NFL football. Even though college has been back for a few and the NFL season started last Wednesday night…today is the first full Sunday of NFL and they are almost all back. It seems they forgot to invite the real NFL officials and they are using replacement refs (only time will tell about this one).
I had lunch the other day with a good friend of mine who gave me the most recent ESPN magazine issue that was the NFL Preview. IN it was in incredible article that he wanted me to read called Football is Dead Long Live Football. So what was so good about this article written by J.R. Moehringer?
While at the same time of describing why football is at such a zenith in our culture, he goes on to write why this might be the start of the obituary for football as we know it. From his standpoint football caught on immediately for a lot of reasons; some of which were that the “ruggedness” of the game instilled certain vitality to the American men and that the everyday person could do a little reading and considers themselves an aficionado of the game and become a critic. And he feels (and I have to agree with him) and I quote “Nothing else approaches football’s universal, transcultural, transgender, transgenerational appeal.” And the television statistics bear the truth of it. No TV show has more men watch it, more women watch it, and more ethnicities watch it than the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is to American culture as the gladiators were to ancient Roman culture. Football is the ultimate king in American culture….Long Live the King.
But and this is a big one, there are three areas which threaten to change the game as we love it.
First, the growing knowledge of potential injuries is growing exponentially. Forget about the word concussion, there is a new phrase coming out “subconcussive injuries” which means “smaller, repeated head blows that often go unnoticed and untreated but cumulatively can be more dangerous that having your bell rung”. The second threat is all the legal action going on when over 3000 former players are suing the NFL for a variety of reasons involving the risks of injuries in the game. Last but not least is the threat of death. 6 former or current football players have committed suicide in the last 2 years and they all had some symptoms of what is called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (headaches, slurred speech, depression, dementia, memory loss etc.). One of the players, Dave Duerson, even left a note saying he wanted them to study his brain. What is remarkable is that he was a member of a panel investigating the disability claims of ex-players. And while Moehringer goes on to say there is no way one could definitively say that CTE is the cause of the suicides…it does appear odd that the players choose to shoot themselves in the chest to save their brains for science to study.
According to this article, the younger you are when you suffer concussions, the far more dangerous it is for you long term. As parents start finding out about the greater magnitude of the danger, as the ultimate gatekeeper, they may stop their kids from playing.
He concludes that while football will survive, it might be a much different beast than it is today. Culturally it will always be important but it will be different.
A well written article that gave me plenty to think about. Wow it is 10:00 am I got to get to the TV for the first morning games……