In Defense of Football

American Thinker.com ^ | November 15, 2017 | Patrick Jakeway

[Kaslin]

Last week at a roundtable discussion, Bob Costas opened another front by making the provocative prediction that parents will not allow their sons to play football because it "destroys people's brains" and that "if I had an athletically gifted twelve-year-old son, I would certainly not allow him to play football."

Is football truly destroying the brains of boys across America? The gauntlet has been thrown.

Many articles reporting Mr. Costas's comments cite the high-profile study conducted by Boston University published in July 2017 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). See examples here, here, here, here, and here. This is Exhibit A in the mainstream media's spin machine. The B.U. JAMA study reports that 177 of 202 brains of former players at all levels exhibited some form of trauma known as CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). This article will examine this study, unpack Costas's and the other media distortions, and make a case in defense of football.

Full disclosure: your author played four years of Division 1-A football at Miami (OH) and suffered a major concussion while playing on kickoff against Michigan State in 1989. Subsequently, he went on to have a successful career in industrial sales and marketing taking him across the world and back again. The lessons learned on the gridiron were crucial to him both as a businessman and as a father.

[stockpirate]

Under no circumstances will I ever watch or listen to a gootball game, ever.

[af_vet_rr]

Agreed. I would not have let my son play if I knew then what I know now, at least not until he was older. I don't know what has changed, but it feels like kids these days are hitting harder, at higher speeds, and more often, than when I was playing in high school.

My son has told me that any sons he has will probably not play. He was in the Marines, and has several friends who suffered head injuries from IEDs, and there is this big question mark about what they will be like 10-20 years down the road.

[Zionist Conspirator]

As a conservative (and a Southerner) who has never liked or understood football, I realize I am once again in the minority here. But I've really always thought it was a horrible, brutish game. I know George Will is on the outs with us, but his description of football as "the worst aspects of American culture--periods of violence punctuated by committee meetings" is spot on. How anyone could prefer such a "sport" to the downright metaphysical phenomenon of baseball is beyond me.

Another thing I don't like about football is the cultish atmosphere that surrounds it. Here in the South people get all worked up about colleges they've probably never been to just because they have the state's name. And the radio broadcasts . . . a game of four fifteen minute quarters stretched into four hours, preceded by a "pre-game" show of ninety minutes and then followed by a "post-game" show of ninety minutes? What in the sam hill do they talk about for three solid hours? Can you actually spend that much time talking about a game? Sheesh.

[jjotto]

Ninety minute pregame? Out here on the prairie with no major pro sports, three hours pregame and three hours postgame isn’t unusual.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Ninety minute pregame? Out here on the prairie with no major pro sports, three hours pregame and three hours postgame isn’t unusual.

Good gravy . . . ten hours devoted to a single game broadcast?

It's even more cultish than I thought!

[Hrvatski Noahid]

> Another thing I don’t like about football is the cultish atmosphere that surrounds it.

I assume you mean American eggball! Football is huge in Croatia. We have two main teams. There is a civil war when they play! I love my Croatian people. But I do not like their cults.