OT - football tragedy

stop sticking your head in the sand about the truth of ostriches sticking their heads in the sand

Here's a different argument that I'm having a hard time articulating my thought, but I'll try:

Since it's such a freak, one-time, instantaneous accident, it's irrelevant how it happened. Even though it happened playing football, it's so rare and isolated that it really doesn't have anything to do with the controversy currently surrounding football.

To me, saying "he died doing something he loved" in regards to football would be more like playing football for years and years, until the concussions bring on all those nasty dementia diseases and you die. An analogy would be smoking cigarettes and eventually dying from lung cancer.

In this case, an analogy to me would be more like someone went to light a cigarette and the lighter blew up in their face and killed them. It wouldn't have happened if that person didn't want that cigarette, and fire and flames and all that are a danger of cigarettes, but it would be so rare that it doesn't really have anything to do with smoking.

Upfront, as a parent of a football player, I want to say I am sorry to hear this tragedy has ocurred, and completely respect what the family, both teams, and freinds of the player must be going through. 

WSJ article here says:

Between 2002 and 2012, according to the University of North Carolina Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, there were an average of 3.8 fatalities a year directly attributable to football, fewer than for weight lifting (an average of 6.3 fatalities a year) or even amusement park rides (4.4 fatalities a year). Mountain climbing produces more fatalities—an average of 25 a year. So does horseback riding, with more than 100 deaths a year, to say nothing of bicycle riding, which killed 677 people in 2011 alone, and swimming, which kills more than 3,500 people a year.

Later it says the players are way more likely to die driving to and from the game or practice.

The one thing I wish the article had included was soccer, baseball and hockey statistics. I found in the UNC Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury data here mentioned by the WSJ article, playing football in high school makes you 3x more likely to die than baseball or soccer / 100000 players. Hockey is about the same, LAX a little less, and gymnastics is 3.3x more than football or hockey. Serious Injury rates are highest for hockey and gymnastics. Football is a close third. Soccer and baseball way lower.

Other articles I have read have said soccer is one of the leading causes of ACL injury for women, and overall the concussion rate in soccer is as high as any other sport.

So I guess the bottom line is they should ban mens gymnastics - it is such a barbarian blood sport.

FWIW - the WSJ says football players live on average longer than non-football players too, with the exception that the largest players tend to be likely to have heart conditions later in life.