientists.
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Um yeah, I think we will have to wait for more research before making conclusions...
 
SP33Demon said:
It starts with the kids, and if parents aren't willing to put their kids at risk, the sport will become less and less popular.
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This doesn't make a lot of sense. Where do most of the football stars come from? The inner city and poor areas of the nation.

You think that will change because of concussion research? Parents have always been worried about their kids playing football and getting hurt, moms mostly, this is no different. As long as there is money to be made, there will be kids and the parents who are living through their kids vicariously, who will risk that for the money and fame.

Basically, what I'm saying is - as long as there are poor people there will be football. Or at least people struggling to get by.
 
cheezy321 said:
Um yeah, I think we will have to wait for more research before making conclusions...
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Why should we have to wait until someone is in a bad enough impaired state (dementia, ahlzeimers, suicide) to test for CTE? It can almost be assumed that they will have it as over 90% of cases already show it. The problem is that it can happen to any player at any time, it's a timeb0mb waiting to go off as in the case of Junior Seau or the tragedy over the weekend.

As medical tech gets more advanced, soon they will be able to test for CTE without a postmortem biopsy. And that day will be the death knell for football if it's as prevalent as this early research indicates.
 
BD231 said:
Only a dumbass would blame every day occurence on head injury.
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Wat?

"So probably at the lowest level, the incidence of CTE is four times greater in NFL players than the population at large would lead you to expect," Cantu said. "But that's really the bottom of what it is. And where, how much higher than that it is, we really don't know."

Long-term brain damage was first documented in boxers in the 1920s. It was not seen in football players until 2005, when a Pittsburgh pathologist, Bennet Omalu, diagnosed late Hall of Fame Steelers center Mike Webster with CTE -- a finding that was hotly contested by the NFL but is no longer disputed.

The data indicate that CTE advances both with exposure to head trauma and with age, according to the BU study. So typically, the longer a player spent in the NFL, the worse his case looked.

"We believe that this is a dose-related phenomenon -- not just to concussions but total brain trauma," said Cantu. "So clearly there's a relation to how many hits you've taken, and that does correlate with how long you played."
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Only a fucking idiot believes that repeated hits to the head aren't going to cause significant brain damage.
 
At some point football will have to accept a redesigned helmet that can be effective protecting the head from concussive injuries as opposed to the current one, which is used as a weapon, helping to create brain injuries.
 
SP33Demon said:
It starts with the kids, and if parents aren't willing to put their kids at risk, the sport will become less and less popular. Over time this will lead to irrelevancy, considering the NFL will have to institute more "pussified" rules to combat such negative publicity.
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You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means. 🙂

The NFL could simply make team sizes larger and limit the amount of playing time per game for each player. They could also limit career length for certain high risk positions.

Irrelevancy not found.

-KeithP
 
I doubt it. People risk their well being just for the thrill of an activity let alone for millions of dollars. No one is forcing these players to put their names on contracts. Some people may be discouraged from letting their kids play, but there will always be people willing to take that risk for the fame and fortune.
 
SP33Demon said:
Why should we have to wait until someone is in a bad enough impaired state (dementia, ahlzeimers, suicide) to test for CTE? It can almost be assumed that they will have it as over 90% of cases already show it. The problem is that it can happen to any player at any time, it's a timeb0mb waiting to go off as in the case of Junior Seau or the tragedy over the weekend.

As medical tech gets more advanced, soon they will be able to test for CTE without a postmortem biopsy. And that day will be the death knell for football if it's as prevalent as this early research indicates.
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I think its pretty presumsuous to think this guy had CTE. He was young and doesn't even really play in the NFL, he has been a journey man and backup player who plays on special teams his whole NFL career. Others whom have shown signs of CTE, like Seau whom you used, played for 20 freakin years in the NFL while taking 90+% of the snaps on defense. How is that comparable to Jovan Belcher who is 25 years old and his 4 years in the NFL he was never a starter?

You make no sense and neither does that argument in the slightest
 
For those interested in reading the actual study:
http://www.espn.go.com/pdf/2012/1201/otl_espn_Brain_study.pdf

From the abstract:
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a progressive tauopathy that occurs as a consequence of repetitive mild traumatic brain 35 injury. We analysed post-mortem brains obtained from a cohort of 85 subjects with histories of repetitive mild traumatic brain injury and found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in 68 subjects: all males, ranging in age from 17 to 98 years (mean 59.5 years), including 64 athletes, 21 military veterans (86% of whom were also athletes) and one individual who engaged in self-injurious head banging behaviour. Eighteen age- and gender-matched individuals without a history of repetitive mild traumatic brain injury served as control subjects. In chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the spectrum of hyperphosphory-40 lated tau pathology ranged in severity from focal perivascular epicentres of neurofibrillary tangles in the frontal neocortex to severe tauopathy affecting widespread brain regions, including the medial temporal lobe, thereby allowing a progressive staging of pathology from stages I–IV. Multifocal axonal varicosities and axonal loss were found in deep cortex and subcortical white matter at all stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. TAR DNA-binding protein 43 immunoreactive inclusions and neurites were also found in 85% of cases, ranging from focal pathology in stages I–III to widespread inclusions and neurites in stage IV. Symptoms in stage I chronic traumatic encephalopathy included headache and loss of attention and concentration. Additional symptoms in stage II included depression, explosivity and short-term memory loss. In stage III, executive dysfunction and cognitive 5 impairment were found, and in stage IV, dementia, word-finding difficulty and aggression were characteristic. Data on athletic
exposure were available for 34 American football players; the stage of chronic traumatic encephalopathy correlated with increased duration of football play, survival after football and age at death. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy was the sole diagnosis in 43 cases (63%); eight were also diagnosed with motor neuron disease (12%), seven with Alzheimer’s disease (11%), 11 with Lewy body disease (16%) and four with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (6%). There is an ordered and predictable progression 10 of hyperphosphorylated tau abnormalities through the nervous system in chronic traumatic encephalopathy that occurs in conjunction with widespread axonal disruption and loss. The frequent association of chronic traumatic encephalopathy with other neurodegenerative disorders suggests that repetitive brain trauma and hyperphosphorylated tau protein deposition promote the accumulation of other abnormally aggregated proteins including TAR DNA-binding protein 43, amyloid beta protein and alpha-synuclein.
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AMDZen said:
Basically, what I'm saying is - as long as there are poor people there will be football. Or at least people struggling to get by.
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That part is true. The thing that will seal football's fate (as we know it) is the liability that the NFL takes on. With the speed of the game, and the size of the players, coinciding with the new style of play, the risk of head injury is much greater than before.

The NFL is literally killing people out there. As more data comes in showing that to be unequivocal, along with the proof that the NFL has known about these risks for some time, the NFL will be unable to stay alive in its current form.

Substantial rule changes will have to take place, along with much more strict anti-doping policies. They will have to take most of the brutality out of football, which will make interest fall off.
 
AMDZen said:
This doesn't make a lot of sense. Where do most of the football stars come from? The inner city and poor areas of the nation.

You think that will change because of concussion research? Parents have always been worried about their kids playing football and getting hurt, moms mostly, this is no different. As long as there is money to be made, there will be kids and the parents who are living through their kids vicariously, who will risk that for the money and fame.

Basically, what I'm saying is - as long as there are poor people there will be football. Or at least people struggling to get by.
Click to expand...

Once high school football is banned or sued out of existence, the infrastructure that supplies college and pro football ceases to exist, which means pro football starts to wither away.

Boxing and MMA still exist because they are individual sports that don't rely on public schools to produce each new generation of athlete. It's a whole lot easier to find and train individual kids outside of school than to supply an entire football team with dozens of players.
 
1. design better equipment/helmets
2. widely publish potential risks of playing - make sure all players are well educated
3. require signed consent forms where players acknowledge they understand the risks

football continues more or less as-is without interference from nannyism, yay!!!
 
youll have to answer for the thousands of people who kill themselves every year before any of this gains any ground. the number of nfl players that kill themselves is mind boggling low when u consider most of their careers dont last more than 6 to 8 years. media making a case where there isnt one.
 
Isn't boxing so much worse and yet we still have boxing today.

Look at Mohammed Ali, he is the most visible sign of how bad the sport can be to your health and yet boxing is still watched by millions. If it weren't for the greedy/crooked promoters it most likely would be even more popular.

MMA and Extreme boxing is huge now too.

Hell people still smoke cigarettes and we know how bad they are.

People will always do what they want to do no matter what the concequences are and no matter what science tells them.
 
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