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

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Aug 29, 2013.

  1. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Missing the point entirely. His argument is that the player pool will be predominantly people who grow up in impoverished situations with football as their way out. Anybody with means will avoid the risk and perhaps, if they are gifted enough, play less risky sports at a high level (baseball, soccer, lacrosse come to mind).

    I don't agree with this. In fact, I've found it universally true in the south -- a place where football thrives the most -- that football participation is at its LOWEST at mostly black, inner-city schools. As I mentioned earlier, where suburban schools have seen participation remain high, the city schools numbers are way down and often I see schools with around 1,000 students struggle to get 40-45 kids out for football and they don't even sponsor JV or freshmen teams.

    Why? Football isn't cheap. Academic issues. Kids having to work and not having the time to devote to sports. And there's the cyclical decline. If you drop your freshmen team, then marginal freshmen will quit because they have no chance at playing with the varsity or JV. That player become less likely to try out in his later years because he has fallen behind his peers. So numbers drop further and you drop your JV team, which causes sophomores and juniors with little chance of helping the varsity to quit too. And they are also less likely to come back as they get older.

    There is a public school where I live in a good neighborhood that used to contend for state championships annually as a "mixed race" big-city public school. After a couple of bussing decisions by the courts, white flight happened and now the school has become "ghetto" -- most of the student body comes from households that receive public assistance -- and can no longer compete with the suburban and private schools on the football field.

    It was down to 25 players grades 9-12 -- and this is a school with over 1,200 students -- last year. The coach said the school's academic requirements, which are tough (I think 2.5 GPA to participate in athletics), eliminates more than half the boys in the school. Of the remainder, many work after-school jobs to help at home and they are out. Of course, he doesn't have a JV or freshman team so he said freshmen don't even bother to show up in August and instead come out after school begins (why practice all August only to sit the bench?).

    That's where participation is really hurting. A friend of mine -- high school teammate, in fact -- got a job coaching at a traditional inner-city power in Houston. It was down to something like 30 players last year. He told me at the height of the program in the late 80s, it had something like 30 players in the program at one time who would eventually play college football. Now, they can barely get 30 players out for the team, period.

    So I don't know where these ghetto kids that are supposed to be the only kids left playing football are supposed to come from. What I've found is that suburban schools and urban privates have become less "lilly white" and a lot of top prospects are black players coming out of those programs. In some cases, they are truly poor people who have found their way to schools with football programs with more affluence (where their kids can take advantage of sub-varsity programs, extensive off-season work, etc.).

    But in a lot of these cases, the black players match their classmates in demographic categories outside of race. In other words, they are middle (sometimes upper) class kids who happen to be black. If you look at college football and compare the player demographics with past generations, I would guess the middle class black kid would be your biggest growth area.
     
  2. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    LTL, look at the rise in participation in soccer and lacrosse in recent years relative to football's decline. That's the point I'm making. For those sports to continue to grow at the rate they've grown, it would eventually have to lead to a decline in participation in other sports.

    Traditional sports like football AND BASKETBALL have declined.

    You can post all the articles you want. They are all reacting to the concussion issue. And they all ignore the factors that were already there and, among those who keep up, were already beginning to be factors for football.

    The concussion thing may be a tipping point (this is a Gladwell thread after all) but it's not the primary issue for football.
     
  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Football was on the rise too, until three years ago. Soccer has been around for 30 years, it has had all the comp layers and the high school priority for at least 15 of those years, and yet it had no impact on football's numbers until three years ago. Why do you think that is, that football kept growing until three years ago and all of the sudden the numbers are down 11 percent in three years at the youth level and 1 percent in one year at the high school level?

    Kids might be choosing other sports instead of football. Yes. But they weren't choosing other sports eight years ago, not in any way that showed up statistically. That's the takeaway that you're missing.

    You are going to be very very surprised in 10 years what high school football looks like if you continue to think there has been no drop in participation because of concussions and related health concerns.
     
  4. Armchair_QB

    Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

    Of course soccer has its own concussion problem.

    But you don't hear much about the fact that girls suffering concussions in soccer accounts for the second largest amount of all concussions reported by young athletes.

    http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/09/11604307-concussion-crisis-growing-in-girls-soccer?lite
     
  5. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Yeah, soccer has been around 30 years (actually much longer than that). But participation is about triple what it was 30 years ago. Lacrosse has gone up from 250k to over 700k participants since 2001.

    I can't find the football statistics in front of me (can't find them on google), but I think you'll find that before it started losing participants, football had seen its rate of growth slow steadily over the years as the other sports rose. It was only a matter of time before the slowed rate of growth turned into losses.

    The concussion thing may have sped up that process, but by no means did it cause it.

    Look, from the very statistics you quoted, there are so many factors that lead to a disincentive from participating in football -- other sports, concussions, economic issues, an overall decline in boys participating in athletics in general -- to conclude that such a modest decline has to be because of the concussion issue is not seeing the forest through the trees.
     
  6. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Ignore the facts all you want, they don't stop being facts.

    Football participation continued to increase. Concussion reporting began. Football participation decreased immediately and quite dramatically.

    You obviously love the sport enough to look the other way. Many others don't.
     
  7. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Kids eventually chose the sports they focus on, but as young kids their parents pick the sports they play.

    Parents aren't signing kids up for football because of the risk. It's not because white kids don't see a future for themselves in the sport. (And, if you don't start football young, you're unlikely to get into it as a player later on.)
     
  8. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    Dramatically? A 1.1 percent rate -- less than the rate of decline of basketball -- is dramatic? In the numbers you presented the increase in participation in soccer and lacrosse exceed the decline in participation in football in the same years.

    The data you present is, at best, inconclusive and has to draw on assumptions to prove its point.

    And before you bring up your anecdotal evidence, let me tell you again about the high school lacrosse games that go on at the park by my house that didn't exist five years ago in this part of the country...

    Again, I would imagine that the concussion would lead to some decline, but only when factored in with many other things. Out west, there is a much stronger culture of being physically active outside of traditional team sports than here so it makes it much easier to walk away from football and it's been happening there for years, even as participation in the south increased after a decline in the 80s.
     
  9. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    I think it's awfully early to be attributing (substantially) any decline in football participation to recent developments re: concussions. In absolute numbers participation may be declining, but any number of things could be in play there. For starters, the number of kids in the 12-to-17 age bracket decreased by approximately 200,000 from 2010 to 2011, so at least some of the decline would be attributable simply to there being fewer kids in general.
     
  10. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    1.1 percent in a single year, after many previous years of increasing numbers, is noteworthy. We'll see where the trends go. The supposed 11 percent decline in three years does not look good for that trend line.

    This is exactly right.

    You're seeing the numbers, and you're seeing it at a time when concussions are the biggest thing going, and you're seeing people from Kurt Warner to Troy Aikman to Tom Brady and his dad saying "I would not let my child play football before high school." That's pretty powerful.

    But by all means, let's place bets and meet up in five years.
     
  11. Armchair_QB

    Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

    No. It has to be concussions. That fits the narrative.

    Soccer is much safer. Even though it has the second-highest rate of concussions of any sport.
     
  12. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    You should look into exactly what it is you're saying when you say "rate" and just how big the gap is.

    But I'm all for banning headers before high school, which is a common proposal. That would eliminate soccer's problem in one fell swoop. The problem is there's really no way to play tackle football and eliminate concussions. I don't even know if there's a way to reduce concussions, although I imagine some new technology could help eventually.
     
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