[mike777]

It is a complete joke and huge lie when players/owners/ and fans who pay and support the league say they want the league to be safe.



Basically 100% of the starters are injured...


Players with broken bones are expected to play



Hall of Fame players die young and many others have life long injuries from football.

Basically fans who pay the players and pay the profits dont care and that is scary.......
----

The game is extremely violent and gambling is in many forms....bookies/office pools/fantasy/ is rampant....


Oh and btw this is the number one sport in America

[Lobowolf]

Go Raiders!!!

[luke warm]

all true, mike... but hypocrisy stopped bothering me a long time ago... i'm just hoping the saints, who have 5 starters out, get healthy

[Gerben42]

Quote

Oh and btw this is the number one sport in America

Sigh... I don't like to watch brutal sports like ice hockey, American football and boxing at all. The American sport I like best is probably basketball. Fast game, lots of action and strict rules about not hurting your opponent.

Don't the ice hockey players have a labour union? That would be the way to get their health a higher priority than those profit-greedy managers.

BTW the most popular team sports here are football (called "soccer" in the US I think), handball and basketball. The most popular non-team sports are tennis and then I would guess biathlon (cross country + rifling).

When the ice hockey world cup was in Germany, only the few interested knew about it.

[kenberg]

Last night I finished reading Starvation Lake. The narrator, like the author, is a journalist and a hockey player. The book has its faults but the portrayal of hockey, of small town America, and the combination of the two, was great. The aggressiveness and brutality don't fit well with my life, but it was, I believe, realistically portrayed.

A couple of cynical comments:

Sports, at least in America, seems to be in a mess. Guys who claim great enthusiasm for sports often don't actually do anything, not even hike or ride a bike. They sit in from of a tv, drink beer, and loudly explain who should have done what.

With the kids, it has become totally nuts, going from one extreme to the other.
One end: My granddaughter, when she was 15 or so, got a concussion playing soccer. The coach found it incomprehensible that her father kept her out for a couple of games. Gotta play hurt if you wanna win, I guess, or some other such *****. Huh! the asterisks were placed there by the editing program. I talk normal.
The other extreme: The 11 year old was over the other day and was telling us about his experiences at this three day camp he had been at. The boys were spontaneously playing a game where one person had the ball and was "it", whoever tackled him got the ball, became "it", and then the others chased him. Sounds right to me. The camp leader put a stop to this sort of nonsense and showed them a new game. The kids were divided into groups labeled carnivores, herbivores (Robert was an herbivore), omnivores and other things that I didn't quite get. I think one was a rabies germ (honest). One was a doctor. Each child got a badge to indicate which group he was in and then he got some slips of paper that were color coded by the group. The boys chased each other around and got slips of paper somehow from each other. It took Robert ten minutes or so to explain it and I still didn't really get it.

When I was young we played. There was little to no adult involvement and we often made up our own rules. I won't say no one ever got hurt but it wasn't often and when it did happen it was an accident. And I was happily ignorant of what an herbivore was.

Perhaps with the passage of time our memory gets selective, but I would not exchange my childhood for the modern variant.

As to the OP, I watch bridge, not football.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on Oct 18 2010, 09:06 AM, said:

When I was young we played. There was little to no adult involvement and we often made up our own rules. I won't say no one ever got hurt but it wasn't often and when it did happen it was an accident.

Perhaps with the passage of time our memory gets selective, but I would not exchange my childhood for the modern variant.

My childhood was similar. Reading your post, I remembered many hours of outdoors play where the rules were made up by us kids. I had a wonderful time, and consider myself very lucky to have experienced that.

[Phil]

We have a different type of household. My 17 y.o. (girl if it matters) asked me in the car the other day about the rules of football. I went over the basics. "Sounds complicated", she said (she's very bright) and we both had a good laugh since nearly everyone else in our extended family is addicted to it. So I guess we just don't use the tube for watching this sport.

By the way, rugby seems on par with football for the potential for a serious head injury. Am I wrong?

[manudude03]

Phil, on Oct 18 2010, 03:55 PM, said:

We have a different type of household. My 17 y.o. (girl if it matters) asked me in the car the other day about the rules of football. I went over the basics. "Sounds complicated", she said (she's very bright) and we both had a good laugh since nearly everyone else in our extended family is addicted to it. So I guess we just don't use the tube for watching this sport.

By the way, rugby seems on par with football for the potential for a serious head injury. Am I wrong?

I used to play rugby until I twisted my knee badly one training session. There are some risks of head injury but it's a lot less significant than it is in American Football. It's pretty much only in scrums if it collapses for whatever reason and high tackles (which are illegal).

[JoAnneM]

Baseball is my favorite, but there are lots of other good ones - golf, track and field, swimming. I used to enjoy watching pro football but it has changed in the last ten years and not for the better.

[blackshoe]

Robert Heinlein wrote a novel (Beyond This Horizon). Fast forward a couple of hundred years. Things have changed completely. Economics is completely different to anything we know. Our Hero was a stockbroker who somehow got put into suspended animation, and has recently awakened. There's no stock exchange any more, so he's got to find a new way to provide for himself. Comes the Game Designer:

Game Designer: So tell me about this game of yours. What's it called, Feetballs?
Our Hero: Football. You see, there's two teams... <description of how the game is played>
Game Designer: Sounds interesting. How many people die during the course of a game?
Our Hero: What? Are you crazy? Nobody dies!
Game Designer: Oh. Well, we can fix that.

[keylime]

Admittedly, I've been watching less American football, and substituting in handball, hurling (!), footy, and rugby. I am a sick, sick man.....

[Cyberyeti]

I've played american football, soccer, rugby union and a few other things. I have to say the most fun I had was playing full contact american football without pads. It was played hard but fair and sensible, and is a very technical game. People could have got hurt, but didn't, as the attitude of the players even in competitive uni v uni games was right and very few cheap shots were taken. Many people in the UK learn to tackle safely without pads from having played rugby.

I'm a huge NFL fan, but not so much NBA/MLB/NHL. If I want to watch a game where there's incidental attempts to get something into the goal while people beat each other with sticks I prefer hurling

[cherdanno]

I think broken bones or brutal-looking body checks in hockey are not the real problem. Body-checks probably don't even hurt very much, and broken bones heal.

The biggest problem for NFL players are repeated small concussions, which seem to have a devastating long-term effect. In addition, the obesity required in some positions takes its tolls. The life expectancy for NFL players is, according to some studies, as low as 52 years for linebackers, and 55 on average.

Encouraging kids to play football seriously should be seen about as responsible as encouraging them to smoke.

[kenberg]

Cyberyeti, on Oct 18 2010, 03:44 PM, said:

I've played american football, soccer, rugby union and a few other things. I have to say the most fun I had was playing full contact american football without pads. It was played hard but fair and sensible, and is a very technical game. People could have got hurt, but didn't, as the attitude of the players even in competitive uni v uni games was right and very few cheap shots were taken. Many people in the UK learn to tackle safely without pads from having played rugby.

I'm a huge NFL fan, but not so much NBA/MLB/NHL. If I want to watch a game where there's incidental attempts to get something into the goal while people beat each other with sticks I prefer hurling

Perhaps you have an opinion on this: Some years ago I had an engineering student in my calculus class who was also on the football team. Football in the fall at the University of Maryland is time consuming. Very time consuming. And energy consuming. He failed the course, I don't know how things went for him subsequently. He did not want to be a pro, he just loved the game.
It seemed to me that there really was no proper place for him. He was no doubt too good for any sort of inter mural stuff. But engineering is a tough field. He needed "Football for highly motivated players who plan a career in science/math/engineering/medicine/law/etc". Frank Ryan has a PhD in mathematics (from Rice no less) and had a successful career as a quarterback. But we know this because it is rare, probably unique. Most people cannot do two very demanding things at once, both successfully. Something more than inter mural, less than full commitment. Does it exist?

[keylime]

There's a commonwealth wide competition here in VA that caters to the "more than intramural but less than pro" philosophy; 8 on 8 flag football. There are some damn good athletes in the B category, and the A category is nuts.

[jdeegan]

What you say is pretty much true. Worse, some years ago the players' union rep, the late, total dumbass, Gene Upshaw, negotiated away any decent pension and medical insurance for retired players. A retired veteran with 10 years in the league (of whom there are very few, maybe one in 20) gets an annual pension of just over $30,000 US per year. My friend Mike Curtis, a ten year starter at line backer for the Colts, is luckier financially than most, and that ain't too lucky.

Sherrill Headrick, another 13 year Hall of Fame linebacker and an old bridge partner of mine, recently passed on. The Dallas and Fort Worth papers spent two days printing his eulogies. He too got the 30 grand.

The best artistic comment on the US pro football game is a 1975 movie titled Rollerball starring James Caan as the protagonist Jonathan E. John Houseman is the bad guy owner who pronounces the film's theme: "...this is not a game in which men grow strong." Thanks to GENE UPSHAW and the owners, it's also a game where men die poor.

[JoAnneM]

Go Giants

[mike777]

3ok per year is poor..please come on...I can think of 5 or 6 billion people who would love to get 30 k per year in a pension.....btw how old was he when he started getting this much?

Please he works for only 13 years and gets that much?


Also what private pension plans did he have?

Poor...please that is a joke....

Talk about a sense of entitlement...

[Winstonm]

If the Bears don't find an offensive line soon, they're gonna get somebody killed.

[mike777]

y67