OT: High school football player dies; seventh in USA this year
Very sad story out of Chicago this morning.
17 year old Andre Smith has died after suffering "blunt force head injuries due to a football accident." He is the SEVENTH high school football player to die in America this year. In 2014, eleven high school football players died, five of whom's deaths where caused by injuries directly related to game action.
As much as we harp on brain injuries in college and the NFL, what's going on in high school football right now is much worse. These kids simply do not receive adequate care for contact football and people are dying almost every week because of it, and unfortunately the fix for this is unclear given the general lack of central control over high school football. It's just a sad state of affairs at this level, unacceptable really, and something is going to need to be done fast or the game risks major (and in that case necessary) gameplay changes.
October 26th, 2015 at 12:59 PM ^
Rest in Peace young man.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:01 PM ^
The game is safer than it has ever been, but now that people are looking for a trend, they will find it.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:19 PM ^
In absolutely no way do I want to take away from these tragedies, but about 1.1 million kids play high school football each year (according to the Googles). 7 deaths represents a 0.000064% death rate. That is about a 1 in 158,000 chance of dying while playing high school football. Those same kids are infinitely more likely to die on the drive home from practice, or while showering in their own bathroom after practice, than on the field. Again, this does not make these deaths "OK" or "unavoidable," but it's important to keep things in perspective...
October 26th, 2015 at 1:31 PM ^
When something emotional happens, people don't always appreciate someone bringing facts and rational thought into it, but I do so thanks. Crossing the street is also more dangerous according to google facts. Flying is infiinitely more dangerous by multiple factors. That doesn't make it any less sad, especially for any friends or family of these unfortnate boys who are suffering a great and lasting loss. But it also puts it into perspective for a rational conversation about safety.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:37 PM ^
of here with your "facts" and "rational conversation". This is the internet. I want to be outraged.
October 26th, 2015 at 4:01 PM ^
This is at screibee below me, but I didn't want it to be buried a page down.
October 26th, 2015 at 4:23 PM ^
And how many of them are high school kids?
How many high school baseball players have died this year?
October 26th, 2015 at 4:35 PM ^
If you're looking for an exact correlation, keep looking. However - I am willing to bet that many of the fatalities in auto racing are to 18-19 year olds. They start racing as soon as they start driving. Sometimes earlier.
Basically, my argument is that limiting risks is a good thing until it becomes a bad thing. Our threshold for risk, as a society, is way lower than it should be. I would rather die in a blaze of glory than live in a world where we all wear bubbles and ban any optional activity the first time it causes a death.
October 26th, 2015 at 4:47 PM ^
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126084
http://myfox8.com/2014/04/12/nc-boy-12-dies-after-being-hit-by-baseball/
There are dozens more of these...
Ban baseball? I'm not trying to be callous. These events are super sad. BUT THAT IS LIFE. WE ARE ALL 1 SECOND FROM DYING FROM SOME FLUKE GAS EXPLOSION OR ROGUE LIGHTNING STRIKE.
Solution? Ban indoor heating and don't let anyone outside when the forecast says 10% chance of rain?
No. Make things as safe as you can without taking the fun out of them, and then mourn when terrible things happen. Don't ban everything for the sake of banning everything.
I feel like I am in a crazy house when people start seeing a few isolated events and want to wave their fingers at all this recklessness. It's information overload. Some woman in India gets killed on a bus and in our subconcious we start wondering just how safe buses are.
Bad stuff happens. It sucks that kids die. I have two children. I would be devastated if something happened to them. But I'll let them play sports. I'll let them ride a bus. I'll let them lead a normal life and just hope that they are part of the overwhelming majority of people who live a long and healthy life in a developed country.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:56 PM ^
If you want to truly provide perspective, compare deaths playing HS football not to driving, but to other HS sports.
How many kids died playing baseball, basketball, track, Hell even an equally physical game such as hockey?
For myself, when you provide such inherently incomplete and false "perspective" it does seem a bit as if you're trying to "take away from these tradgedies".
No disrespect intended, just providing some perspective...
October 26th, 2015 at 2:10 PM ^
Sorry, but the numbers fomo provided are not "false perspective." Football being much less dangerous than many everyday activities is a very important point. Football being more dangerous than other sports is much less meaningful.
October 26th, 2015 at 2:38 PM ^
How in the Hell do you figure that? How is comparing football fatalities to automobile fatalities more pertinent that comparing them to fatalities in other sports?
More people probably die on our highways and byways every year than in armed services conflicts too, but that doesn't mean you should say joining the service and fighting in armed battles or facing terrorist bombs is therefore relatively safe!
Your logic strikes me as faulty in the extreme?
Your light is now lit - rebuttal time...
October 26th, 2015 at 2:48 PM ^
Your highways-vs.-armed-services thing falls into the obvious trap of death rates vs. total fatalities because of sheer numbers, so we'll just go ahead and ignore that, because it's "faulty in the extreme."
According to the study I linked below, which is as comprehensive as anything you'll find, high school football has a fatality rate of 0.29 per 100,000 participants. Driving in the US has a fatality rate of 11.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. (And obviously higher per participant, since not everyone drives.)
Yet we accept driving and don't accept football?
Given that, the onus is on you to answer these questions: Why do you think an activity with an 11.6 / 100,000 rate is safe, and an activity with a 0.29 / 100,000 rate is not? And why is it faulty in the extreme to compare them?
October 26th, 2015 at 3:01 PM ^
I agree with you 100%, you are flat-out correct on everything you said. I'll add two things that go beyond what we've already talked about when considering how dangerous football is.
One difference between football and driving is that driving (for now) is basically essential - for many people, you just have to drive. Football will always be optional, so the cost-benefit consideration will be different. I don't know what the tipping point would be, at which death rate you'd go "ok this just isn't worth it anymore." I think we're still way below that, but it's subjective.
The second thing is that death rates don't tell the whole story of how dangerous an activity is. We still don't understand the long-term effects of football on the human brain, but I'm certain that more relevant statistics will be those that track outcomes over time.
October 26th, 2015 at 3:33 PM ^
I don't disagree with your overall point, in that when in the proper perspective, football is relatively safe. However, frequency of trial is being ignored here. What would be most accurate would be something like "deaths per hour of participating in the activity" or even "deaths per number of times participating in the activity (trips or game or practice)." People drive A LOT.
To put it another way, I have better chance of flipping a heads in a coin toss than rolling a six on a die, but if I roll that die 100x more than I flip that coin, it becomes a far more likely outcome.
October 26th, 2015 at 2:53 PM ^
Which statistics you want to compare depends entirely on what question you want to answer. If the question is "is football more dangerous than other sports", then you want to compare the fatality rate of football to that of other sports. If the question is "how dangerous is football in the grand scheme of things", then you compare it to everyday things. Both are equally valid.
Your example of comparing highways to military service, however, is objectively flawed because you chose to compare absolute numbers, rather than fatalities per capita.
October 26th, 2015 at 3:33 PM ^
This will attempt to answer points in both Wahoo & Wisco's comments:
The armed service conflicts contrast was an example of taking something inherently dangerous, that also had NOTHING to do with the topic at hand (much in the way that auto fatalities have nothing to do with HS football), and satirizing attempts to compare road fatatlities with HS football fatalities.
Wisco makes the excellent point that when introducing driving and (non-athletic event) swimming deaths into a conversation about deaths playing HS football, one has compared not HS football to other HS athletics to determine it's relative danger (apples to apples I say); but instead the dangers of HS football as compared to many other societal functions (driving, working, flying - apples to oranges, I say).
Wisco decrribes each as equally valid comparisons, to which I wholeheartedly disagree.
Wahoo asks should we not ban driving before taking on HS football, as the liklihood of death is greater there - a point I would again say is obfuscation, and akin to the tobacco industry saying more people die in auto accidents than from smoking. It may be true, but it doesn't men we shoudn't vigorously regulate tobacco usage.
People from the ages of birth to 100+ die in auto accidents every year, not just the ages of 14-19 (or go 7-19 and include ALL youth football). Some are drivers, some are passengers, some are pedestrians, some are even the responders trying to help the people involved. We have rigorous regulations about who can drive, how often they need to be re-tested to maintain the priveledge, and when their level of intoxication has passed the legal limit.
And these are clearly not enough - NOT EVEN CLOSE! Operating a powerful machine at speeds from 25-75 mph (and that's just the legal speeds) is inherently dangerous. All the other activities various people have mentioned as other dangerous things besides HS football are also potentially fatal. There's no one on here denying it.
But I can promise you that if the title of this post had been "Another person dies in Chicago traffic" the only ones clicking on it would have been people trying to see what the joke was. The fact that kids are dying playing football resonates with us. The fact that there are alternatives that may be safer we can steer these kids into, but instead spend all this time typing and googling for facts that say "driving and flying are dangerous too!" should give pause.
For those who watched the Paramus-IMG game the other night, I believe we saw the inevitable model of youth football in the future in IMG. School districts will find it too expensive to insure students against the inherent dangers of this game we love. Academies will arise to provide highly skilled and trained players for colleges (if that model even survives) and professional leagues.
Jesus, as I'm typing this long-winded diatribe the board's top item just became "Chris Clark & Syracuse part ways" - someone needs to check that kid for brain damage, STAT!
October 26th, 2015 at 4:00 PM ^
that we should regulate football? Be aware of its dangers? What exactly?
Sorry, but you typed a long response saying we shouldn't compare playing football to other non-sports activities, but you did not type a point saying why we shouldn't. And you make the point that we regulate tobacco and driving, because we recognize the dangers. So I assume you think football needs more regulation. You responded to wisco's point that people have to drive, and people don't have to play football. Do you know why we haven't regulated playing sports? Precisely because they are voluntary activities. That is the point. People can choose whether or not they are their kids can play. And that's exactly what should happen.
If parents collectively decide over time that it's too dangerous, then the game will wither away. And while that would be terrible IMO, that's the proper way to approach a voluntary activity. When considering whether or not to allow a child to play, it is in fact entirely reasonable and legitimate to compare that not only to other sports, but to other things we do in life. You've yet to tell us why we shouldn't do that.
October 26th, 2015 at 4:10 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 4:12 PM ^
There are a few things that we can acknowledge as facts:
1. Football is more dangerous than walking.
2. Football is not mandatory.
3. People die playing football.
So the question becomes - When have we gone too far in controlling activities for willing participants? We would never allow a Russian Roulette league to get started and be featured on ESPN. Obviously.
Alternatively:
1. Chewing is more dangerous than drinking.
2. Steak is not mandatory.
3. People die eating steak.
What do I mean by this? There is an alternative to steak. We can get ALL of our nutrients in slurry form. We would never risk choking, and the heimlich would be a tool of the past.
My basic argument is that life is inherently dangerous. I mean... most people* inevitably die at the end. If we continue to chip away at our freedoms to accept risk, then we've become this sterile, boring society that has sacrificed the joy of living for the joy of not dying. I'm sorry, but that is not a fair trade.
* Did not research the exact number of people who die after they live.
October 26th, 2015 at 4:26 PM ^
It was about what I consider specious attempts to compare the danger inherent in youths playing it to activities such as driving and flying - and then saying you're not trying to take away from the tragedy of youths dying.
It struck me that these apples to oranges comparisons do indeed take away (at least a bit) from focussing on the HS football picture .
I made my point about where I feel the future of the game is heading. School districts will find the costs unacceptable. Private academies will replace them (a la IMG). The loss here will be for those who play just for the sport and camaraderie.
I love football and can't imagine what tragedy it would take for me to stop watching. I merely did not think the comparisons being made were apt to the topic.
October 26th, 2015 at 4:50 PM ^
Eh. Your argument wasn't really all that egregious. I just used the argument to further my point. Some people take the opposite stance to the extreme, and they are the ones that give me a headache.
October 26th, 2015 at 6:56 PM ^
I don't think it's specious at all. fomo's point is that football is basically safe, and no, I don't think it takes away from the tragedy of when it does happen. When Volvo advertises the five-star safety ratings of their cars (i.e., "you're less likely to die in this car"), nobody thinks it takes away from the tragedy in cases where someone did die in a Volvo.
And if you're trying to make it relatable, you have to broaden the scope. If you were trying to convince someone to go (or not to go) into the armed services, would you compare the Army's rate to the Navy's (or vice versa?) That wouldn't be useful because the person you're talking to would have no idea whether those are even good or bad fatality rates. Likewise, comparing football to other sports is only useful if you're trying to make the case that it's more or less safe than those other sports.
In other words, your comparison is only helpful in answering "is it safer?" Only by comparing it to other activities that people can relate to, can we decide "is it safe?"
Look at it this way: Let's say high school sports had completely unacceptable fatality rates, ranging from say 50 deaths per 100,000 in cross-country to 500 per 100,000. You're making the case that cross country is a dangerous sport, which, objectively and obviously, it would be at that rate. Are you going to accept it if anyone says you can only compare to other sports? And how would you know, and how would anyone know, that that death rate is unacceptable?
October 26th, 2015 at 4:26 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 6:05 PM ^
Good post.
October 26th, 2015 at 2:12 PM ^
revealed few stats where the deaths were broken down by sport, but several articles said football was the sport with the highest incidence, which makes sense.
The fact that football has the highest incidence means what to you? The poster you responded to had a more relevant point. Saying football causes more deaths than baseball does nothing to detract from his point.
October 26th, 2015 at 2:23 PM ^
This is the most comprehensive set of numbers I've seen. It's not very well-arranged, but it's got all the data.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:42 PM ^
For some context for that number: the rate of drowning deaths for males in the U.S. is 2.07 per 100,000 population*. Note that this is per population, not per number of people who frequently swim. (or swim at all).
Yes, football is dangerous. Yes, I strongly support every safety measure that we can take to protect these young men. However, almost everything we do carries the risk of injury or death. The sky is not falling.
My condolences to the family of the young man who recently passed away.
*Source: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6119a4.htm (data for years 2005-2009)
October 26th, 2015 at 2:24 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 4:46 PM ^
So if they didn't have football practice, they wouldn't have to drive to and from it, and they wouldn't have to shower as often. Thus, significantly reducing the potential for death. I think you proved your point. No one should do anything athletic becuase not only does the death rate increase from the activity, but the actitvities required to do the activity are even more dangerous!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Hide and do nothing!
yes, S/
But it is true as stated below, driving and showering are pretty essential. Football is a choice and statistics are not the be all end all to decide an argument.
October 26th, 2015 at 3:09 PM ^
But it isn't safer than it's ever been. The average annual number of indirect and direct football-related deaths are at levels not seen since the 1970s.
Yes, the overall risk is still very minimal, but shouting "HEY PEOPLE DIE FROM DRIVING AND POOLS TOO" ignores the fact that so many of these severe injuries and deaths result from the absence of protocols that are very easy to implement, such as heat acclimatization policies, access to trainers during games, on-site defribrilators, etc. High schools are way behind on this stuff, and many of them are just now starting to catch up.
October 26th, 2015 at 6:07 PM ^
If you're only comparing the average annual number of deaths, you're not using the right stats. If more kids play today than in the 70s, and I'm just making that assumption based on a much higher population, you'd expect the number of deaths to increase even if the risk per child remained the exact same. The quesiton of increased danger would have to take into account the rate of deaths (i.e. number of deaths per player season, or whatever is the appropriate frequency control).
October 26th, 2015 at 3:25 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 1:04 PM ^
Man...tell ya what. I LOVE football (especially college) more than any sport in the world, but don't know if I would allow my kid (currently don't have any) to play it.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:11 PM ^
That was a common concern when I was a kid back in the '60s and '70s. The big change over the last 45 years, greater information exchange.
October 26th, 2015 at 2:10 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 2:41 PM ^
Not to start a religious debate, but I am an atheist, so that won't work. : )
October 26th, 2015 at 2:55 PM ^
"...develop male character..."
oh, boy.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:08 PM ^
It's true that there needs to be more emphasis on safety, and particularly, getting the high school players proper fitting, new equipment.
My only perspective on this is that there are well over 100 of bicycling deaths each year, and 20% of them are children.
I think we tend to point a finger at football, and forget other sports that can be dangerous.
One of my daughter's friends died skateboarding a few years ago, and he was wearing a helmet and other safety equipment. He fell on concrete and I believe hit his head on a step or a curb.
59 people died skiiing in Colorado alone in the past few years.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:20 PM ^
And how many people died typing on message boards, Mr. Naysayer. It's you advocates against us getting fresh air that are turning our country into a series of tubes stuffed with pizza rolls. How dare you suggest that children not be allowed outside. How dare you.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:22 PM ^
In Skiing the point of the sport is to avoid trees. Football is a sport where players get off on who can hit the hardest because it makes them feel macho.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:35 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 1:37 PM ^
Macho...or stupid, whichever term you prefer.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:50 PM ^
October 26th, 2015 at 3:13 PM ^
Takes on FIYAHHHHHHHHHH
October 26th, 2015 at 1:39 PM ^
Long lift lines be damned.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:11 PM ^
hyperbole much?
What is sad is people care more because it is football. All life lost is shame, but to the media, and some others, somehow life lost in football is somehow more important or relevant then lost in other ways, like swimming pools, where people actually do die every week because of it.
http://www.poolsafely.gov/drowning-deaths-injuries/
October 26th, 2015 at 1:19 PM ^
If you believe in the children of tomorrow, you will vote NO on pools.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:23 PM ^
Seven fatalities/nine weeks of football = Almost every week.
October 26th, 2015 at 1:36 PM ^
"People are dying every week"
That statement implies much more than the actual data supports.