I don't think it should be outlawed or anything like that. I just don't think schools should have it as an option for sports.

I guess thats why you are an elite level poster.

That's fair, it just sort of looked like you were saying long term brain injuries/concussions are strictly the result of helmet to helmet head hunting hits and if you take away those plays you get rid of the injuries.

Oh...my bad. Thats definitely not what I was trying to say, outside of the facemask thing(which is hyperbole anyway). But, I do think, as I've said, that the major issue in football is the use of the helmet in a wrong way.

Terrible title for OP. Football will never be banned under any circumstances. The facemask will never come off. Someone dying on the field wouldn't get football banned. The economic implications would be too devastating.

What about litigations? I do not think the NFL is Merck where they can pay off hundreds of millions in lawsuits and keep on rolling without a hitch. And if the NFL starts losing lawsuits, I think you can definitely see it snowballing down to the NCAA and highschool levels, which would capitulate a lot faster.

Also, I played a year of football my freshman year of high school (I sucked) and from what I can remember it was kind of a badge of honor to trade paint with helmets of guys from the other teams, so there was definitely head-hunting going on. I played mainly special teams (again because I sucked) and on the return team especially your goal was pretty much to concuss someone with a blindside hit.

Also, I do not know if taking away football at the younger ages would necessarily help with the concussion problem. For one thing, you would lose the fundamental training at a young age, and perhaps more importantly you would lose the ability to "condition" yourself to concussions.

What I mean by that, is that the human body has a remarkable ability to adapt to stress, probably including head trauma, so by starting at a young age, where the trauma is minor and gradually building up ability to withstand head trauma, by the time a player reaches the NFL their body has built in protective mechanisms to handle trauma that would incapacitate someone that had no adaptation.

I donno how valid this theory is, but it is one I have heard before.

time to start banging our babies on the head, that'll stop concussions

I don't think that's how it works at all. If anything it gets worse as you continue to take more and more damage.

This, with each concussion you suffer another one becomes more and more likely. Basically that was the worst post i've seen someone make.

That's what I was told when I got mine. But a lot of people have no idea what concussions are about and the dangers that come from them. It's pretty dangerous to think that so many people are going to sign their kids of for football this summer and they have no idea what kind of danger that may come from it. My cousin is playing football and it worries me, that's for sure. I don't think I will allow my kid to play unless something big changes between now and then.

People have died doing a lot of different sports, car racing, boxing, mma, etc.

None of those things are banned.

They'll just continue to fiddle with the rules until it's 2 hand touch and the whole game is a pillow fight.

This is a Grear dupe, right? If so, that is a very ironic statement that was just made.

The thing about football relative to any other sport is the regularity of the helmet collisions. Even in boxing and mma fighters are only taking blows to the head during fights, they're not getting hit in the head every day in training. I've only played football at a very low level (university in the UK) but even at that level the physicality leads to more serious injuries (not just talking head injuries) per participant than pretty much any other sport played in universities.

As a 150lb receiver I wasn't exactly involved in a huge number of high impact collisions and I don't think I'd have a problem with my kid playing a similar role at a similar level, but I'd certainly be very hesitant about anything much more punishing, be it at a higher level or at a higher contact position.

lol @ this.

My dad was at every game I played 4th-12th grade. He never saw me laying on the field helpless after a head injury. Nor any of my teammates. Nor anybody on the other team. I think you're perhaps overstating the riskiness.

The testosterone rush of playing football can't be duplicated by any other American sport imo

And by far the worst injury i had in my life was breaking my arm playing baseball.

Are you including neck/spine injuries in the lying helpless on the field aspect? In the 7 games my old uni team has played so far this season (the play is probably on a level similar to ~div3 HS) there have been 2 pretty serious neck and back injuries, one of which resulted in around a 10 minute delay and one which resulted in the game being called early in the 4th.

Maybe you've been lucky but players lying helpless on the field, albeit not just for head injuries, is not exactly uncommon in football. I don't have anything empirical to back this up but I'd be shocked if it's not significantly more common than any other team sport.

"American football, in its early years, was an excessively violent game, plagued with several deaths and life-changing injuries every year. The violence became so drastic that President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to shut down the game in 1905, should rules not be changed to minimize this violence."
wikipedia

No, I'll explain why.

No, I'll explain why.

At the very least.

You couldn't be more wrong.

This is the cultish response to the dilemma, that head injuries aren't that serious.


The problem the entire thread has faced thus far is a lack of understanding of what precisely causes CTE and further brain damage. Based on everything I've researched:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic...encephalopathy

Isolated concussions are not a problem. Sustaining multiple ones are an obviously bigger concern. Getting back on the field, or even too much physical activity, before fully healed is a far graver concern. Now, you're first response to that is probably "lol tuma" or "Yeah, might be true, but we know next to nothing about how the brain functions in response to trauma"; you would be correct for both, but think of this --> To assume we know little, and to extend that to knowing when it's time to put an athlete back on the field, is a hilarious gap in logic.

(Paging Dr. Ikes/et al)

From what I've gathered, head injuries fall along a spectrum. This should be obvious. A little woozie? Coma for a week? Mild headache? All of which are symptoms of something bad happening to your brain. The severity being tested by baseline tests, such as knowing your birthday, being able to balance, no headaches etc. and w/e (I don't know a terrible lot about the tests) are a beyond imperfect way to analyze the state of the brain, given how mysterious it is. So yeah, your headaches might be gone but you still might not be 100% ready to go back to work. See: Sydney Crosby et al.

Going deeper, and a physics/biologist guy would be far better at explaining this, but again from what I've read is that the 1000s of collisions experienced over the course of the season and on are compounded so severely that they far outweigh the devastation of a concussin, manifest over a long period of time, and are mostly undetectable in the living brain. The reason is simply based on Newton's laws: An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, etc.

So what this means, is that if you're running to make a tackle, your body is in motion as your brain is. You collide to make the hit, your body comes to an immediate stop, and your brain continues forward colliding with your skull. This, repeated many many times causes severe damage to the frontal cortex, the area responsible for a lot of important ****. So essentially, you could never have a helmet-to-helmet hit and still face the same degeneration as those who've faced very obvious brain trauma.

To say the inherent collisions in the game of football/hockey are not as significant as the concussions is totally plausible. But, these football guys are freakishly big and fast, and thus the impact is more significant. But the brains aren't more muscular, or stronger. They still get wrecked, and more significantly as guys get bigger.

All of this applies to youth athletics too. Are the collisions less fierce? Of course! Is the child's brain more susceptible to long-term injury? Who knows! But the kids keep getting shoveled out there regardless.

I'm not an expert on any of this, so please correct and weigh-in if you'd like. There's a lot of good info out there.

Conclusion: Good luck designing equipment to break down the basic laws of physics.

edit: also, when they examined Chris Henry's brain, they found the frontal damage to be as severe as a late-stage alcoholic (I think)....yeah yeah the guy was an idiot, but he also didn't have a long NFL career, and only got hit a couple times a game. The lineman, I've read, are the most susceptible to this stuff.

This is possibly true, but I'd compare it to the following: A child is abused growing up, made it through the pain, and is better prepared to cope and help others cope with future abuse. That isn't to say the abuse didn't have devastating effects on the kid, that he has to carry with him his entire life.

But your argument is false, because it's well documented that you're more likely to get a concussion if you've experienced one before. This is not indicative of being able to handle trauma better.

Wow, Tumaterminator you are doing some serious work itt.

I already thought I had an adequate amount of knowledge on the topic, but I feel like I learned a lot from reading your posts. Thank you sir.

All the meat head cult of ex football players are soul crushed by tuma's post and have no clue what to post next.

Gonna cross post that to FB too.

Have at it.

I got pretty megaelitefurious when a close friend told me her little brother (hs kid) was knocked out during a hockey game, and that it wasn't a big deal because he's dealt with it before. **** is scary.

My little guy turns four in a month, and will start playing team sports this summer. No way he ever plays football.

T-Ball FTW!

Tuma, not gonna lie, I don't understand a damn thing you posted but it sounds good. This is very interesting:

Very interesting read and informative.