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I know this isn't about the Zips, but it is about football and I worry about what the future may hold for some of our fellow Zips in terms of long term health problems.

That’s a very interesting article, GP1. Thanks for posting.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit lately. The issue of player safety will continue to become more visible. Various TV shows have taken up the topic. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there’s a small part of me that feels a little uneasy from an ethical standpoint considering I spend so much time and effort supporting a sport that leaves many damaged beyond repair.

Here are a few thoughts as I read this:

1. His main notion is that football at the ground level could be destroyed by medical insurers backing out to protect their bottom lines. Maybe this is farfetched, but I wonder if youth/HS/college football could still survive in this scenario by simply requiring medical waivers to be signed by all players absolving the league/team/school financial liability due to injury. Is the love of football so ingrained in the American psyche that players and their families would be willing to sign such a waiver?

2. He discusses the immense economic blow it would have on the “small town” college football centers, like Clemson etc. Who’s to say, in this “post-football world”, that another sport or form of entertainment might not take the place of these local economic engines? And for those thinking about soccer (and I am a big fan), this sport has its own issues with regard to concussions and injuries in general. I don’t know what that replacement activity would be. But without football, all of a sudden the sports and entertainment landscape becomes wide open and totally unpredictable.

3. He points to the use of HGH as one of the culprits in the rise of injuries and that’s hard to dismiss. But I think equipment design and manufacture are at least as responsible. I’m convinced there can be more safety designed into equipment, especially if energy absorption characteristics are given higher priority. This will likely result in more expensive equipment, but I think most would agree at this point that this is a worthwhile tradeoff.

This is definitely something to monitor from now on.

The late Joe Paterno thought football should return to leather helmets. He just might have had a point.

Concussions happen when the brain bashes against the skull. We are not made for sudden stops. They can design all the energy absorbing equipment, nothing can stop the brain from bashing against the skull when a hit is made.

It all goes back to hgh. Force = Mass x Acceleration. The players today are too big from taking hgh and the human body cannot take the force. Look at James Harrison. When he came back from injury, his face was so red, he could have guided Santa at Christmas. The red was from all the hgh he takes. He is only one example of many in the NFL. My brother overheard the Falcons strenght and conditioning coach yelling at some linemen one day, "I don't know what you are taking, but you had better get off of it before your head explodes." Everyone knows it is going on and nobody wants to do anything about it. Back to force.... Specifically, the head can't take the force. Some may laugh when I say this, but the NFL needs to go through a five year period where they bring down the maximum weight of the players through weight limits like they do in little league. Make the NFL a sport again instead of a freakshow.

I hate to say this because it may come true, but I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that an NFL player, or even a high level college football player, could get killed on the field of play in the next five years. If not killed, one of the linemen die from a heart attack during a game. If that happens, parents will really think twice about letting their kids play.

He had a point alright... A stupid point.

Several kids on my sons 7th grade team suffered concussions last season. I saw a story on the news the other night about a company that is developing a device that would alert the coach if a player took a hit that could cause a concussion. It was a small device that attached to the helmet and a red flashing light would go off if the hit was severe. That would alert the coach who could have the player examined before being allowed back into the game.

Maybe we are letting kids play football at too young of an age and they can't grasp the fundamentals of the game to the point where they can play it in a safe manner. There are a lot of bad jr high coaches who can't teach the proper way to play the game as well.

Here's a counter-inuitive thought. Could the advanced padding/helmets that players now wear actually be the cause of the problem?

I'll explain my thought. When players wore less sophisticated padding (ala, JoePa's leather helmets, whatever) I highly doubt players were engaging in the collisions they are nowadays. They just couldn't. They'd kill themselves and they probably knew it. At the very least they were probably hitting more with their shoulders than with the crowns of their heads.

Take rugby as the prime example. Everyone thinks rugby players must be so outrageously tough because they don't wear any padding. But what people don't realize is that there actually aren't that many severe injuries in rugby precisely because the players don't engage in collisions like they do in American football. They just can't - they'd kill themselves. Today's football players, contrarily, feel invincible with the advanced helmets that they wear. But, invincible they are not.

That’s the whole point of energy absorbing devices. They make the stop “less sudden” by reducing the decelerations. I’ll agree the increased size of the players (their increased speed can’t be ignored either, since potential energy is related to speed squared…..although of course speeds haven’t increased nearly as much as size) inherently increases the magnitude of these decelerations.

Speaking more on the effect speed has on the decelerations felt by the brain, this is exactly why some coaches propose doing away with kickoffs.

How come old photos of the NFL show guys aged well beyond their years and their faces are crooked?

The rugby analogy is good because I think it is a great sport; however, rugby players pitch the ball a lot and head on hits are rare. They don't pass the ball downfield so there isn't anyone to get hit going over the middle.

Like I've been saying on this board for years now. Regardless of what our wives and girlfriends tell us, size matters.

I think I get an assist for this

If anything, it's the opposite of bad coaching. A lack of fundamentals was not what caused the concussions. Back in the day, when you and I were that age, the coaches would have just told the kid to suck it up and get back into the game. Our coaching staff was trained to recognize the symptoms and took the actions to make sure the kids got proper treatment. And just so you know, the bigger, faster, size matters thing applies in the 7th grade too.

Don't you think that is a little young for kids to be having sex?

Concussions really aren't an equipment issue, imo.

I believe what we're witnessing now is simply the culmination of players at every level being bigger, stronger and faster than ever before, meaning the kinetic forces at play in the game have multiplied several times over. At the same time, the sensitivity of the human brain has remained constant. So in other words, while being bigger, faster and stronger offers no enhanced protection from concussions, it virtually guarantees that concussions will happen more and more frequently.

It would be interesting to see if Ray Lewis would still be interested in delivering punishing blows if the equipment he wore allowed him to take more punishment himself. These fools delivering blows with their multi-layer shoulder pads and spearing with their helmets might not be quite as brave if their own Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) were thinner and less protective. The concussions that are a result of the constant head slapping and mashing on the lines will be very hard to minimize, but I bet we could certainly lessen the "human missile" injuries by just making these gigantic steroid monsters wear less equipment. I don't recall seeing the head-low missile strikes from secondary guys in old NFL film, probably because those guys were engaged in at least some level of self preservation. "Hey Ray, I just removed your face mask. Get out there and good luck with that big fella."

Those were basically my thoughts a few posts back. I think the high tech gear, quite counter-intuitively, may actually increase the liklihood of serious injury.

Want to really hurt the player. Fine the crap out of them when they take cheap shots. Also, don't allow running backs to run with their heads down. That should be a fine as well.

I was watching a program on TV last week. Can't remember where the research was going on but it was about this issue exactly! The researchers were studying concussive injuries. They compared current helmets with the old leather. I actually wore a leather constructed helmet when I played 8th grade football in the early 60's. We had plastic but they gave the old leathers to kids they didn't think were very good. Guess we were expendable. Anyway,the research seemed to be pointing toward indicating that the leather helmets might be better at preventing concussions than the rigid,hard plastic that is used now. They didn't say anything about other types of injuries.

This is interesting. I'd be curious as to whether they'd attribute their findings to leather's shock-absorption qualities, or, as would be my guess, to the seemigly obvious but probably overlooked probability, that while wearing leather helmets, players would simply be far less prone to lead with their heads on tackles?

This has nothing to do with leather helmets or modern helmets. It has everything to do with the size of players and the force they apply when they hit each other. As the players get bigger and faster, the damage to the players gets greater.

The brain floats in a pool of water. There isn't enough water between the brain and the skull to protect the brain from hits. This is why we get concussions when we are in a car wreck and our head doesn't hit anything because of the seatbelt. A concussion is a bruise to the brain. The bruise is caused when the brain hits the skull. The worse the concussion, the bigger the bruise. Players have to get smaller before someone is killed.

Remember that a football helmet is not just a hard shell. There's a soft, compressible inner liner that absorbs impact by dissipating energy. The hard shell of the helmet stops instantaneously when it contacts another hard object. The head continues to move forward at a slower rate as the liner material compresses. When the liner material reaches full compression, the skull stops moving but the brain doesn't. The brain doesn't stop moving until it contacts the inside of the skull. That's where the concussion is sustained.

The compressible materials used inside modern helmets is scientifically designed to dissipate energy. It's better at that than leather. Otherwise, they'd simply use leather inner liners inside the hard shells.

As mass and velocity go up, kinetic energy increases exponentially. Bigger, faster football players generate greater energy to be dissipated on impact, leading to greater likelihood of injury. Looking at it scientifically, it would be fairly straightforward to calculate the energy generated from the impact of two football players by measuring their weights and top running speeds. This would in turn provide data that could help calculate the energy dissipation required in a helmet to mitigate forces of the brain impacting the inside of the skull to the point of eliminating concussion.

I don't have a football helmet in front of me, but I'd guess there's not more than about an inch-thick layer of liner. Knowing the energy generated from the impact test above and the impact dissipation rate of the best helmet liner material would tell you how many inches of helmet liner would be required to dissipate enough energy to prevent concussion in the worst case impact.

The question is, what would we do if the testing showed that 6-12 inches of padding would be required to totally eliminate concussions. Would we be prepared to accept the visual oddity of BIG helmet football to protect football players from multiple concussions that ultimately result in irreversible brain damage? Or would we say, big helmets are for sissies?

Actually these guys were testing the helmets. They were dropping/swining an object so that it struck the helmets while they were stationary. Then somehow they measured the forces inside the helmets. These guys wern't advocating going to leather,they were saying that this particular type of testing suggetsed that the design of the modern helmet might need rethinking.

Why then don't colleges and the NFL start looking at maximum weights for players?

Say, how many concussions do professional rugby players suffer and how big are the players today? I ask because professional rugby players absolutely do not hit the same as football players do, and I believe that it's obviously because they aren't layered up with "cladding" the way football players are. Self preservation dictates that they wrap up more and they deliver more glancing blows. You also never see rugby players leading with the head blindly. The problem with American football is one of too-large steroid freaks who are protected from many injuries they would otherwise incur when they spear other players with their heads and shoulder pads. The game has gotten to the point of actually requiring smaller players wearing much less equipment. Guys like Ray Lewis would be out of the game immediately without the multiple ridiculous layers of gear. The more I think about this issue and the more I see players layered in about 100 layers of under armor and Nike plastic crap, the less respect I have for our American game. It's become a freak show.

Liability? If you admit that the bigger players you have been promoting are in fact killing themselves because of that same size, then you create a liability issue.

I not only think the game would be safer if they had smaller players, I believe it would be a more exciting game. There would be more room to have a running game if there weren't five 350 pound guys creating a wall of fat on the line and belly bumping against the other team's wall of fat. Linemen might actually be able to move their feet and create holes instead of leaning against one another and holding.

Anyone remember this helmet that Bills safety Mark Kelso used to wear? It was specifically designed to reduce concussions with a layer of styrofoam underneath that outer shell. A couple players wore them but most wouldn't because they thought it looked stupid.

There is only one solution to this problem.
How real men play football

The NCAA approves rule changes including moving kickoffs from the 30 to the 35 yard line and placing touchbacks on the 25 instead of 20 yard line. This is an obvious attempt to reduce kickoff returns and the injuries (especially to the head) that can accompany them.

Part of me likes it, but part of me thinks if you really want to avoid these full speed collisions why not simply place the ball on the 25 after all TDs and FGs. But that takes away the onside kick for teams that are far behind, so maybe this is a good compromise after all.

Zips kickers under Ianello typically kicked the ball to approximately the 39 yard line (on average) so I doubt this will affect us much in the short term.

If they are going to promote touchbacks, eliminate the kickoff all together or do the following:
1. Kickoffs from the kicking teams own 45.
2. Any kick out of bounds or in the endzone gives the receiving team the ball on their own 35.
3. Any team that returns the ball and doesn't get it past the 20 automatically gets it on the 25. Five yard halo in effect for retuner until ball is caught. The halo rule is great for safety because it makes the players slow down or even stop.

A kick off is a free kick that once it goes 10 yards, anyone can get. These rule changes would allow that rule to be taken advantage of more often. They need to make the game more exciting again. Instead, the NFL (and it seems now the NCAA is following) is turning into:
1. Touchdown (exciting stuff if your team is doing the scoring)
2. Media timeout (restroom break at home)
3. Extra point (no excitement here because 97% are successful. a td should be worth 7 points with a nonkicking play from the 3 to get another point.)
4. Media timeout (how many times can you use the restroom)
5. Touchback (no excitment here)
6. Media timeout (quick nap)
7. First down

BTW JZ84, I read Scorecasting and it is a great book.

@CK

Good point. Recent kickers aside, UA has had a number of accurate PKs in my time following them, but I think you'd have to go back to Darren Alcorn to find a guy who could put it in the end zone from the 35 consistently.

@GP

Thanks for the book tip. I agree that moving the kickoff even more would be more effective, especially given CK's point regarding the Zips (and some other teams outside the BCS).

Aren't you the one who recommended it to us? I thought someone on the board recommended it so I bought it off of one of the internet book services.

I posted a CNNSI story that discussed the book (I had forgotten the title, until I looked it up just now). But I've never read the book. It's on my list now, though.

April 2012 Independent Football Veterans Conference Powerpoints from their panel on concussions and the lawsuits filed against the NFL and Riddell.

This is not going away anytime soon. it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

Steriods

I'm not saying Seau took steroids, but it is unusual for a human to be in the type of physical condition he was in for 20 years as a professional. Guys take steroids to lengthen their careers. The longer the career, the more head injuries. The more head injuries, the more likely it is to have mental problems from the hits. Steroids also cause guys to be more violent on and off the field (Seau was arrested at one point for beating his wife). More violence causes more head injuries. The article above also shows the steroid abuse can lead to depression when players stop taking them.

The NFL needs to rapidly clean itself up and the NCAA needs to follow as quickly as possible or the sport is doomed. It's a sport, not cock fighting.

Size/weight limits, equipment changes, something has to change. I've said this in other posts, but I am increasingly uneasy about my own participation, just as a fan, in a sport that leaves behind a trail of carnage the way that football clearly does. Seeing heavy hits doesn't get me going anymore, they just make me cringe and feel a little guilty for essentially cheering the gladiators on toward their hobblings/deaths. If the college game and NFL instituted weight limits you'd see these players size down practically overnight. The power in the hits is the speed AND mass of these players. Reducing the mass would go a long way to reducing the forces involved. Equipment changes are also in order. When you spear someone the way these players do every single week, YOU should be injured. I've never seen old football video from the days of leather helmets and no face guards where the players were launching head-first in horizontal fashion at one another. A dude who is 6'4", weighs 275 pounds, runs a 4.5 and has been training since he was a kid to spear other human beings is not what we should consider a football player. He's nothing more than the embodiment of potential human suffering. Why do we cheer that? It reflects poorly on all of us.

This is a really difficult discussion, but one that's really important to have. Everything in life is a balance of risks and rewards. Football is no different. It makes some lives richer than they might otherwise be, and it can also destroy lives. Everyone should be demanding fair and honest assessment of the odds on both the risks and the rewards so that we can each make our own informed decisions about where we stand on the issue. We all need to understand that some people on each side of every debate have vested interests that lead them to focus more on the pros or the cons, so not all published data is completely reliable. We have to try to dig through it all and find the data that we believe to be most realistic and objective.

I agree and I think I have a solution. The NFL should have a real PED policy. If it is about money, then make it about money...any player caught with a single PED in his system is suspended for 16 games. Second infraction and the player is out of the NFL for life. The size of the players will immediately begin to get smaller. The length of careers will get shorter and there will be less head injuries that cause people to kill themselves.

It is obvious when I watch a game that there are guys out there juiced up to no end. My team is the Steelers and James Harrison is one of the more juiced up players I have ever seen. The guy went from having a bad leg injury that was keeping him out of games to squatting 450 pounds in about four weeks...without juice, that is impossible.

Thanks for the video. I always struggle to watch really stupid people talk for that long, but I made it. At the end of the day, the guy sees the game as a way to give his family some sort of financial freedom..even if it means permanently hurting others. This is what the Romans used to do with Gladiators. It debases our football and society when cheap shot artists like Harrison are celebrated. It's a sport, not cockfighting.

Debase is the perfect word. I listened to Bill Romanowksi chatter with Colin Cowherd yesterday and he was such an idiot, spouting off about how the suicide was a wake up call for the NFL about head injury while simultaneously ranting about how terrible it was that coaches and players had been suspended by the NFL for bounties. These guys are idiots and the inmates can never run the asylum. Guys like Romanowski and Harrison are absolutely terrible for the league and for the sport. And remember, there are many, many coaches that teach and train players to get gigantic, fast and dangerous. The coaching culture needs to be changed as well.

Thanks. The coaches are as stupid as the players. They are former players.

I didn't like Goodell when he started as commissioner, but I understand why he is doing what he is doing and why it is needed. He needs to get bums like Harrison and Vilma out of the league before someone gets killed by their stupidity. The players are mostly morons who happen to be really good at playing football. Ray Lewis is one of those morons and we celebrate his silly, phony, pre-game rants for some reason. There is a good career in pro wrestling waiting for him when his NFL career is over (He's mostly a hanger on now anyhow).

The ncaa needs to stop worrying about tv contracts and builing ADs resumes and get around to protecting the players from themselves.

This is a tough decision.

The medical professional side of me says that something needs to be done. We've seen so much evidence of head injuries in all sports, not just football.

The firefighter side of me says that an adult who chooses to take part in something dangerous, should already know the risks. Whether it's skydiving, or scuba diving, or getting in a plane or boat, or on a motorcycle, or getting on a back road in a fast car and laying the wood to it. As a veteran firefighter I sometimes ask myself if going into an unoccupied burning structure (especially one that has long been abandoned) is bravery or thrill seeking. I think everybody would have an answer that is somewhere in between.

And now, since we know the effects of concussions and cumulative head injuries, does the modern player have any legal recourse against the league and equipment manufacturers? If you know the risk is there and you still suit up and play, isn't that implied consent?

Sometimes I question whether I want to even watch football anymore. But that is ignorant to the number of head injuries (especially concussions) in other sports like hockey and soccer. Thinking back to post-crash interviews of race car drivers, are they suffering concussions? What about baseball? Boxing has not been brought up, and the whole idea of boxing is to CAUSE a concussion. We can pretend it's to throw more punches and get more points, but come on. They really want to lay down a knock-out.

Not an easy decision for sure.

Bissinger

Good article, but his conclusions are all wrong. I guess he addresses it some in the article in relation to the situation at Maryland, but the problem isn't college football itself. It's the Athletic Directors who spent the last 10-15 years spending money like drunken sailors who have bankrupted the sport in college. Maybe the book exists, but I would like to see a book analyzing the past twenty years of spending on facilities in college athletics and what the returns have been. My guess is the biggest returns come in the form of athletic directors building something, putting it on their resume and then running to the next job before they have to actually pay for what they have built. There was a housing bubble and I think in the near future, we are going to see a facilities bubble. Athletic Directors are as bad as bankers.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer in college football as well.

This is why we need to stop playing the BCS game and have a spring league of our own.

Ban College Football?

Safety, exploitation at center of debate on college football ban

Deja vu:

The NCAA was founded in 1906 to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time.

The rugged nature of early-day football, typified by mass formations and gang tackling, resulted in numerous injuries and deaths and prompted many college and universities to discontinue the sport. In many places, college football was run by student groups that often hired players and allowed them to compete as non-students. Common sentiment among the public was that college football should be reformed or abolished.

President Theodore Roosevelt summoned college athletics leaders to two White House conferences to encourage reforms. In early December 1905, Chancellor Henry M. MacCracken of New York University convened a meeting of 13 institutions to initiate changes in football playing rules. At a subsequent meeting December 28 in New York City, 62 colleges and universities became charter members of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS). .....

NCAA History

Thanks for the post Dr Z. Safety should always be the #1 priority of any organization. Too bad, for too long, it wasn't a priority in college football. Builing stadiums and "facilities" was the priority and now we are where we are. The NFL is way ahead of the ncaa in terms of safety at this point. The exploitation in college comes from the fact schools are using humans to bankrupt their universities in order to pad the resumes of athletic directors. There is a huge case that most schools lose money with a football team. If that is a given, who benefits?...The ADs and extremely highly paid coaches are the ones benefiting. The players are being exploited to make money for the coaches, ADs and TV networks. They are the only three making money at this point. It's hard to say the universities exploit them when they lose money on football programs.