While I feel that hockey has done a much better job than other sports in trying to address this, it still has a long way to go.
Two players have been carted off on a stretcher after hits to the head in this game.
Gruden and McDonough are both just saying over and over “how can these guys keep doing this to each other.”
The first guy put his head down and drilled straight into the ball carrier. Rolled over, grabbing his back, legs not moving.
The second guy got a helmet-to-helmet shot not looking, and the guy that drilled him stood over him and gloated.
In the same drive as the second hit, a player caught a touchdown and took another helmet-to-helmet shot. I can’t believe he got up right away.
I don’t want to link any of those.
Did you see what the gonk did yesterday?
Yeah. 
More context, please?
Apparently he has been suspended for one game for that hit.
.
A fair punishment, given both the severity of the infraction and the fact that he has no prior history of this sort of stuff.
This is a giant development. Sports will need to fundamentally change in reaction to this. The entire world may need to change in reaction to this.
I thought we knew this already? At least I knew this already.
You regularly conflate “knowing” something with “assuming” something.
Or I’m just right all the time.
After watching a bit too much CTE-ball this winter due to being social on a cruise ship, I noticed a few things that contribute to making football way more dangerous than other sports.
The biggest one, I think, is the players are just so DISPOSABLE!
Except for the quarterback, who if injured can really mess up the game plan, everyone else can be swapped in or out just whenever. There is a backup for every person and position. And, most importantly, unlimited substitutions throughout the game.
If someone is injured? Doesn’t matter! Not within the game. It’s just a statistic. The sport is so dangerous that there are almost daily news segments about the injury report.
The other end of the spectrum for this is, of course, individual sports like golf or tennis. If you get injured, you’re out. Maybe not just out of the match or season, but your entire career.
Then there are team sports with limited substitutions. Like in soccer, with just three substitutions per team per match. If someone is injured so much they can’t finish a game of soccer, that’s a HUGE deal to the team.
Also there are team sports with smaller teams, so each individual player is more important. Like basketball, I guess. The smaller teams means you can’t afford to lose too many of your starting lineup, and certainly not your star player. Unlike football, with a limited schedule, there isn’t really time between games for players to recover. Only the Golden State Warriors can lose a world-class player and still win, mainly because they have another three world-class players who can take up the slack, but most teams aren’t in that position. Injuries are a huge deal.
This is all made worse be the disposable nature of even the replacement players. Need to pad out your injury-hit team next season? No problem, as there are THOUSANDS of UNPAID professional-level athletes leaving college that year that would love to come play.
Off the top of my head, one solution would be to allow unrestricted substitutions, but restrict the total size of the entire squad to 20 players total. Otherwise restrict the teams to one substitution per quarter. That means every injury would be SERIOUS BUSINESS and massive penalties would be enforced.
The whole thing made me quite depressed.
20 players a side means you have a kicker playing offense and defense. For the modern NFL, you would need 30-ish players a side minimum. 11 for offense, 11 for defense, a kicker(who maybe can double as a punter), a backup QB, and even assuming you have a combo kicker/punter, that’s 6 remaining subs/special teams players if you’re staying at 30.
I think a side effect of that would be the overall talent level going way down. You know the graph of how much better kickers have gotten?
I think this is true for punters too, but I don’t have a graph for it. I suspect it’s true for a lot of positions.
No we didn’t and no you didn’t.
I mean, sure, any yahoo can say “well of course getting hit in the head causes CTE.” That’s great!
There is a mile-wide gulf between stating something without evidence, and conducting a study to provide evidence of the actual mechanisms of a phenomenon. The latter is actually useful and allows us to actually respond to the phenomenon.
Sure. 30 is probably enough.
The utter domination of speciality players in american football is good for narrow skills, but not particularly interesting overall. I mean, there isn’t actually a single team, is there? There’s offence, defence, and specials team (made up of players of all kinds, of course). Like in rugby the kicker is on the field the entire time. Kicking is just part of the job. An important job, of course, but also they should be tackling if needed!
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Rugby only has one kicker and that works out pretty well.
NFL already has situations where players are actively TRYING to injure star players on the other team. If you reduce the number of players, it only increases the incentives for this kind of behavior.
The only solution for football is to simply remove the violence. When a person is hit, they get hurt. The reality nobody wants to accept is that the only solution is to make it so people do not get hit.
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I watched a bit of Sports Centre on ESPN and was horrified by the very casual conversations of “Well, I’m sure if Brady’s hand is just there, they would step on it…” I honestly couldn’t believe that intentionally injuring someone was so common that the panel was both talking about it openly, and that nobody was saying “What the fuck???” about the panel talking about it openly.
I know that. The problem is that the modern NFL kicker or punter has been specializing in only doing one kind of kick, and they tend to be smaller people who are less suited to playing other positions, unless you have a rare exception case like Tom Tupa so out of the gate, we don’t know how many kickers would turn out to be decent punters and vice versa. If you made the change for next season that rosters must be 30 players, you may find that a few teams have super kickers and some either have to “waste” a roster spot on a dedicated punter or just accept that their punts will suck. A rugby player going to the NFL as a kicker might do okay, but he probably won’t be as good as an American football trained kicker or punter, the same way Connor McGregor isn’t a top flight boxer even though boxing is part of his MMA training.