Posted on 11/15/2017 11:41:24 AM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Before the NFL pooped their pants and started flinging it at the fans, I would have joined defending football.
The CTE question is not a matter of feelings, and it’s not a matter of opinion.
It’s a matter of data, and the data is insufficient to reach a definite conclusion - yet.
But the trendlines in the data are not good for American tackle football.
The anecdote of the industrial sales and marketing man is meaningless, just as is the “my pappy smoked until age 98” anecdote is meaningless.
I don’t favor restricting any athletic contests that people want to engage in. The Feds should stay the hell out of this matter.
But.
My sons are too old to play football anymore, and my younger daughters wouldn’t want to. If I know then what I know now, I would not have let my now-37 year old son play tackle football at age 11, and the more people who reach that conclusion, the less of a future football will have.
Obviously a true statement. Just look at all those millionaire athletes that will soon lose those huge salaries for being stoopid.
In defense of men lying on the sofa when they could be doing something useful or doing something with the family.
If this malignant midget had any integrity at all - I know, we can stop right there - he would completely recuse himself from anything football related. Money.
Over the last 75 or so years (once we left the farms), the two primary ways to “make men” has been the military and football.
This is not going to end well.
The operative phrase here is "A MAJOR CONCUSSION". My guess is that the author had this one and hung up his cleats shortly thereafter, so he did not suffer any further concussions. This is the crux of the analysis. It's not one or two concussions, it's the 10 or 20 over a short period that caused the cumulative effect leading to CTE.
I would not doubt that guys like Junior Seau or Mike Webster, due to their playing position and style, were probably subject to multiple hits to the head per game than the average person would face in a lifetime.
Me too.
Ironically, I just gave this speech to a parent (mom) of one of my 10 year old football players (I coach).
The studies associated with CTE might have some merit at varying degrees. But there is NO CONTROL group that has been studied to make scientific conclusions. They have some data and are making assumptions. To fully understand CTE they need brains of people that never played football. AND they need brains of people who played “other” sports, from soccer and baseball to badminton and auto racing. They need thousands of samples to analyze. Then they need to analyze hundreds of monkeys too.
Today, there is a notion and observation of a small sector of a population that has football in common. This is not very scientific yet. But, like many other things political, facts and data don’t really matter once an opinion has been reinforced with emotion and broadcast by the media.
That's where I stopped ...
Hate to say it, but football is doomed. You’re talking about a culture where kids are never unsupervised, where they have to wear a helmet to ride their scooter on the sidewalk, where they can’t ride in the front seat of a car until their practically driving one. Do you really think that parents are going to be playing Russian roulette with brain damage?
If football is destroying brains, what is MMA cage figting doing?
CTE is not just an issue in football. Any contact sport, including soccer is at risk. Especially hockey, and rugby. Soccer is not far behind due to heading the ball.
Costas is an idiot. Follow the money, moron.
That sums it up right there.
I need to read the original study...were the brains examimed in people who already showed signs of cte..or did they randomly pick up patients from a true sampling of all players...did the position played make a difference...did they compare rates of cte with say people like boxers or construction people or coal miners? I know mamy exfootball players wbo have none of these cte probs...could it be with advent of using head as battering ram?
I'm not saying that I am a fan of Bob Costas btw.
I think Bob Costas must have played a lot of football.
From the article:
“The first problem with the B.U. JAMA study is that the sample is skewed. The fact that the donors expressed interest in the program indicates self-selection bias in favor of those people who may have already exhibited symptoms related to CTE. This is not a proper sampling methodology according the scientific method and certainly cannot be used as the basis for predictive claims.”
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