heard a report on the radio, proly npr, about some rocket launcher that army uses that is just terrible on soldier's heads. so like, these guys are getting cte just from training.

ok I found it

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-s...-heavy-weapons

ya that aint good for the noggin.

Doubt they fire live heavy weapon rounds all that often in training. One of those recoiled rifle rounds goes for at least 500 bucks a pop

They want top football programs for the same reason any other school does: recruitment. Having a player announce their school as Army/Navy when television does the starters is the type of advertising you just can't buy.

There is also the aspect of tradition, I'm not sure if that would keep it alive in a vacuum though.

Army-Navy is one of the oldest football rivalries. No way that's going to stop.

Me too. I'll still be watching loads of football on network TV (watching the preseason right now), but I'm getting more and more conflicted about entertainment that takes such an extreme toll on the players.

I dunno what's going to happen with football. It's crazy popular, but then so were boxing and horse racing back in the day. If a critical mass of moms decide they don't want their kid playing football, the sport could decline dramatically in popularity.

Aaron Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE at age 27

I've had enough as well. I'm done. Now I'm going to tell everyone on the other forums I post at. Then Tweet. Then post on my Facebook timeline. Then post a selfie on instagram of me tearing a photo of Roger Goodell. Then blog on Livejournal.

It's Gilmore Girls and Pretty Little Liars for me this Sunday

what season are you on?

CTE is on the verge of becoming the medical equivalent of a moral panic at this point IMO.

Have they done proper control studies on CTE? Like if you just got a bunch of random physically active dudes who weren't athletes and studied their brains for this condition, how many of them would still have it? I'm asking honestly, maybe they have done such studies, I haven't really bothered to look.

When I was a kid I fell out of a tree pretty high up and landed flat on my back, also hitting my head. Later that night I woke up with a horrible, horrible head ache. Almost certainly had a concussion without even knowing what one was. Pretty certain that's the only concussion I've ever had. If they looked in my brain, would they find CTE?

Without basing it on much of anything, I just get the feeling that CTE as a condition is way more common and easily acquired than people think and that it is now serving as a convenient scapegoat for any type of undesirable behavior athletes are engaging in.

I mean, if close to 100% of NFL players have this condition, then obviously any time they look for it (which is almost always after something bad has happened) they are going to find it. Aren't the vast majority of ex-NFL players who played very long careers not walking around deranged from CTE?

From what I understand, medical science is still trying to get a handle on CTE and until they can detect it earlier and in living people, they are still sort of guessing a lot. I want to know how easy it is to acquire, and then if acquired, can it be proven to be actually be linked to increases of suicide and homicide and all that other stuff.

I'm not a doctor and don't pretend to know anything about any of the science. I just sense a certain hysteria surrounding it that doesn't seem to be based on science.

"I don't read any of the articles about CTE but I am pretty sure they're all BS and I shouldn't bother"

Well by his own admission he hit his head as a kid so we would write him off as a dotard.

you don't say

When Hollywood is rushing to slap Will Smith in some sappy movie about something, you can forgive people for being a little skeptical.

Even if every single dire thing said about CTE is 100% true, there is a certain strange agenda or giddiness I sense from people who seem to relish the idea of using it as a weapon against sports.

Psychologically it's reassuring to find out that if I hadn't played high school football I would have had to blame not winning the Nobel Prize (in physics) on all the drugs and alcohol.

We're *this* close to the term "participation trophies" appearing itt.

If most all football players have it. I'm pretty sure most hockey players have it as well. Skateboarders, cyclist, race car drivers, potentially soccer as well. How deep does the rabbit hole go? Also the obvious like boxing, MMA, and wrestling.

Sure, most sports have some potential for brain damage. But the unique thing a out football is that there's sub-concussive, but CTE-inducing impact on every single snap, at least for linemen.

Are you a psychopath? The only agenda is the one against letting children give themselves brain damage.

or ya know, using common sense that having children and young adults smash into each other at full speed, sometimes using their heads, is proly really really bad for their brains.

and yes, they have found a staggering correlation between cte and dementia, alzheimer, and violence, and severe depression.

aren't they worried about this with real fitba too? Have the pushed back when kids are allowed to start heading the ball?

Anecdotally seems like less of an issue, given the billions world wide who play fitba, but who knows.

Didn't you hear? He had brain damage as a child and turned out ok!!

What's also unique is that the NFL knew about this and hid it from the players.

I don't think that gets emphasized often enough.

Yes. No heading allowed under age 11 in US youth soccer.

Well no wonder we suck.

The real winners in all this will be law firms. Their dicks must be just so hard right now. Lawsuits at every level of the game. It will be glorious for them.