If college football dies, Norman, Oklahoma (current home to one of us), has … noodling? And what about Clemson, in South Carolina, which relies on the periodic weekend football surge into town for its restaurant and retail sales? Imagine a small place of 12,000 people that periodically receives a sudden influx of 100,000 visitors or more, most of them eager to spend money on what is one of their major leisure outings.I don't know how sad I'd be if places like Clemson or Norman or the other several dozen college towns had to actually focus on, you know, academics.
In a groundbreaking study, researchers at Virginia Tech placed instrumented helmets on 7 and 8-year-old football players and collected data on more than 750 hits to the head over the course of a season.The Fragile Teenage Brain: An in-depth look at concussions in high school football
The findings provide the first quantitative assessment of the acceleration and risk that young brains are exposed to in youth football.
Lead researcher, Stefan Duma, a professor of Biomedical Engineering, has been gathering data on head impacts among college players at Virginia Tech for nine seasons. In his new study, he reports some head impacts in youth football equal in force to some of the bigger hits he sees at the college level. “Nobody expected to see hits of this magnitude,” says Duma.
The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) [...]But with the pros, there are cases like Kris Dielman's, where a grown-ass adult says that he knows he's been hurt and is in danger, but accepts it: "Deal with it. That's how I got here, doing stupid (stuff) on the football field. It got me 10 years in, so I'm all right with that."
The consequences appear to be particularly severe for the adolescent brain. [...] In 2002, a team of neurologists surveying several hundred high school football players concluded that athletes who had suffered three or more concussions were nearly ten times more likely to exhibit multiple "abnormal" responses to head injury, including loss of consciousness and persistent amnesia.
A 2004 study, meanwhile, revealed that football players with multiple concussions were 7.7 times more likely to experience a "major drop in memory performance" and that three months after a concussion they continued to experience "persistent deficits in processing complex visual stimuli." What's most disturbing, perhaps, is that these cognitive deficits have a real-world impact: When compared with similar students without a history of concussions, athletes with two or more brain injuries demonstrate statistically significant lower grade-point averages.
Why not just adjust the helmets? Instead of just putting them on people's heads so the head and neck take the impact, attach them to the shoulder pads, so that the head isn't even touched. You could even put a big transparent dome over the whole head area, or else attach it so that it moves with the head on like a mechanized arm or something. Both would look pretty cool.My impression was that improvements in protective gear over the decades tend to encourage more violent maneuvers. If the head was more or less untouchable, we'd probably start seeing stronger body blows.
I think it's odd how no one wants to think about technical solutions, it's either "we should end the game, it's not ethical" or "It doesn't matter I like my football!" Why not just focus on solving the problem?
posted by delmoi at 12:15 on February 13
The trouble is, first of all, I don't think the solution you've described would work. Pushing the force onto your shoulders would just destroy your shouldersHmm, seems odd to think that forces that could damage your shoulders wouldn't damage your neck. You'd still have lots of padding, and you could have even more then on the head.
Concussion Factsposted by Rhaomi at 12:50 AM on February 14
Sometimes people love football so much it hurts.
A concussion is a Brain Injury that can affect the way your brain functions, sometimes so much that you could be benched or cut from the team. Concussions can occur following a hit that is so awesome, the brain twists around and can even impact the inside of the skull.
- If you've delivered a hit like this: That's a damn good hit! Keep it up!
- If you've been hit like this: Don't think about the fact that suffering concussions can give a player a reputation for weakness that could follow him around for years and reduce his salary or even end his career. [...]
Concussion Symptoms:
- Confusion
- Irritability (similar to a menstruating woman)
- Headache (similar to the ones your little sister or grandmother might complain about.)
- Aversion to noise and light, such as that encountered while playing in a nationally televised football game.
- Forgetting that your only other job options are construction, crime, or the military
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What would the end of football look like?
posted by never used baby shoes at 9:56 AM on February 13 [2 favorites]