Why is Dennis Dodd making an issue of Malcolm Gladwell's comment on football?

I used "renege" with a cashier at Target the other day, and immediately regretted it.

 

It might be regional for the South, but overall you're completely whiffing on this one. People are choosing not to put their kids in football because of concussion and other risks. It's there in data, it's there in anecdotes -- personally, I have conversations about it once a week.

You are seeing those other sports increase because the injury risk isn't as great.

 

Neither is Gladwell in any other category besides selling people on his status as a high-level thinker.

 

Yeah, those are the same.

I pegged you as a CostCo sort.

 

Wife is.

Lots of Kirkland brand bulk bottles in our house.

 

Stuff like that can easily lead someone in my line of work to inadvertently stroll into a shit-storm. For example, there is a huge, traditional body of inventory management challenges known collectively as "newsboy" problems (think of the kids on the street corner in the old movies yelling "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!"). Nowadays, in textbooks they're called "newsvendor" problems. I'm pretty sure I know why they're no longer called newsboy problems.

Re: renege. In classical management science/operations research work, when one is working with queuing systems (i.e., waiting lines), one has to account for whether customers will, having entered the queue, at some point decide to simply leave the queue. To leave or abandon the queue is to "renege."

 

I think some people see negative connotations that aren't necessarily there.

 

I dunno. Is the Army is a ghetto? When something is "ghettoized" isn't that something then placed in a ghetto, an impoverished, neglected part of the world? Is West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs part of a ghetto?

Somebody brought up Elvis. Well, shit, he was talking about what was happening <i> in </i> the ghetto. It was an observation. Gladwell's talking transformation, talking about pro football becoming its own ghetto (of fabulously rich people, mind you) of folks who see the violence inherent in the sport as an "acceptable risk." Kind of like boxing, I guess. Although boxing didn't sink into the ocean because of the violence, just like UFC isn't sinking now. It sunk because it was so loosely organized, so full of competing interest, that it defaulted on its own success.

Does this sound like the NFL? No, it doesn't.

 

The enlisted people mostly come from poor backgrounds. That's what he meant. Like football. He doesn't mean that football will become a "ghetto" of people who see the game as an acceptable risk. He means that the people who play football will all come from ghettos.

 

Right. That's what Dodd thought. I can't believe nobody stopped him before he started calling Jesse Jackson to get his reaction on Malcolm Gladwell using the term "ghettoized."

Dennis Dodd is going to come off like a moron in his attempt to play Woodward & Bernstein here.

 

Agree to disagree. The rise of soccer and lacrosse alone more than account for the still small decline in football participation. If the drop in participation was higher than the rise in participation in other sports, then the trend would be more clear.

Now, one might argue that the football losses to other sports might be because of the dangers of football relative to the other sports. And there may be something to that. Just as questions about the safety of football are coming to the forefront, lacrosse and soccer are rising in popularity. Makes for an easy choice for some.

But particularly in the case of soccer, I think it's more to do with soccer's effective early recruitment. Where I live, football isn't really played before age 10 or so (never has been). There are mostly some flag football leagues to play in before that age that have always drawn moderate participation as parents wait to put their kids in "real" football later. In my area, I was told last year the numbers were something like 90 kids in football and 400 in boys soccer in ages 5-9. Of course, there are no football participants before age 8 (when they start flag), but there was still a 2-1 ratio of soccer players to football players in the ages that played football.

Soccer has ALWAYS been a sport that started kids younger. They can kick the ball around when they are 4 and where I live, for some reason, they want to organize that into a team sport (I also saw 4-5 year old t-ball...could not believe that).

So by the time they've reached 10, they've been playing soccer for 5 years and probably traveling with a competitive team if they are any good. And that's the age you just START playing football.

This has been the case for some years now...probably going back to the late 90s. But perhaps the concussion issue has tipped it. More of these 400-something soccer kids will keep playing soccer after 10 and not choose to "start" playing football as in years past.

But I still think the bigger factor is the rise of soccer (and lacrosse and, in some areas, baseball) than the fear of football. The rise of soccer and Lacrosse predated the concussion injuries. And what to make of the decline in basketball participation? Is there a concussion fear there? Or is it about white, suburban participation decline based on perceived opportunities?

 

Here is another one from the Washington Post: at least one study, conducted by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, a Silver Spring-based trade association, found an 11 percent decline in tackle football’s “core” participation the past three years.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-10-24/sports/35498322_1_youth-football-youth-league-roger-goodell

That's in the last three years. Soccer has been around for 30, lacrosse for 10 or 15, and yet somehow the declines in football participation are all coming in the most recent years. Why would you say that is?

You're missing the boat on this, you really are.