What other culture has people bashing their opponents left and right, all for a oblong shaped ball that bounces unpredictably?
Sure, the entertainment value for football is large. According to Forbes, in 2013 The National Football Association (NFL) revenues were just north of $9 billion, making it the most lucrative sports league in the world.
The problem is that we now realize beyond doubt that players are sacrificing their brains and bodies to create this revenue.
The New York Times reported a study in which 111 NFL brains were studied and 110 of them were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition that has been linked to depression, memory loss and substance abuse.
Compare football to basketball. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), 73 concussions occurred over a 17-year period in the NBA. By contrast, according to USA Today, 281 concussions were reported in the NFL for only the 2017 season.
The problem doesn’t lie with the players. Far more so than other violent sports such as boxing or wrestling, football’s issue lies with its integration into American culture and its enormous fan base, where fans are just waiting to see players like safety Kam Chancellor lay out an opposing wide receiver. Fans sometimes replay the tackles over and over again, tweet them on Twitter, share videos on Facebook and add them to their Snapchat stories, making comments like “Ooooo, that must’ve hurt.”
With this level of popularity and adoration, the sport also greatly affects a younger generation of athletes at the high school or middle school level, whose brains are still developing.
As a country that promotes such a violent sport, we need to be honest with ourselves. Football is deeply rooted in American culture. High school football games have the most attendance out of all other high school sports. People with minimal knowledge about football host Super Bowl parties. The sport of football has been engraved into the American identity. But as the popularity of the sport continues to flourish, players’ health increasingly suffers.
The entire nature of the game, tackling another person so they don’t run the ball into a certain space of the field, will inevitably lead to injuries.
In 2014, Ryan Shazier was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first round of the draft, and he became a defensive presence and playmaker for the team. In December 2017, Shazier suffered a severe spinal injury after tackling Bengals’ wide receiver Josh Malone. Shazier just recently started walking without a cane.
It’s time for all of us to recognize that the costs of football just aren’t worth the benefits. Players are nearly guaranteed to get CTE as they age; they only play 2.66 years in the league on average.
In light of growing concerns about the dangers of football, the NFL has implemented new rules into the game to make it safer, but these measures are not enough.
In 2017, crackback blocks, an offensive strategy in which a player will spread out near the sideline and seal off a defender from the wide side to open up the field for the running back, have been prohibited. Wide receivers running a pass route get defenseless player protection, which means that if they haven’t had time to clearly become a runner, tackling them is a penalty.
However, the NFL needs to continue to incorporate more precautions before the game can be played with minimal risk of injury. For example, the NFL does not have standardized criteria for diagnosing concussions. They could also implement some sort of neck support to minimize concussions. NASCAR has implemented a Head and Neck Support (HANS) device, which is a restraint that tethers a driver’s helmet to a shoulder harness to prevent abrupt neck motions.
For the sake of America’s youth, people need to stop idolizing football and leagues need to incorporate better protection for its players, whether that be in gear or in rulebooks, to prevent serious and lasting injury.
