OutcomeThe study covered 94 catastrophic injuries in high school and college football players across the 1989-2002 Academic years. They point out that injury rates were relatively low:
There were 8 fatalities as a result of injury: 5 athletes with an isolated subdural hematoma, 1 athlete with a sub-dural hematoma and diffuse brain edema, 1 athlete with atriovenous malformation, and 1 athlete with diffuse brain edema. All patients died within 28 days of the injury except 1 athlete who remained in a coma with a feeding tube for 5 years.
The forty-six athletes with a nonfatal (permanent neurologic deficit) injury were determined to have a variety of residual deficits such as memory loss, slurred speech, paralysis, blindness, seizures, personality changes, hearing loss, spasticity, and medical complications. None of the athletes with a nonfatal injury returned to playing competitive football after the reported catastrophic head injury.
Thirty-six athletes were classified with a serious injury with no residual neurologic deficits. Two athletes returned to football without any known recurrences.
In the study period there were an average of 7.23 direct high school and college catastrophic head injuries in scholastic football participants per year. There were 0.67 injuries per 100 000 high school and 0.21 injuries per 100 000 college participants for a risk ratio of 3.28.(I pulled a little bit of statistical information from the second quote for readability.)
There were 0.67 injuries per 100 000 high school and 0.21 injuries per 100 000 college participants for a risk ratio of 3.28.That's not much. That's less than the risk of dying from one skydive a year, way less than the risk of any form of motor vehicle accident...heck, that's somewhere around the rate for going outside and getting struck by lightning.
Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room.At least at the big levels.
I don't know about this in any serious way, so I can't really comment with authority. However, a discussion with a faculty member in our Kinesiology program who works with our female athletes casually confirmed my impression (drawn from my own students) that the female athletes are well aware that there is no significant hope for a professional career for them. They use their sports as they were intended -- to play, as amateurs, a sport they love while getting the education they can use to achieve their career goals. The male athletes, in my experience, are not so self aware.I don't think the issue is so much gender as whether you have any realistic (or realistic in your fantasies) shot at the pros. Pretty much no female athlete thinks that, and most male athletes don't think that either. I had a friend who played football at a Division III school, and he knew he wasn't going to play in the NFL. He decided in high school that he wasn't going to shoot for the NFL and that football would be his ticket to a good education, rather than his career. (Given his background, which was extremely disadvantaged, this took a remarkable degree of self-awareness and savvy, though. People thought he was nuts to turn down football scholarships for a need-based scholarship at a Division III school, but he wanted to know that his financial aid wouldn't go away if he got injured.) Again: we're not talking about college sports here. We're not even talking about all of college football. We're talking about a tiny subset of college athletics which is a huge business and gets much more attention than the other, much bigger subset of college sports.
« Older The Kindle is changing its name to ... Kindle. W(T... | Flabby Physics!... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:58 PM on September 13, 2011 [6 favorites]