“There would need to be some historical data to compare to the last 2-3 years.”
You bet... And you can also bet that since that study huge efforts were made the last ten years to reduce those numbers of kids dying. Especially by the “anti-contact sports activists. So I will bet that those numbers have dropped very substantially since up until recently.
But you are not going to find any to compare to, they have been purposely removed and hidden. They do not want anyone to have comparative reference data for the last couple years.
Still does no answer all the folks in other sports and all those who do not even play sports dropping off like flies... One cannot cherry pick one incident to justify or debunk a perspective. The picture needs to be viewed in whole.
And in the whole, the conspiracy theorists are being proven correct by the hour... By a huge margin they have been more right than wrong.
In time, data will be available for the last couple of years. Might take a couple more years, but it’s going to be difficult to disappear that much data. There’s too many researchers that would detect that, seems to me.