
At Colorado, a Breach in Football’s Wall - mlthoughts2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/sports/colorado-football.html
======
michaelbuckbee
I knew it was bad, but I had not realized that the CTE numbers were so high
from the article "...read the work of the Boston University C.T.E. center,
which found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of brains
obtained from deceased N.F.L. players and 91 percent of college football
players and 21 percent of those who played high school football."

From BU's site, here was the methodology: "For the study, the researchers
began with the donated brains of 202 football players. Pathologists, knowing
nothing of a patient’s history or symptoms, examined each brain for evidence
of CTE. At the same time, clinicians—blinded to each brain’s pathology—used
medical records and interviews with family members to collect detailed
information about each patient’s medical history and symptoms. The group met
for regular consensus meetings, where the pathologists and the clinicians
presented their findings. They limited the study to football players,
providing a somewhat homogeneous sample."

Stated another way (based on the study) 9 out of 10 college football players
are going to leave with CTE.

~~~
lotsofpulp
It's clear that there is significant brain damage risk to participating in
activities that knock your brain around. Why anyone would let their children
or themselves box, MMA, hit soccer balls with their head, or play American
football is beyond me.

~~~
matwood
Have there been any studies that attempt to rank the risks? I imagine boxing
would be at the top. Followed by football.

MMA is a tricky one. A fight can get bloody, but because of the light weight
gloves (and kicks), any single good blow typically ends the fight. Fights can
also end by submission without having to knock someone out. A professional UFC
fighter, and a professional NFL player would be an interesting comparison.

What about the board sports (wake/snow/skate)?

~~~
jlarocco
> What about the board sports (wake/snow/skate)?

I doubt they're anywhere near the others. Boxers and football players get hit
every match as a matter of course. The whole point is to hit people.

Board sports, on the other hand, the entire point is not to fall down or run
into things. A person can snowboard an entire lifetime and never take as many
hits to the head as boxer gets in a single match.

------
jedberg
I'm a season ticket holder (for Berkeley). When all the CTE stuff started
coming out, I felt a bit guilty but not enough to cancel the tickets. Now I'm
not sure how I feel. On the one hand, these kids are aware of the risks and
choosing to play anyway. On the other hand, many of them are choosing to play
because they come from depressed backgrounds with no other way of paying for
or in some cases even getting into college, and football offers a chance to
completely change their entire family's situation.

But then again, I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast where they
interviewed someone who played football and then went on to get an MBA from
Harvard and worked in the executive ranks of both the NFL and NBA.

He's well aware of the CTE risks, but when they asked him if he'd do it all
again knowing what he knows now, he said he would still do it, because he grew
up poor and now has multiple lifetimes of money. But he would never let his
son play, because his son doesn't need to play to get out of a bad life
situation like he did. He said it was a sacrifice he'd make again for the sake
of his kids and his family. Do we want to deny people that chance to get out
of poverty even though they have to knowingly risk their life? I honestly
don't know because I didn't grow up poor.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
This sounds distrurbingly like gladiator / slave pit fighting. It’s basically
a horrible lottery ticket for poor players, most of whom get brain damage and
a meaningless college degree, but maybe 2% of whom get life-changing amounts
of money (and then some of them get fucked up on drugs or involved in crime
anyway...).

It sure does not sound like a good way to distribute opportunity at life
success to poor children..

~~~
jedberg
I agree, it's a terrible way to distribute wealth. But it is _a way_ that
currently exists. Do we take it away without a replacement?

Yes, long term I think football wouldn't exist if we had lots of wealth
redistribution programs. But we don't.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I am not sure I follow you on this. For example state lotteries are widely
known to function like a tax on poor people. Even though some people win the
lottery, it’s fairly uncontroversial that most people would be better off if
the lottery was simply disallowed, and nobody wins. We don’t need a
replacement for the lottery, just to remove it.

I don’t see why it’s different for college football.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> _Even though some people win the lottery, it’s fairly uncontroversial that
> most people would be better off if the lottery was simply disallowed, and
> nobody wins. We don’t need a replacement for the lottery, just to remove
> it._

There's a big difference between "disallowed" and "does not exist". The
lottery as it stands distributes its poor tax proceeds to the state, often to
education. It's heavily regulated, and advertisements contain warnings on the
dangers of gambling, and I'd say it's common knowledge that it's a tax on the
poor.

If it was removed, however, it would leave a vacuum. People are irrational,
and the idea that they could get lucky and win is extremely tempting. I don't
think you can say with confidence that whatever gambling would take its place
would be less harmful than the lottery.

------
Balgair
It seems that repetitive head injuries are really something that has long term
consequences. The issue is VERY complex and has a lot of factors. One thing to
look at is the complex data on other sports[0]. It turns out that men's rugby
and women's ice hockey are also big magnets, along with soccer/futbol. It
seems to be that just about any hit to the head can be damaging, regardless of
equipment. The 'violence' of American football may be a correlated factor, but
not causative.

But we're just beginning to understand these things. More data is needed,
unfortunately. It seems that these athletes really are suffering.

[0] [https://completeconcussions.com/2018/12/05/concussion-
rates-...](https://completeconcussions.com/2018/12/05/concussion-rates-what-
sport-most-concussions/)

P.S. I've also struggled with these issues. I've written on HN before about
them and won't bore here. Suffice to say, though I've had deep struggles with
concussions, and in the end I'd say I wish I'd not done those sports as a
result, it is a _hard_ question to answer. If I could be back out on that
pitch once more with my mates and be guaranteed to not get another head
injury, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I loved that time and really do miss it
everyday, even decades later, I love rugby. I wasn't an easy thing to quit,
and it is still not easy to stay away from. The concussion epidemic is not
going to be easy to solve.

~~~
mathgeek
> More data is needed, unfortunately.

I’ve slowly been convinced that more data isn’t needed before we act on this.
The only reason there’s a call for more data is that these sports are very
popular and drive revenue. We have enough data to say “yes, these sports pose
a serious risk to the health of those playing them.” That doesn’t mean to have
to stop playing them, but it does mean we can’t throw our hands up and claim
we just don’t know why these kids keep getting brain injuries.

~~~
jrandm
I think most programs admit and accept the physical risks of physical sports.
Brain trauma is less understood than something like a knee injury, but that's
exactly why these studies need to continue to gather data. We can continue to
improve safety during play, detection of damage, and treatment after injury.

Anecdotally, most youth leagues I see for contact sports have changed their
rules to better protect the players. I would be against any legislation doing
the same for adults who are informed of the risk.

What other actions would you propose?

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xibalba
I played high school football, and my family is a "football family" with Dad
and other relatives having played at the college level. I loved the game and
had many great experiences. I'm sad to write it, but that tradition ends with
me. I will absolutely not allow any children I might have to play this game.

I often wonder how badly my own brain is damaged.

Coincidentally, I also did my undergrad at CU.

~~~
pacala
Quite popular among middle schoolers in my city is Ultimate Frisbee [0]. It
flows similarly to football, at least for an European eye, but without rushing
or tackling.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_(sport)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_\(sport\))

~~~
humanrebar
It's more like rugby than American football.

The physicality of the linemen and other blockers is key to the whole game of
American football. It's like you have a group sumo match and then a rugby game
happening around it.

It adds strategy, tactics, misdirection, and specialization of abilities you
don't see in other sports.

~~~
pacala
The sumo comparison is quite apt, and also present in rugby, at least in scrum
situations. OTOH, in rugby passing forward is prohibited. Not so in ultimate
or football, where passing forward is a defining characteristic of the game.

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madhadron
This is entertaining, because football was almost eliminated from US
universities in the early 20th century because it was too lethal. Teddy
Roosevelt stepped into broker a rules change to remove the most lethal parts
of the game.

> Cabral loves the band of brothers aspect of football

Or join ROTC if you want the real thing.

> We should move in the direction of offering lifelong insurance and medical
> care for football players who become badly damaged,” said John Kroll

The problem with this is that it's hard to say when the brain injury occurred,
since its effects manifest down the road. So we should probably require high
schools and Pop Warner leagues to carry lifelong insurance for players.

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uberdru
I hope that American football does not exist in its current state in 10 years.
Ideally, a test will be developed to detect CTE before you're dead. I was a
lineman. I hit hard, and I was knocked out several times over the course of a
decade or so of play. There's no way to play football in a 'safe' manner. The
tactics and the equipment have evolved in a way that maximizes risk of brain
injury.

~~~
dylan604
What about going back to leather helmets and other less armor like equipment?
Sure, there will probably be a steep injury spike as people try to play in
current styles with less padding, but maybe they'll go back to actually
tackling rather than trying to light someone up for the sake of it. Rugby
seems to do alright without all of the body armor.

~~~
peteretep
> Rugby seems to do alright without all of the body armor.

Rugby has very different rules on physical engagement, and has never seen the
epidemic of deaths that American Football had.

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dannylandau
I'm currently sitting in a Boulder Cafe at Galvanize reading this article, and
wondering if a high school peer that I know -- Tennyson McCartney -- who also
played for the CU team back in the day had CTE. He also committed suicide 10
years back. Remember him as a giant of a guy that was smart and kind.

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fiftyfifty
Why do we continue to allow our institutions of higher learning (namely high
schools and colleges) to promote this sport? The very organizations charged
with making our children smarter sponsor a sport proven to cause brain damage.
At some point these institutions need to be held accountable for this, only
when that happens will we see any change.

~~~
dylan604
Simple: money. The money earned from football events pay for so much of that
institution's budget. Friday Night Lights is a tradition that's not going to
change.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Actually this is not true. Many top athletics programs lose substantial
amounts of money, even after accounting for TV deals,

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runni...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-
up-the-bills)

There’s some unsubstantiated claim that constantly growing expenditure on
sports is requires like a marketing arms race to advertise to potential
students, but I haven’t seen much data backing that.

My guessis that, just as with most professional sports clubs, college
athletics programs by design are intrinsically huge loss leaders designed to
be vehicles by which coaches & administrators extract money from the
university.

For the tiny fraction of top teams with massive fan bases, they can get away
with this while being profitable. For almost all other programs, they burn
through money chasing success and profitability for a while, and after enough
consecutive seasons of financial losses, they retreat to fiscal austerity and
a decline in the athletics department while some other programs are on an
upswing.

~~~
ajkjk
It doesn't have to be a surprising economic argument. People _like_ football.
They're obsessed with it. Of course they have it at their schools.

~~~
xnyan
People also like running, video games or chess to name a few. Football, even
with its popularity, is unique in providing an enrichment pipeline from high
school to the pros that a few benifet from quite a bit.

------
dekhn
Football is a sport where when I first saw it, I thought it was basically a
sports analogy to war, including damaging soldiers. Like boxing, I simply
cannot comprehend why people want to do sports where injury is a routine
component of the activity.

~~~
leetcrew
> Like boxing, I simply cannot comprehend why people want to do sports where
> injury is a routine component of the activity.

football is probably one of the more dangerous sports, and it's getting a lot
of attention right now due to CTE concerns. that said, injury is a routine
component of pretty much all sports at the highest level. you can't be the
best in the world at a physical activity without pushing your body to its very
limits.

~~~
dekhn
yes, but there's a difference between running and causing self-injury, and a
sport where people actually have to collide.

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JustSomeNobody
> “My dad always told me the name of the game is hit, hit, H-I-T. There is
> always a place on the field for someone who will hit.”

This is just sad.

Would love to see data before and after "hitting" replaced "tackling".

------
writimov
I've spoken with multi-generation football family coaches, players who say
that the sport is headed for an end. I'm not sure I believe that.

It comes down to whether a safe helmet can be made or whether a CTE treatment
can be created. (Both of those seem like very difficult goals.)

The number of participants in the kids leagues has been declining for a while:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/191658/participants-
in-t...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/191658/participants-in-tackle-
football-in-the-us-since-2006/) What parent would allow their high schooler to
play if there is a 21% chance of lifelong disability, loss of earnings
potential, etc.?

~~~
lostapathy
A safer helmet isn't the only way out, though. Rules can be changed to shape
the game away from the big hits as well.

Change the rules so there isn't so long between plays and all the optimal
players get smaller and more athletic, and they can't "rest and reset" for the
next big play. All of a sudden, the magnitude of the collisions goes down
substantially.

"Unfortunately" then an NFL game wouldn't be good for 3+ hours of TV
advertisements, so there's a lot of incentive to keep the pace slow.

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LanceH
They should make the field slower.

~~~
soared
Then we just get bigger offensive and defensive lines, who still take big
hits. Making the field faster might be a solution - moving the game towards
hockey rather than rugby speed.

~~~
LanceH
Speed makes hits catastrophic. A slower field means those linemen (who are
taking hits every play) are doing so with less impact. A faster field and
those linemen launch into each other with even greater force and impact. The
running backs up the middle are going even faster when they get stuffed by a
faster linebacker.

Make the field slower. No three point stance. Extreme version would be no runs
inside the tackles so we see mostly lateral movement and pass plays.

Step one is to stop funding football with the schools. Private clubs can show
proof of insurance.

~~~
lostapathy
If you move the game along faster and reduce the resting time between plays,
the average player is going to shrink back closer to something more closely
resembling a normal human, so the reaction mass (and thus severity of
collisions) will drop a lot as well.

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drivingmenuts
It seems the way to make the game safer is, ironically, to reduce the safety
equipment. After all, if you have more skin in the game, so to speak, the less
you might make or take on risky maneuvers. Of course, there are always those
who are going to go for broke and do it anyway,

So maybe the way to win is not to play,

A similar sport is rugby, but the incidence and possibility of injury is
pretty high there, if you read the news. Plus, rugby is un-American, just as
American football is un-Worldwide. So changing sports isn't really an answer,
either. Basketball isn't the same kind of sport, though I took a few elbows in
the face and a knee or two in a very unfortunate spot, so yeah, it rates up
there.

I grew up in a small Texas town where football was practically a second church
(technically, 4th, since there were three churches in town). I broke a couple
of bones and sprained both ankles multiple times before I was out of
elementary, plus I was rail-thin, so by the time football rolled around I was
pretty risk-averse. However, I "managed" the team, which meant doing a lot of
menial tasks the the coach didn't want to. I was also the cameraman.

There were several times I observed some pretty serious injuries. One of our
tackles shattered his right thumb to the point where it was very difficult to
reconstruct. I watched a running back go over the line and got pinned between
two tackles, right at the hip, not only taking him out of the game, but
putting him in serious condition in the hospital for a week (the term used at
the time was "bone-bruise" and he was on crutches for the rest of the season,
at least). During training, despite every precaution, I saw people suffer from
heat-stroke and -exhaustion because we started training in the 110-degree
August sun.

These weren't urban kids, either. They were small-town farmboys, used to
working in heat and taking hits from the occasional obstreperous cow or a kick
from a nervous horse (those were few and far between, thankfully). I once had
my bell rung by a charging sheep desperate to get out of a trailer, so I know
what a concussion feels like, after you wake up. No hospital trip, either.
Just sucked it up and went back to work.

The point is: that these guys were were willing to take some damage just to
play a sport. They were middle-school and high-school kids, ready to take on
the world, without considering the potential risks. Their parents encouraged
it (my grandparents were pretty much neutral about it) and when one of their
kids got injured, it was just part of the game, even if the damage was fairly
traumatic. None of these guys were particularly violent at the time, but if
there was fight, they weren't going to back down and so the prospect of being
padded up and charging the other guy wasn't that big of a deal.

How do you even begin to compete against that sort of mentality?

NOTE: Not to knock om people who grew up in an urban environment, but I think
growing up in a rural farming community carries a higher risk of injury. When
working around livestock you have to be on your game at all times, since you
can't just take a break for a minor injury, that would otherwise entail a trip
to the family doctor for a quick checkup. That was potentially a whole day
lost. Anything above a minor sprain or a small cut could have some serious
effects on production.

~~~
smacktoward
_> It seems the way to make the game safer is, ironically, to reduce the
safety equipment. After all, if you have more skin in the game, so to speak,
the less you might make or take on risky maneuvers._

This seems like saying the way to make the roads safer is to take seatbelts
and airbags out of cars, because then people will be incentivized to drive
more carefully.

And the football case is even worse, because on the roads nobody's future
career hinges on how recklessly they're willing to drive. College football
players on the other hand have huge financial motivations to be willing to
ignore the risks and hit hard, since if they aren't, they are likely to lose
their chance at one of the tiny number of jobs in professional football to
someone else who is.

------
rb808
If all kids could just sit on the sofa and play video games we'd all be much
healthier.

~~~
mactrey
False dichotomy. You can get strenuous, competitive, healthful physical
activity without ever risking brain trauma. Swimming, tennis, track and field,
etc.

------
inamberclad
Weird to hear about my school in the news, mostly because I stay on the other
side of campus and don't give a flying fuck about the D1 sports. Besides,
we're usually not that competitive.

------
smileysteve
> “My dad always told me the name of the game is hit, hit, H-I-T."

The article doesn't touch the board response beyond this quote, but this
mindset seems problematic. In a sport marked by injuries at all levels, and in
this concussion centric area, it says a lot about ignoring the issues that
such would be a tagline. Why it's different from a Nascar team purposefully
running people off the road is a question begging to be asked. And that a
majority of the fans probably watch for the hits, much like Nascar fans in the
90s is problematic.

It's probably affecting society in other ways too - obesity epidemic, family
violence, us vs them mentality

Basketball, Soccer, even "real" football fans are looking for the play
development and strategy much more than the "hits".

~~~
smileysteve
One example is that "Hit, Hit Hit" is as extreme as "Chug Chug Chug" might be
in alcohol consumption. There's speed, skill, strategy, player rotation,
juking, wrapping up, deflecting --- but hit hit hit is the rallying cry.

------
terryschiavo22
What's most important in this conversation is to remember that we're not
talking about football. We're talking about college athletics as a whole. Just
because degrees attained while playing college football are largely worthless
because of how little time is able to be spent studying does not mean that
degrees attained with less-demanding sports (say, gymnastics or soccer) are
equally worthless.

~~~
soared
For those unaware the above comment is likely about how american football
programs fund almost entirely all athletics and some amount of academics at
universities.

~~~
scott_s
I don't think that's accurate. Many top-level football programs _lose_ money.
See:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runni...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-
up-the-bills/?utm_term=.cf7073df0f5f)

~~~
smileysteve
Thanks for mentioning this, it's important; we're told, tv money, etc, but
every bowl season schools not in the top 10 have to face a choice of making
money or losing money

