[dinoparty]

I played the game only in high school, but even there I remember coming home EVERY night after a game or full-pads practice with a headache. Now, maybe that’s just because I was a wimp, but it leads me to be less than enthusiastic about encouraging my son to play.

[kiryandil]

I played the game only in high school, but even there I remember coming home EVERY night after a game or full-pads practice with a headache.

Your brain was trying to tell you something. I think the biggest point that people are missing (from reading the comments, and Rush's listener) is the size and speed of the players. I'm big and fairly fast, but these guys are HUGH and SPEEDIES. The human frame was not meant to take the weight and absorb the punishment.

[Gilbo_3]

EVERY night after a game or full-pads practice with a headache.

having had my share of hits and headaches, i would wonder if yer helmet fit or style wasnt right...

had a helmet one year that felt like it *caused* a headsplitting pain everytime it contacted something...coaches swapped it out and i was comfy [even when impacts caused *stars*] the rest of the season...

the size and speed argument is prolly a part too, but the hitters and hittees are both bigger and faster...at a point i guess it would be signifigant in relation to tissue, but look at the punishment a heavyweight boxer can inflict, AND absorb...of course individual results will vary tho...

and as in most colliding objects, the one delivering the blow usually tranfers more damage to the hittee...

[epow]

I didn't go out for football in high school until I was a senior and my jaw was broken in pre-season practice, so I never played in an intra-school game. However, even waaaay back then in the mid-'50s we players all knew that football was a ruffntuff game and that injuries and pain were routine and to be expected. I doubt that HS players even today are at serious risk of incurring life threatening head injuries, but as the game goes up the scale of roughness (for lack of a better word) from HS, to college, to the pros, it becomes progressively rougher by magnitudes and the risk of players incurring life shortening injuries or even death on the field goes up with it. AFAIK no pro player has expired on the field or in a dressing room yet, but if the increase in "roughness" sufficient to cause life threatening injury is growing by leaps and bounds as the two Georges claim, and to which Rush appears to agree, it may not be too awfully long before football at every level from Pop Warner to the pros is emasculated by the clucking-hen nanny state that so many Americans seem quite willing to accept these days with little or no protest.

I don't want the pro game nor the college game to go soft and cuddly by any significant degree, but I wouldn't stop watching and take up knitting on Saturday and Sunday afternoons if a reasonable boundary on obviously deliberate life threatening "roughness" were to be placed on the pro game by the managers or the owners themselves. Just keep the nanny state government agencies as far away as possible and I think the that the most life-endangering aspects of the game could be eliminated or at least significantly reduced without destroying the game or Rush's enjoyment of it.

Just my off-the-cuff thoughts, may be revised after further contemplation.