RE: Rules Changes Could Send Two Sports in Different Directions
I love football. Out of all of the sports I watch it is my favorite. I also played football in high school. I can say without a single doubt that my kids will not play football. I played before all of the concussion awareness and concussion protocol. We called them "dings" and no big deal. A source of pride was "playing dinged up" and viewed as a badge of honor. Looking back there was a very noticeable decline in my cognitive ability which was reflected in my school work during football season.
I also think that the NFL won't exist in 20 years. At least the sport we know as american football today. If it survives it will be a starkly different game than what we know it know. I just don't see how it can survive in it's current state given all of the information and research we have. I recently listened to Arian Foster's interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. He provides some insights on the health of pro football players. He said nearly every player gets some form of surgery after the season. He also said that playing through injuries on pain killers happens every game and it's impossible to go through a football career without surgeries or injuries. The head trauma is just something we recently found out about. The fact that out of all of the brains of football players they studied nearly all of them have signs of CTE is a very shocking statistic. An almost 100% correlation between an action (playing football) and a disease (CTE). It is similar to the tobacco giants when the link between cancer and tobacco use was discovered. You can't really have a reliable product that increases sales every year and continues to grow when it kills those who are involved or consume the product. Something has to give here.
Yes, I agree. The future game will not resemble what we have today. I remember when Barry Sanders retired and they asked him why (because he was still productive). He said it was like getting in a car accident once a week during the season for his whole career.
It's even worse now. I mean think about it. The players are getting bigger and faster. You are consistently seeing guys that are over 6'5" and 300 pounds running 4.7 40s. The players are just getting not only bigger and faster but the size isn't just dead weight or fat. The size is also muscle and power. That 6'7" 320 pound lineman is not just slow and fat but rather equivalent to a mix of a power lifter and a sprinter. These guys are agile. Their speed also makes it more dangerous. They are not only bigger and stronger but they can get up to their max sprint speed quicker meaning harder hits can occur in a shorter period of time as well as their agility making it harder to avoid them.
It's also sort of scary seeing the major discrepancies in some of the body builds between positions themselves. Look at someone like DeSean Jackson. He is about 5'10" and 175 lbs. Compare that to one of the better linebackers in 2017, Dont'a Hightower. Hightower is 6'3" and 265 lbs. He has almost a half of a foot in height and almost 100 lbs on Jackson. I can't imagine the level of impact that would create if Jackson was to get drilled taking a pass over the middle. It's even more scary when you see that someone line Damon Harrison for the Giants is 6'3" and 341 lbs. Now it's not exactly that likely a wide receiver would get a hard hit laid on them by a defensive tackle but the fact still remains that these smaller guys are playing against people almost double their size. That can run nearly as fast as they can. I would imagine that in these cases an impact at full speed by both of these players would be almost more than a car accident.
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Football is very beneficial for physical fitness.
