New Yorker: Does Football Have a Future?

Good point. As we all know, specialization has killed the three-sport athlete. Maybe football is the easiest one to drop. Especially since it interferes so much with summer baseball and basketball.

However, football seems like the easiest route to a college scholarship, because of sheer number available if nothing else.

 

What I left out in my initial comment is that at least of the people I've talked to, body damage and specifically concussions/brain damage are specifically cited as a reason not to send their kids into football. I've also talked to a few dads who attribute their current body aches to their football history. A lot of that is psychosomatic -- since we're hearing more about it, those guys are figuring that if their back hurts it must be because of what happened when they were 18 and not because they're carrying 30 extra pounds -- but it's playing a role in what their kids get involved in.

 

More kids at a younger age are moving to single sport model.

As far as Swartz articles I would have a lot more respect if for them if someone like say John Ed Bradley was the write

In Swartz's articles on youth football he has fallen pre to the generalization that all youth coaches are neanderthals with no idea how to teach the game. Could not be farther from the truth. There is a lot of good teaching done. I coached at youth level for 12 years and pride myself on fact that we had zero concussions and few serious injuries. We spent a lot of time on proper safe tackling techniques. Focus has been on the helmet but I've become more convinced that ever that safety starts with teaching.

 

You're kind of straw manning me here. Just so you know. Both with the sarcastic what-was-I-thinking? reference to your own parenting decisions, and the analogy to letting children drive.

To get back to brain trauma and football, you're leaving something out: it's not just concussions. It's sub-concussive hits and the resulting damage. That's the new new part, the part we're just starting to understand. It's a shift in understanding what the risks of the sport actually are and/or may prove to be.

Again, driving is a poor analogy. Driving drunk might be a better one. Smoking is probably a better one still.

 

Boom and shockey -- you both say your players avoided concussions. I think the gist of Swartz's reporting and all the research being done is, you don't know that, because for too long only the most severe concussions were actually called concussions. There may have been dozens of concussions in that time that weren't called as such, and the players got sent right back into the game after "getting their bell rung."

 

This is where not having played the game leaves Swartz a lack of understanding.

 

That's a strong (if a bit long) article in the New Yorker. Plenty to think about fans ... and for us parents, too.

One aspect I think could be, uh, blown up a bit: not just the increased size of pro players, but the increased size of ALL players.

My son played sixth-grade "junior tackle" football this year, his first time playing organized football. He really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed watching the games and seeing the kids improve in skill. But the range of sizes of kids gave me pause as a parent.

We had kids that might have weighed 80 pounds on the same field as kids who were at least 150 or 160. "But they're all sixth graders!"

I think the increased size of players at all levels is the cause of many of these impact injury problems. Or maybe it's the size of Americans in general.

Seems obvious that while our body sizes keep getting bigger, our skulls' ability to protect our brain in collisions with these bigger bodies is not increasing at a similar rate.

 

What about the Harvard guy, Liewinski I think his name is, who did play football and on whose efforts Swartz's writing is based? Is he qualified to say concussions have been overlooked and misdiagnosed for decades?

 

This is pretty funny- Swartz did a story on Bobby Hosea how runs a camp to teach proper tacklng.

In picture that leads off story - the kids technique is both dangerous and wrong. He is opening himself up to serious neck injury.

 

Yea - former WWE Wrestler Chris Nowinski who's institute is funded by a start up helmet company - Xenith.

 

Public education is high on the screaming budget-cutters' hit list.

And football is by far the most expensive major sport. When the chainsaw comes, it will hit the sports budgets first.

The summer passing leagues are the first step toward "AAU football," which will mean the end of high school football as it's been known for the last 100 years.

More and more we are shifting toward the European model of youth sports: organized sports have nothing to do with schools, but are run by independent clubs.

 

Meanwhile, Boom's lack of understanding (spread across this site, just look at every post the moron writes) extends to not even being able to spell the guy's name correctly.

That article is the best anyone will read this month and will be in the next BASW.