The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
The (very fortunate) Death of American Football?
Thanatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I didn't want to derail the actual football thread with talk about this, and I think there's more than enough here for its own topic. So, I'll begin by admitting my own bias, and open with an anecdote: I hate football. I think it's a terrible sport. Also, I don't know a ton about it; I've only recently been learning much, so if I get anything wrong, please forgive me.
I attended my first professional football game a couple of years ago, the day after Thanksgiving. It was awful. I mean, I'd gone to plenty of high school games (I was in pep band), and I'd watched plenty on television, but it was my first game to attend in-person. It was a Seahawks game (which didn't help), but it was 40 minutes of guys playing football, and three hours and twenty minutes of listening to the same six advertisements over the stadium's loudspeakers, while the players stood around and waited for the commercial break to be over. It was like some form of fucking torture or something. Also, if the seats hadn't been gifted to me by a very nice vendor, they would have been $80 apiece. And these were not great seats. Like, they were probably the cheapest seats in the house. That is a shitload of fucking money.
So, my personal experiences out of the way, we now move on to my readings on the subject. Again, I admit that most of my reading has been fairly slanted; my primary source on the subject being the Seattle Weekly, a Village Voice free weekly paper, in addition to reading anything that pops up in my Google News feed about the logistics behind the sport.
My first problem with football is what it does to its players. It's a brutal fucking sport; professional players are lucky if they can walk up a set of stairs after their career, to say nothing of the frequently covered-up problem of traumatic brain injury, probably the strongest argument for bringing an end to the game. There have been several fairly well-publicized suicides linked to TBI in football: Junior Seau, a former linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, whose brain, post-suicide, was described by an expert as having "degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims." At the time of his death, Seau was 44. Former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson actually shot himself in the chest, just to make it easier to study his brain posthumously. And this isn't something that just affects older athletes; 21-year-old Owen Thomas' brain showed evidence of CTE. And according to researchers at Boston University (the experts on this kind of thing), evidence has been found in players as young as 18.
And keep in mind that a lot of these players do not make a ton of money from their careers, are essentially unable to work after only three or four years due to the damage done to their body and mind, and the NFL doesn't even provide them with medical insurance; the only help retired players get is a "hope the door doesn't hit you in the ass on the way out" from the shitfuckers who own those teams.
And of course, there's the (from my perspective) non-issue of the NFL Bounty Program, where players offered incentives to injure other players. The sport is a bloodsport, so we shouldn't even be really surprised by shit like this; like John Madden said in response, "It's a violent game, it's a tough game. Just playing it normally, you're going to have injuries. The game has plenty of natural violence. You don't need to manufacture any more." John fucking Madden said that.
Even disregarding the issue of traumatic brain injury, we can turn our attention to what is possibly the most overtly corrupt institution in the U.S. today: the NCAA. The NCAA, for those of you who don't know, is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. And the NCAA football program, once you begin to learn about it, is ridiculous. This is an amazing (and long) article that does a great job of explaining the system if you're a neophyte. Essentially, though, the college football programs play a bunch of games in their conferences, which then determine who gets bowl bids. "Bowls" are essentially the finals; the better you do and the better teams you play against, the better bowl you get. 70 of the 120 Division 1 football teams will get bowl bids. The vast majority of them will pony up the cash for the mandatory ticket purchases, and play to tiny television audiences and even smaller crowds in the stands. And since the bowls aren't hosted by either of the teams playing, they'll also shell out a bunch of money for airfare and restaurants and hotels. More than you would imagine, in fact, since the NCAA requires teams to spend a fucking week before the game in the city the bowl game takes place.
Though, to be fair, I can understand that, since you need to justify the six-figure salary a bowl CEO gets for putting on just that one game (to say nothing of the other executives with six-figure salaries below him). I guess a week in town helps to justify that. And of course, while the game isn't being played, they do have to spend their time bribing... I mean "hosting" legislators in their bowl towns, to, you know, help them get a sense of the place. But why, you ask, would college presidents let them get away with this? Well, you see, a lot of those tickets, hotel rooms, and airfare go to college trustees, who also enjoy taking their week off for bowl games. Which means that frequently, the coach has more influence (and gets paid more) than the college president does (coaches that get bowl game bids are, therefore, quite valuable commodities). And of course, the college president gets to go along for the ride, too. In short, what all this means is that instead of the colleges raking in the money they could from a playoff, they end up getting about a quarter of that, with the middlemen running the bowl system, the trustees, and the presidents raking in more than the colleges themselves do. But the most odious thing about it? A fucking shit-ton of these schools are public universities, which means it's fucking taxpayer money they're using to pull this fucking bullshit. You thought congressional junkets were bad? They don't even begin to fucking compare.
"Oh, but at least the system is fair." Right? I mean, of course it's fair! There are rules which set out explicitly what the necessary qualifications are to get a bowl bid! And those rules apply to everyone, right?
Of course they do. And in 2011, when Western Kentucky had a winning season of 7-5, and had a good enough record to get a bowl bid for the first time in their history as a Division I team! And according to the NCAA rules, of course, you have to have a winning record to get a bowl bid. So, how did Western Kentucky do in their bowl game? Well, they didn't get a bowl game. Why? Because the NCAA decided that, rather than giving a winning team a bowl bid for the first time ever, they would just give UCLA, whose team was 6-7, a waiver, so that they would get a bowl bid, instead. What was their justification for this waiver? Well, basically, their justification was "it's UCLA." And, of course, a game with UCLA playing (the Kraft "Fight Hunger" bowl, that is mostly just marketing for Kraft and fights very little hunger) is going to bring in more money than a game with Western Kentucky.
So, for those of you who actually follow football, and actually think it's a good sport, I'd love to hear from you. I would really love to hear about what can possibly justify an institution like NCAA football. It is fucking appalling.
I attended my first professional football game a couple of years ago, the day after Thanksgiving. It was awful. I mean, I'd gone to plenty of high school games (I was in pep band), and I'd watched plenty on television, but it was my first game to attend in-person. It was a Seahawks game (which didn't help), but it was 40 minutes of guys playing football, and three hours and twenty minutes of listening to the same six advertisements over the stadium's loudspeakers, while the players stood around and waited for the commercial break to be over. It was like some form of fucking torture or something. Also, if the seats hadn't been gifted to me by a very nice vendor, they would have been $80 apiece. And these were not great seats. Like, they were probably the cheapest seats in the house. That is a shitload of fucking money.
So, my personal experiences out of the way, we now move on to my readings on the subject. Again, I admit that most of my reading has been fairly slanted; my primary source on the subject being the Seattle Weekly, a Village Voice free weekly paper, in addition to reading anything that pops up in my Google News feed about the logistics behind the sport.
My first problem with football is what it does to its players. It's a brutal fucking sport; professional players are lucky if they can walk up a set of stairs after their career, to say nothing of the frequently covered-up problem of traumatic brain injury, probably the strongest argument for bringing an end to the game. There have been several fairly well-publicized suicides linked to TBI in football: Junior Seau, a former linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, whose brain, post-suicide, was described by an expert as having "degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims." At the time of his death, Seau was 44. Former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson actually shot himself in the chest, just to make it easier to study his brain posthumously. And this isn't something that just affects older athletes; 21-year-old Owen Thomas' brain showed evidence of CTE. And according to researchers at Boston University (the experts on this kind of thing), evidence has been found in players as young as 18.
And keep in mind that a lot of these players do not make a ton of money from their careers, are essentially unable to work after only three or four years due to the damage done to their body and mind, and the NFL doesn't even provide them with medical insurance; the only help retired players get is a "hope the door doesn't hit you in the ass on the way out" from the shitfuckers who own those teams.
And of course, there's the (from my perspective) non-issue of the NFL Bounty Program, where players offered incentives to injure other players. The sport is a bloodsport, so we shouldn't even be really surprised by shit like this; like John Madden said in response, "It's a violent game, it's a tough game. Just playing it normally, you're going to have injuries. The game has plenty of natural violence. You don't need to manufacture any more." John fucking Madden said that.
Even disregarding the issue of traumatic brain injury, we can turn our attention to what is possibly the most overtly corrupt institution in the U.S. today: the NCAA. The NCAA, for those of you who don't know, is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. And the NCAA football program, once you begin to learn about it, is ridiculous. This is an amazing (and long) article that does a great job of explaining the system if you're a neophyte. Essentially, though, the college football programs play a bunch of games in their conferences, which then determine who gets bowl bids. "Bowls" are essentially the finals; the better you do and the better teams you play against, the better bowl you get. 70 of the 120 Division 1 football teams will get bowl bids. The vast majority of them will pony up the cash for the mandatory ticket purchases, and play to tiny television audiences and even smaller crowds in the stands. And since the bowls aren't hosted by either of the teams playing, they'll also shell out a bunch of money for airfare and restaurants and hotels. More than you would imagine, in fact, since the NCAA requires teams to spend a fucking week before the game in the city the bowl game takes place.
Though, to be fair, I can understand that, since you need to justify the six-figure salary a bowl CEO gets for putting on just that one game (to say nothing of the other executives with six-figure salaries below him). I guess a week in town helps to justify that. And of course, while the game isn't being played, they do have to spend their time bribing... I mean "hosting" legislators in their bowl towns, to, you know, help them get a sense of the place. But why, you ask, would college presidents let them get away with this? Well, you see, a lot of those tickets, hotel rooms, and airfare go to college trustees, who also enjoy taking their week off for bowl games. Which means that frequently, the coach has more influence (and gets paid more) than the college president does (coaches that get bowl game bids are, therefore, quite valuable commodities). And of course, the college president gets to go along for the ride, too. In short, what all this means is that instead of the colleges raking in the money they could from a playoff, they end up getting about a quarter of that, with the middlemen running the bowl system, the trustees, and the presidents raking in more than the colleges themselves do. But the most odious thing about it? A fucking shit-ton of these schools are public universities, which means it's fucking taxpayer money they're using to pull this fucking bullshit. You thought congressional junkets were bad? They don't even begin to fucking compare.
"Oh, but at least the system is fair." Right? I mean, of course it's fair! There are rules which set out explicitly what the necessary qualifications are to get a bowl bid! And those rules apply to everyone, right?
Of course they do. And in 2011, when Western Kentucky had a winning season of 7-5, and had a good enough record to get a bowl bid for the first time in their history as a Division I team! And according to the NCAA rules, of course, you have to have a winning record to get a bowl bid. So, how did Western Kentucky do in their bowl game? Well, they didn't get a bowl game. Why? Because the NCAA decided that, rather than giving a winning team a bowl bid for the first time ever, they would just give UCLA, whose team was 6-7, a waiver, so that they would get a bowl bid, instead. What was their justification for this waiver? Well, basically, their justification was "it's UCLA." And, of course, a game with UCLA playing (the Kraft "Fight Hunger" bowl, that is mostly just marketing for Kraft and fights very little hunger) is going to bring in more money than a game with Western Kentucky.
So, for those of you who actually follow football, and actually think it's a good sport, I'd love to hear from you. I would really love to hear about what can possibly justify an institution like NCAA football. It is fucking appalling.
Thanatos on
0
Posts
As an aside, the university I work for just hired Jim Tressel, ex-OSU-coach, to be Vice President for Strategic Engagement, at $200,000/year.
Allegedly schools do the whole football thing because students like football or some shit. Apparently so much so that a school is willing to hire even a famous ex-coach. It's insane.
Then it would be even more successful. Truly an ignoble death, to be buried in money by your many millions of adoring fans.
The NCAA the organization however makes an assload of cash on Football and Basketball and a ton of it gets lost in the actual functions.
Debatable - I haven't seen any good stats on this, and the ones I have seen apply only to a few (like a dozen) schools.
The vast majority of D1 schools are screwed by the NCAA football system.
TylerJ on League of Legends (it's free and fun!)
Your point still stands that a similar bloodsport used to be the biggest thing in American sports.
College football is worse when you consider all those blowout games. One side getting curb stomped by another team, generally for a paycheck. One university is collecting money from another university to have 60-70 students they recruited get the crap beat out of them.
At least the NFL athletes are on equal footing and paid.
At the lower levels of play, some athletes will be deterred and choose other paths, but I think most of the very best prospects will still choose football despite the risks (unless they can play basketball instead).
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
It also provides a lot of exposure for the Universities, and pays the way for every non-revenue sport to operate on a lot of campuses. Places like PSU, OSU and Stanford, that's 30+ teams paid out by the Football team. And that's ignoring a lot of the fundraising work for charities that players get involved in, and community work a lot do. Sure we love to point and laugh at the idiots like Pryor that do stupid shit and couldn't seem to care less about school, but for every one of him, you have 20 guys on every practice squad busting their asses and being good members of society while getting an education and providing a strong enough product for other varsity teams to operate.
NCAA football will be here to stay, both because there is way too much money invested in it, and quite frankly, it's a product that will always have people willing to sign up and compete, regardless of risk. Some people are dumb about their personal safety, some don't think it will happen to them, and some simply will do it because that is their one and only shot to attend a top tier college.
As for the NFL, it will live on. I foresee it hitting a Baseball like decline in the next 5-10 years simply due to over saturation. In the end, it "suffers" from the same problem everything else does. No matter what the consequences, if you flash enough money and prestige, people will compete, and the average bar is far, far lower than the NFL pays right now. Guys on Practice Squads far out earn the average person. Actually make a team and make league minimum and if you live responsibly and are smart with your money you can bank enough in three years of play to last you ten.
http://www.villagevoice.com/photoGallery/index/3244542/1
I think he might be a vampire.
The problem is, whether in this current NFL landscape, you cost yourself 7 years of working (or living) with those 3 years you played
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
You work for the University of Akron? Fear the Roo and all that, yeah? I'm from the Akron area. Went to KSU, actually. :P
But yeah, it's crazy how much a small school like that is paying Tressel. What can he possibly do for that team that can justify his monstrous salary?
For literally every other team, winning six games means you are bowl eligible. That's why they needed a waiver, because due to having to play a postseason game they wouldn't have normally had to play, they had a losing record.
I'm surprised you didn't catch that their records had a different number of total games.
UCLA also got into the worst imagineable bowl against another team that was 6-6, the same regular season record as them.
Bowls are dumb, but there's a reason why it's called "bowl eligible". Teams that have six or seven wins don't deserve anything, it's not exactly the hallmark of a great season.
And the NCAA doesn't have really anything to do with the bowls. Like, at all.
As far as the NFL goes, the bottom line is that yes, it is incredibly dangerous, but not really any more dangerous than boxing, coal mining, certain aspects of construction work, being in a Jackass movie, etc. I don't have a problem with consenting adults with full knowledge of the risks (yes, the dangers are probably not fully realized yet I'll get to that) participating in a dangerous activity. What needs to happen is that the risks need to be fully understood and communicated. Right now I believe the majority (all?) of studies on CTE and frequent sub-concussive hits to the head are funded by the NFL which has an obvious interest in downplaying the long-term effects. The players union needs to start funding their own studies to make sure we aren't having another case of the tobacco industry going all "cancer? what cancer? that's just the healthy glow of being so fucking cool."
Regarding the NFL providing medical insurance, I'm not sure where you got your info but it is most certainly provided. In addition, players that have been in the league for at least 3 years get 5 additional years of coverage after they retire. Beyond that, they can continue to participate in the same plan for life, although they have to start paying the premiums themselves (this last part was added in the newest CBA). I believe they also have a pension plan but no idea on the dollar amounts.
The NCAA is much harder to defend, and before I go further I should point out that there is a very interesting Intelligence Squared debate on NPR discussing the issue of whether college football should be eliminated.
I think the NCAA has been able to leech so much from the colleges and players partly due to the insane popularity of collegiate football and partly due to this weird notion that college athletes shouldn't be paid for playing sports. Like paying a kid with tuition-waivers and scholarships is totally fine but actually giving him cold, hard cash instead or in addition is just completely morally bankrupt. I think if we realized that we are already basically paying these kids to play at the collegiate level, maybe we realize that there's no real reason to tie what is essentially the NFL minor league to institutions of higher education. Of course, the one confounding issue is that the incredibly profitable collegiate football and (to a lesser extent) men's basketball programs subsidize the rest of a university's athletics, which at my school was something like 20 different D1 programs with their own scholarships, equipment and travel expenses.
Of course, I don't get why people take the risk in gymnastics either. Doing flips and shit may look pretty cool, but you could land on your goddamn neck.
Paralyzing you.
Forever.
And for what? Applause?
What puzzles me most though is football's popularity. I get that people like it. I just don't get why they like it so much. Why not baseball? Hockey? Soccer? What is it about football that draws the numbers and the fanaticism?
That pretty much kills the fun.
We should just switch over to rugby. It uses similar skillsets, with the biggest difference being that the mega-huge tub of lard linemen will not have a place unless they get into a very different sort of shape than they are currently in.
Which doesn't bother me.
Also the players don't end up with mush brain. The lack of helmets and pads actually makes the game less rough, although it is still very rough. But the pads and helmets double as weapons, which is a huge part of football's problem I guess.
It is ironic that as the protective gear has gotten better (particularly the football helmet) the game has gotten less safe. Better protected? Great, hit people with your body harder.
Rather than ponder the irony, just pull the plug now because it's never going to get fixed. There is too much money involved and the expectations of the fans won't allow for a less violent game.
Yeah, it's one of the funny things you learn about rugby once you know a bunch about the sport.
Less equipment means it's actually safer since people are more cautious about hitting other people.
So let's talking player health and safety. It's true, football is a violent vicious game full of atrocious injuries that don't occur just to the head.
Don't watch that video if you can't handle a man's shin bone snapping in half.
But we'll stick to concussions, because that is today's hot topic. Concussion and brain injury study is a fairly recent topic. For a while, a concussion was seen as a minor injury. You don't really worry about them. You take a few minutes, shake the cobwebs off, and you go back to the field. Well, that all changed in about 2006 with this man.
Chris Nowinski. A graduate of Harvard that decided to become a pro-wrestler. Chris suffered a severe concussion shortly into his career and had to retire in 2005, after only 4 years of pro-wrestling. Chris then teamed up with some doctors and dedicated his life to studying concussions.
These videos from late 2011 highlight the brain injury problems found by Chris' organization.
There's another great interview about this from either Outside the Lines or 60 Minutes that I can't find right now. It has many former player's wives and the players being interviewed by ...Chris Connolly, I think. It's sad to watch what's become of these guys.
So now that you see all this, how do you fix it? What about banning the sport? Well, you can't do that. The main reason is of course financial. Football is so ingrained into America that it would be like banning cars. The economy would collapse. High schools, colleges and whole cities would free fall into destitution. You can't hit that extreme.
But what you can do is look at other ways. One of the issues with the NFL is their equipment. Much of the equipment, especially the helmets, has not been updated since the 80s. The current most common helmet from Riddell is a piece of shit safety wise. It hasn't been truly updated in years, but it's the league standard.
But there are alternatives, which some players are adopting.
That is the Revolution helmet from Riddell. That helmet offers far more protection than the standard helmet. Some players have already adopted it and commented that they feel much safer in that helmet than the regular one. I believe there is some scientific evidence to back that up, but it's late and I can't find it right now. So Why isn't it the standard in the NFL? Who the fuck knows. I don't have a good answer for that. It could be that Roger Goodell is an idiot or it could be that teams are cheap.
And with all that, there has been several rule changes over the past couple of years with this new information about concussions. The first is that you simply can't hit players in the head anymore. You can't do it. Doing it will lead to suspensions, fines and penalties. Several players, most notably James Harrison, have already been hit with heavy fines and suspensions for repeated offenses.
Massassquoi missed a number of games from that hit. And Harrison did from his suspension. So there is a deterrent to stay away from the head and go for body tackles.
Sticking with James Harrison
So Colt McCoy, the Browns quarterback, gets a concussion from this hit. A few plays later, he returns to the game. A news story breaks in the following days from his father saying that there is no way his son should have gone back out there and that the team must not have administered the now required concussion test on the sidelines.
http://www.cleveland.com/livingston/index.ssf/2012/05/colt_mccoys_father_was_catalys.html
That article does a good job summing up the situation. Basically Colt's dad called bullshit on the Brown's sideline test, was found to be right, and caused a shit storm, damage control and a procedure change from the NFL.
But there is one other thing holding the NFL back from this. There is a physician, who looks at a lot of these players who believes there is no problem with concussions. He's an old man. And I can't fucking find his name right now. He's part of that OTL/60 Minutes piece I mentioned earlier. I just can't find that clip and it's enraging. Basically, this old rotten fuck thinks that the issue is a fake one and that concussions aren't a big problem. And he has a high ranking position in the NFL. While I don't know the inner workings of the NFL's top brass, he could be all the resistance needed to prevent many of the changes needed to slow down, or stop (not likely) concussion rate in football.
Edit: Found the clips I was mentioning. It was HBO Real Sports, which is why I couldn't find it.
Admittedly, the clip is from 2007 and the culture has changed in the past 5 years. It's not nearly perfect, as highlight by the Colt McCoy situation, but the old asshole at the 8:15 mark of the first video is the guy I was talking about.
Anyway, there are major, major flaws with the NCAA. The bowl process in football is one of the most ridiculous, as the bowls exist basically to skim money off the top, pay their boards outlandishly and avoid taxes because they're "non-profit."
On a historical note, people predicted the death of football before because of a number of deaths from students playing the game in the early 20th cenutry. Then TR made some rule changes by the totally made up power of the Presidency and the game was saved.
like wearing a mouthguard in hockey
Seriously
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
Yeah, I remember hearing about that too now that you mention it. Players are stupid and should be forced to wear the ugly helmets so their brains don't rattle around. I think Aaron Rodgers wears one and recognizes that it looks dumb but it'll prevent scrambled brains, so he's fine with that.
Legs are not supposed to bend that way.
Don't google Napoleon McCallum
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
The comparison would actually be wearing a facemask in hockey.
Anyone in the NHL under the age of like ... 40 grew up his entire life with a facemask. That they don't wear one in the NHL is pure, 100% dickwaving stupidity.
Only those pansie, commie Euros wear facemasks and they couldn't win anything if their life depended on it. Good old Canadian MEN don't need to wear a facemask because losing your vision or most of your teeth is what you need to do to win the STANLEY CUP!!
[/Don Cherry]
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS REFS
You're completely right. I was trying to think of a better comparison, thought "facemask", but in my head all I could see were these for some reason
and totally spaced on hockey facemasks. I can only hope that's what I was actually trying to think of
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
I feel like pro football players should have all the necessary information about safety made easily available to them - and then if they still want to play, that's their right as an adult. But you can't say that about high school or (worse) pop warner football.
And the business side of college football is fucking depressing. The players are the ones generating nearly all of the value, and getting only a tiny fraction of the benefit. If I had my way it would be replaced with a minor pro league of some kind, and separated from colleges entirely.
Okay, first off, there were two teams that didn't get bowl bids in 2011 who were eligible: one was Ball State (6-6), the other was Western Kentucky (7-5). And what was the bowl's justification for that?
And the idea that the NCAA doesn't have anything to do with the BCS is... I mean... just... wow. How much of the kool-aid have you been drinking, exactly? The BCS' sole purpose is putting together the bowl games for the NCAA. The NCAA Division 1 schools spend, like, $40,000,000 on bowl tickets at their behest. I... just... wow.
I don't think the NFL and NCAA are going to be able to afford to insure their athletes. And while the NFL might be able to self-insure their pros, I don't think the NCAA is going to be able to justify that sort of cost. And once NCAA football goes the way of the dinosaurs... well, then the NFL is going to have to start up their own farm teams, who they're also going to need to insure.
I don't know, though; maybe I'm being overly optimistic, here.