Rawls if he can hang onto it, I'd guesss
PurpleStuff
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Recent Comments
| Date | Title | Body |
|---|---|---|
| 2 weeks 12 hours ago | No one will care |
People in Ireland do not care about a Catholic school in Indiana founded by French priests. The only people in the stands strongly supporting ND will be Americans who traveled over for the game. Everyone else in Dublin will be laughing at them for thinking they are Irish. |
| 2 weeks 6 days ago | Good point on Cutler |
You can't take the issue seriously at the same time people are calling a guy a giant pussy for treating it seriously. To JeepinBen's point above as well, this is one issue where the league can/should play a strong role. They need to be the ones who step in and say "We wouldn't let someone in Cutler's situation back in the game even if he wanted to, and the fans can go fuck themselves if they have a problem with that. Every player's long-term health/sanity is more important than any game" That kind of hardline stance may be what is necessary to make real progress on the issue when so many players are willing to act against their best interests and the folks around them have a stake in letting them take that risk. |
| 2 weeks 6 days ago | Seems weird |
You would have to think either their personnel office is totally screwed up (I wouldn't put it past the 'Skins) and they literally signed too many guys and had to tell somebody to go home or that he did something to immediately piss them off (mouthing off, tardiness, drinking a cold brew in the huddle). |
| 2 weeks 6 days ago | Clearly there is a problem |
Obviously even if it is just some small percentage of those who play for an extended period of time at the highest levels, football is clearly fucking up some people's lives. I just think that we will see a far more cautious approach to concussions, further study on the medial end, a stronger stance on taking players out of games if they display the slightests symptoms, and a continued adaptation of the rules/equipment to limit knockout blows. The game will continue to get safer and safer (let's not forget it was almost outlawed in its infancy because loads of players were dying during games). I don't think we are anywhere close to seeing the death of football, though. |
| 2 weeks 6 days ago | Numbers |
More parents refusing to let their kids play football isn't going to have any impact on the business of football. The participation numbers are already fairly low. Far more kids play soccer and baseball than participate in organized tackle football before high school (the sport is quite expensive and as pointed out parents can worry about a lot more potential drawbacks than long-term head trauma). As long as people are watching football and buying tickets (the role virtually all of us play in the equation), then there will be more than enough folks playing the sport to field 32 NFL teams. Also, assuming there are 300 million Americans, only one in ever 180,000+ people is currently on an NFL active roster. Parents making decisions based on what might happen if their kid plays for 15 years in the NFL is just silly. The fact remains that even if every parent encouraged their kid to play football, the overwhelming majority wouldn't make their high school team and even fewer would actually play. People patting themselves on the back based on what they hypothetically will or won't let their kids do is pretty useless to the discussion. |
| 2 weeks 6 days ago | Jumping the gun |
You are dead on in this case. Obviously there is a problem that needs to be addressed, but the media and most casual observers seem to have already concluded that Seau suffered from brain damage directly caused by playing football. While that may be the case, there is zero real evidence to back up the conclusion at this point. Until the medical/scientific tests are done, any physical causation can't just be assumed. Real evidence has to be discovered and the other potential factors need to be ruled out before you can just conclude football = suicidal depression. People are also making sweeping generalizations based on still isolated occurences and anecdotal evidence (Duerson + Seau = incredibly dangerous trend). The media has continually quoted the figure that 8 members of the 1994 Chargers have passed away prematurely. Though that number is eye catching and troubling, even assuming football collisions and head trauma led to Seau's suicide, that would make such an injury just as likely to have taken the life of a Chargers player as being struck by lightning and three times less likely than heart disease/attack. Yet no one is talking about the dangers of a league that virtually demands obesity from a large segment of its players and what that does to their life expectancy, though that impacts a much larger group of people. While the issue needs to be studied and clearly more needs to be done to prevent players from getting back on the field shortly after a concussion, the "This is the end of football" talk is being fueled by an overreaction to the actual statistics caused by media headlines. |
| 3 weeks 13 hours ago | Poor records in bowls |
Haven't the New Year's Day bowls remained pretty constant for a while? It seems like the Gator, Citrus, and Outback have all been around for quite some time on New Year's Day. Is the apparent dilution really about the bowls trying to cram teams/games down our throat or just the result of conference expansion (fewer independents with pristine records), the addition of an extra BCS title game (two more post Jan 1bowl teams), and the fact that the Big Ten and SEC are getting two BCS-level bids nearly every year when in the past that wouldn't have been the case. |
| 3 weeks 23 hours ago | What actually happened |
One guy died in an alcohol related (at least according to one site I found) car wreck (at 28), another in a commercial plane crash, one was struck by lightning, one OD'd, and three died of heart disease/attack. Now Seau. A lot of plain bad luck involved along with the self-destructive stuff, and really nothing before now that looks like it has anything to do with head trauma (the guy who OD's was suspended for drug use in his mid-20's). |
| 3 weeks 1 day ago | Lifespan |
We can't just keep using this as a meaningful statistic and making conclusions about which players are most impacted by NFL hits. Guys who weigh 300+ pounds have a much shorter life expectancy than people who weigh a great deal less. That is always going to be the case inside or outside of the NFL. For the same reason that we shouldn't be quick to adopt rugby helmets/rules (or MMA style fighting, for that matter) just because an untested theory seems intuitive, we shouldn't leap to conclusions about the safety of pro football (much less lower levels of football) based on an emotional reaction to one case (or a small number of them) that hasn't even begun to be investigated yet. |
| 3 weeks 1 day ago | Perception |
You are seeing a trend in large part because the media is telling you there is a trend. Obviously the issue should be studied in depth, but especially in the case of life expectancy a large number of factors other than NFL head trauma can have an enormous skew on the statistics (race, obesity, steroids/supplements, money/fame/women/drugs/booze, etc.). I'm guessing that the NFL sees higher rates in at least some of those categories than the general population does, and any honest assessment of the situation can't involve jumping to conclusions based on broad statistics. If anything illustrates this perception gap, it should be the fact that so much hand-wringing and speculation is going on because one NFL player committed suicide for reasons that are still completely unknown to any of us while in another front page thread no one is talking about the damage caused by amateur pilots or small aircraft, when a single Michigan basketball commit has lost his father, mother, two siblings, and his step-mother, and been seriously injured in multiple plane crashes. The fact that we're outraged about concussions or a bounty system that doesn't seem to have caused any particular injuries (and proudly announce that we won't let our pre-teen children play tackle football as a result) but are ambivalent about FAA procedure, the granting of pilot's licenses, or recreational flying in general, seems to suggest that our perceptions are strongly manipulated by what we're interested in already and what we're told. |
