Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and other American Football issues

I place my bets on soccer and ultimate frisbee.

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Turns out the umpire hit by the angry ball had a fractured eye socket.

Many many a game was unpopular until all of a sudden enough kids play it.

I’ve watched lacross.

I’ll eat my hat if it’s ever mainstream popular. Even low-tier esports are more exciting.

Full disclosure, I’ve never played or cared about lacrosse, I do however occasionally drive by my old highschool and see the newly made lacrosse… pitch? in use by the lacrosse team and the football field either empty or also in use by the lacrosse team.

I calls 'em like I see’s 'em.

I think the sports that are considered “fringe” will remain that way. Part of the issue with football is that we have a huge football culture in this country starting from a young age, so we’re putting kids in an environment where we’re teaching them that this unnecessary risk is acceptable and laudable.

MMA doesn’t have that, really. It’s fringe enough that we don’t have a pervasive culture indoctrinating people into it. It’s not “normal” or “accepted,” so I think it will remain regardless of its inherent risks. And the thing is, the risks are also way more transparent, because of course getting kicked in the head is bad for you.

The fringe will remain fringey and dangerous, the mainstream will move on to something else.

I have no opinion on lacrosse one way or the other, as I have never seen a match or know anything about the rules.

However, judging from the fact that it uses a lot of specialised equipment (stick, face masks, gloves, shoulder pads, rib protection, etc) I think it will never catch on big time like basketball or soccer. With those any number of people can join in by turning up to a location with, at the very minimum, a single ball and a basketball hoop. For soccer, just a ball. Even the most advanced players can only differentiate themselves with better equipment by wearing different shoes.

Based purely on the equipment needed, lacrosse seems to have a very high barrier to entry.

Yeah, and this makes it feel as though the barrier to entry is intentional! It’s a sport where rich white kids can play together without fear that poor black kids can join in. Basketball for them!

But I am saying I doubt it will become a popular sport for voluntary participation. Nobody plays NFL-style football for fun. It’s just too dangerous! Even in the Pro Bowl they only play halfheartedy. There are many reasons why football is played in schools and colleges though, mostly it being financially beneficial to the school or college, and very little notice is taken of benefits to the kids.

You know what sports people chose to play when getting together? Stuff like soccer and basketball.

No, I don’t believe they are disconnected. The reason why many sports become popular is because the people watching have had direct experience with the sport in the past. If not with the exact sport with the same rules and equipment, at least a variation where they can get a feel for some of the skills and concepts.

Running is the most obvious version of this. There’s a reason why the 100m dash is one of the biggest draws in the Olympics. But the same thing happens at all levels. Most people have kicked a ball. Most people have thrown a ball and caught it. Even with boxing, many people have a pretty clear idea what’s involved when punching or being punched. Most people have tried and failed to dunk a ball. Most people have swung a stick at a ball thrown at them.

But sports with specialised equipment like lacrosse? Unless you’ve played it, do you have any conception or appreciation of what’s going on? The only way I can understand it is through the lens of either hockey or handball.

Looked at the wikipedia page for lacrosse, and I still have no idea what it looks like or feels like to play the game. Part of that is because it’s a terrible wikipedia page, but also because it is so far removed from my lived experience of all other physical activities.

But American Football has very, very little depth in terms of game play. Fundamentally there is running with the ball and throwing and catching the ball. Everyone can understand the athletic skill required for in the participants they are watching. There is no high bar to appreciating that skill.

That there are stupidly complex rules to go along with the basic athletic skills it isn’t a consideration, and 99.9999% of people watching won’t know all those rules anyway.

Yeah, sure, but I’m saying the equipment (to me) is so specialised that I have no conception of how easy or difficult it is to do that throwing and catching and scooping with that stick/net thing. My thoughts go something like:

  1. This looks like hockey but with all the dangerous action up around face level.
  2. Throwing and catching looks so easy there isn’t any down-side to passing.
  3. The field is so large, so much of the action is just moving the ball around without any danger of losing possession.
  4. The only reason to play this instead of handball is so you can hit people with sticks?

I’m not arguing that this isn’t increasing in popularity in schools and colleges in America, I just think it will never become a major mass participation activity (due to exclusive nature of the funding/equipment setup).

And I also think it will have an upper limit on how popular it will be as a spectator sport, and the players won’t become household names, and probably won’t be earning millions. It’ll be a niche sport like badminton or curling or rugby sevens which people will get into for a few days when the olympics comes around, but not pay attention to otherwise.

The only specialized equipment in lacrosse is a net on a stick. Otherwise it’s just a ball and two scoring nets. Instead of just sticks, like hockey, you have sticks with tiny nets on the end. That is the only major difference. It’s not that weird.

What’s crazy about lacrosse is that you are throwing the ball through the air. You have the ball at the end of a long stick. You can get a lot of leverage and throw it crazy crazy fast. The ball is hard. It’s very very dangerous. Someone died at RIT while I was a student there because they were playing lacrosse and the ball hit them in the chest.

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Sure. But soccer is already the biggest sport in the world, and I think it’s possible that it might increase in popularity in the USA as football decreases in popularity until it’s one of the major sports alongside basketball and baseball and ice hockey. Probably it won’t be as big as football, but I think that has more to do with the entire economical setup of the USA for the last 60 years or so, fueled in part by mass advertising of drinks, cars and insurance at live sporting events. Football caught that wave perfectly and I don’t see another wave like that in the horizon.

I’d say it depends. Many a sports fan was made long before they had a concept of playing sports. I was a fan of baseball and american football when I was very very young because my dad liked watching sports with his child who could barely talk.

By the time I could go to school I was able to recite the batting order of the the Yankees, and while I didn’t understand football at all, (I mean I guess it was fun to watch people get hit) I was still a Jets fan. Actually doing anything that resembled any of these sports came way later.

It could happen with lacrosse. Get a fanbase from all the people who played in school and keep it because many of them have kids.

I think it’s a totally fine sport, but considering how difficult it’s been to even get soccer into a higher tier of mainstream awareness in the US, I will literally eat a hat if lacross is ever as commercially successful as soccer or ice hockey in the US.

I further think that esports are going to drastically reduce the regular sports market within a decade.

Well, I’ll go further and say that baseball is going to decline sharply after a couple more generations.

I suspect hockey is growing (more immediately exciting, better able to compete with esports and short attention spans, huge non-male fanbase, etc…).

Football will die the death we keep discussing in these threads.

Soccer will probably hold steady due to world interest.

Basketball, as much as I personally don’t care for it, is entrenched in culture, and there are some movements with that 3v3 league coming up in New York

Stupid poorly researched gut guess 10 years from now? The top ten sports in the US in 2027

  1. Some esport
  2. Some other esport
  3. Basketball
  4. Ice Hockey
  5. Soccer
  6. Some esport
  7. Some form of evolved martial arts (post-MMA)
  8. Baseball
  9. Some esport
  10. A particularly niche esport

I like the take that esports take over the sports but I do wonder what will happen involving the ever changing nature of the esports world.

Things come and go in esports. CS 1.6 was a thing until Source, Source was a thing until Go, which will probably be a thing until it isn’t. Even giant titans like League of legends will probably go the way of Starcraft.

Baseball has been around since forever.

So how we square that circle? Is it the end of the era where the sports parents watched as kids are still on the air? I mean will my buddies’ kids care that their parents were at MSG for the league of legends superbowl equivalent in a wold where league doesn’t exist anymore? The way I care that my 94 year old grandpa got to see legends like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris?

It’s an interesting question.

You need to change the structure of esports such that they aren’t about a specific game controlled by a specific company. Instead of the Street Fighter world championship, we need the 2D fighting game world championship. The actual software, its code, and its rules need to be universal, stable, tightly controlled, and optimized for fair and interesting competition. Just like the rules of any other pro sport. Existing video games are coded with other competing commercial interests in mind, and this is why they can’t last forever. It’s also how you get problems like people abusing glitches, etc.

So my hot take then, is that that’s not going to happen.

And that when/if Rym’s vision comes to pass it will the streetfighter and league of legends rather than 2D fighting game and dota-like game.

Given that, I return to my query: how do we square that circle?

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