eyes up!
June 27, 2018 8:15 AM   Subscribe

 
Time to take a cue from the rugby players and lose the helmets altogether. Don't want players to lead with their heads? Take away the armor.
posted by davelog at 8:36 AM on June 27, 2018 [8 favorites]


The phrase "but this will change the game as we know it" seems to come up a lot in these articles as an argument against the rule change. That's kind of the point, you chuckleheads. The game as you know it is responsible for causing permanent disability (physical and cognitive) and death. It's GOT to change.
posted by Defective_Monk at 8:40 AM on June 27, 2018 [24 favorites]


I used to really enjoy watching football. Then CTE was discovered and it felt gross to see people getting brain damage for my entertainment. Then the kneeling controversy and lack of support/downright contempt of the owner class for their players sealed the deal for me. I was done with the NFL.

Anyway, I'm getting more into basketball lately.
posted by gwint at 8:43 AM on June 27, 2018 [10 favorites]


The NRL and AFL here both have very similar issues ongoing, if not the same rule-changes in play. Yet as davelog says, as I understand the presence of helmets actually leads to much more serious injuries and collisions.
I've often heard of how boxing became more dangerous in some ways as boxing gloves were introduced, and fighters stopped worrying about breaking their hands hitting people. Not sure of the details wrt that, but the whole aspect of PPE increasing risky behaviour is fascinating to me.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:44 AM on June 27, 2018


gwint: "I used to really enjoy watching football. Then CTE was discovered and it felt gross to see people getting brain damage for my entertainment. Then the kneeling controversy and lack of support/downright contempt of the owner class for their players sealed the deal for me. I was done with the NFL.

Anyway, I'm getting more into basketball lately.
"

That's me except for the basketball. Sadly my city lacks an NBA team.
posted by octothorpe at 8:48 AM on June 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


That's me except for the basketball. Sadly my city lacks an NBA team.

You are in the best possible situation! Enjoy the sport without the toxic emotional slurry that is fandom. I just watch whatever game looks fun on any given night and its great. The basketball regular season is mostly meaningless anyway.
posted by selfnoise at 8:53 AM on June 27, 2018 [12 favorites]


That's me, except for the basketball. I'm all about soccer now.
posted by papercake at 8:55 AM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


Banning helmets altogether is tricky because they were introduced directly to address a rash of college players dying on the field. Is having a smaller number of people die painfully in a cloud of blood and gore in front of 90,000 screaming people better or worse than a larger number of people dying off-field from CTE and related brain trauma? Maybe it's the former, but good luck selling anyone on a sport where at least 2 or 3 people per year will die on national TV.

If anything, the answer is probably to give up contact altogether and switch to flag football, but considering it took 10 years for the NFL to even admit to itself that maybe concussions were some sort of problem, I can't see anything happening for the foreseeable future beyond tinkering like this around the edges in ways that make approximately no one happy.
posted by Copronymus at 8:57 AM on June 27, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'm still holding out for some kind of big deal Croquet league or circuit. But even that sport involves mallets, and we know what can be done with them.

But seriously, I find it hard to entirely write off football because I know it meant so much to my dad, and thus some of my fonder memories of being a kid involve going to games with him, getting crazy emotional slurry with him (but only ever in the moment; having fought in a war, he knew enough to not bring all that home with him). The game clearly has gone too far in its violence -- I wouldn't dispute that for a second. And yet, there is something to its basic premise. Here is a field. There is our objective. Those guys are in our way. How shall we guys force and/or maneuver our way to it? I mean, it beats actual war.
posted by philip-random at 9:11 AM on June 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Time to take a cue from the rugby players and lose the helmets altogether. Don't want players to lead with their heads? Take away the armor.

Football players have a bigger concussion risk, but rugby players have a greater chance of significant spinal injury, so it's not that simple.

Here's a short article on some of the differences between rugby and football and how they can contribute to lower injury rates.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:15 AM on June 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


Banning helmets altogether is tricky because they were introduced directly to address a rash of college players dying on the field.

Please cite something about this. I know nothing about the topic, but your description sounds extreme and doesn't really jive with various online sources. Here's a source talking about ~20 deaths from football in 1905, but there isn't a clear link to helmet rules.
posted by Chuckles at 9:28 AM on June 27, 2018


Wow, The Deadliest Football Seasons on Record:
Starting in 1931, coaches with joined the Committee on Injuries and Fatalities of the American Football Coaches Association to track football-related injuries and fatalities. The group has issued a report every year since (with the exception of 1942), though its methods of measurement have evolved over the years.
Anything similar from the rugby world?
posted by Chuckles at 9:35 AM on June 27, 2018


Annual Football Survey 2013. Page 33 has a fascinating chart of fatalities by decade.
posted by Chuckles at 9:47 AM on June 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I hope someone comes up with something soon. I can't watch it anymore, on any level.
posted by Etrigan at 11:12 AM on June 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I haven't really watched football in ages. To me it feels too much like gladiators in the ring, where the spectacle is more important than the players and everyone is disposable. It's kind of bogus that these guys get hurt so regularly, get such short-sighted medical treatment, are so easily replaced and have such short careers yet do this with non-guaranteed contracts. I'm more of a baseball guy, and so to me one of the real solutions for fixing much of what's wrong with football would be to pay every dollar on the contract. You think you'd be taping up that broken foot, loading a guy up on painkillers and sending him back out there in a 42-7 game if you still owed him $36m over 6 years? How about a concussion: how many fingers, buddy, hey, how many fingers? 36 million you idiot, send him to the locker room.

As far as making it safe for kids, simply crank up enforcement of no helmet hits at all and then add something like the charging rule from hockey: more than a few strides of approach into someone might get you a penalty. Also, throw more guys out for smaller offenses, like they do in hockey for fighting. Big hits are part of the game, but like hockey's relationship with fighting, it's time to dial it back instead of making it a staple of every drive or shift.
posted by Cris E at 11:23 AM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


Annual Football Survey 2013. Page 33 has a fascinating chart of fatalities by decade.

It shows 30 in the timeframe between 2005 and 2013 (9 years)? That's three a year, I'm surprised there were that many.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:25 PM on June 27, 2018


I am just so bothered by this. It's an attempt to reduce an unacceptable problem, and in so doing it acknowledges the unacceptable problem.

Football has to be stopped. The risks cannot be justified.
posted by dios at 9:06 AM on June 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


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