6) He has been notoriously thrifty, living on $25k a year and driving a used car (2). So would imagine at some level he has been planning this outcome, or leaving option wide open.
Regarding mathematics as a career and his outlook on the financial issue -
"I have a bright career ahead of me in mathematics. Beyond that, I have the means to make a good living and provide for my family, without playing football. I have no desire to try to accumulate $10 million in the bank; I already have more money in my bank account than I know what to do with. I drive a used hatchback Nissan Versa and live on less than $25k a year. It’s not because I’m frugal or trying to save for some big purchase, it’s because the things I love the most in this world (reading math, doing research, playing chess) are very, very inexpensive."
That is the secret to happiness as far as I am concerned; measure your days by how much you've learned not by how much you have earned.
Yet the vast majority of the time, this sentiment comes from people who are well-off, e.g. someone with an MIT PhD and an almost impossible-to-screw-up future.
There are at least two possibilities. Either people who aren't well-off are just sour grapes, or they deal with a lot more than a lack of proper mindset.
The secret to happiness is no secret: if you have more money than you know what to do with, you can cover the vast majority of cases that will make you unhappy. If you, your children, or your pets get ill, you can get them proper medical care. For someone who lives on $25k/yr, that will almost always end in disaster.
I think it's not productive to pretend like money doesn't equate to happiness. The lust for money can do a lot of damage, but simply realizing that money is incredibly important to happiness is a realization that most people don't make. They spend extravagantly when Christmas comes around; they eat out because they want to "feel like a normal person," i.e. someone who can afford to eat out; they get expensive birthday gifts for family members. And why? Then when a financial disaster comes around, like someone getting ill with no insurance in the US, there are no resources left to deal with it.
I don't know. It's just far too easy to feel like there's a key to happiness waiting to be discovered. It's a multi-faceted and complex issue.
I live in a post-Soviet country - maybe one of the best in terms of GDP. Compared to the US it's basically the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of how much money you need to live - healthcare is free, you can rent an ok apartment on not much more than minimum wage, unemployment is below the EU average, transport is cheap (and public transport is good), food and entertainment isn't expensive.
Yet people still like to complain about how everything is too expensive and how they have no money. People here are miserable and we have one of the highest alcohol consumption and suicide rates in Europe.
I'm not really sure what point I'm trying to make, but as you say happiness is complicated. Giving everyone $X/year more isn't suddenly going to make them happier.
I really like this response, it gives tremendous insights into the person. I'd like to unpack it a bit though and perhaps provide some food for thought.
Starting in the middle:
> I think it's not productive to pretend like
> money doesn't equate to happiness.
That quote and this one:
> Yet the vast majority of the time, this sentiment
> comes from people who are well-off
Ties the notion of money to happiness.
It would be great if it were that simple, but it isn't. All of the studies show that once your basic needs are met The correlation between money and happiness essentially goes away. And part of the problem is being imprecise in our language, because their is 'money' which is to say "gee you're pulling in $10,000 a month!" and there is 'wealth' "gee it only takes 10% of your take home pay to cover your rent!"
Many people who work in the STEM sector of the market, will have their basic needs met. They will all have individually varying levels of happiness that are not well correlated with their individually varying levels of wealth. You'll meet them, people who are "rich" and miserable, people who consider themselves "middle class" and are totally happy.
And I assert there is a key to happiness in this uncorrelated range of wealth.[1] That key is to define your happiness in something you have complete control over, rather than something that is externally influenced. Everyone I've ever met who does that is happier, more consistently, than people who don't do that. It doesn't have to be learning like it is for me, I know people who are very happy and measure their days by how many people they have helped.
It is my thesis that everyone has some internal notion of their "score" in life, and once their survival needs are well met (food & shelter) their happiness is entirely a function of how much they are 'scoring' versus an arbitrary benchmark of what a good 'score' should be.
[1] For the literally minded we'll define this uncorrelated region as that level of wealth that starts just above 'I have enough incoming capital to keep from struggling to meet financial obligations' and below 'I have so much capital I don't have to work to meet my financial obligations.'
It's security. Money (currently a proxy for power) can provide you with the ease of mind that if you fall ill, if someone you care about is injured, then you can get them the best care, that you can take time off to help them. Similarly, it helps to feel as if you have people who are also secure so that they can be there for you too.
I think of it as, money can't buy happiness, but poverty can create unhappiness. I do think it's important for most people's happiness to get to a point where they can earn enough (at a job they don't hate) to never have to worry about how they're going to pay next month's bills or whether or not they can afford everything they need from the grocery store. Having to worry about stuff like that is a constant source of stress that wears away at whatever happiness someone does have in their life.
Beyond that level of income, whatever it is, people don't necessarily get happier, but they at least have more resources to work with. Depending on the person, and depending on whatever tradeoffs are made to get that higher income, they might figure out how to turn more money into more happiness, or they might not. That's more dependent on what makes an individual happy.
On the other hand, there are ways you can risk your health for money, where the reverse trade isn't possible for any amount of money. So, getting back to the article, retiring early seems like a good trade.
That's possible in some special cases, but it's also quite possible to ruin your health in ways that can't be fixed. And this is what football players are facing.
Always? No. Many health issues are actually incurable with current technology. For a simple example, many forms of hearing loss are incurable as far as we know. You can spend a lot of money on fancy hearing aids but it won't get you normal hearing again.
Old rich people can't spend money to cure all their ailments and be young again. Maybe someday, but not today. And it's not a gamble if there's no chance of success.
The vast majority of time you /hear/ it from people who are well off, as they are the ones who have their lives written about. There are plenty of happy, non famous/rich people. I should know ;)
Imputed rent doesn't seem like a strong concept here. If someone wants to imagine expenses, then they can certainly imagine that the player bought an annuity that pays his landlord the rent forever, so that imagining the imputed rent has to come out of his 25K is like double-counting the rent.
Even without owning one's own home, not all areas have high rent, even within the same state. California, for example, has a pretty big swing in rents between the Bay Area and even Sacramento, let alone somewhere further north or south in the Central Valley.
Keep in mind that he's an NFL player, so he's in the offseason for most of the year, so he can live pretty much anywhere he wants. During the season a large portion of his costs are paid for by the team (hotels, meals, etc.).
I can definitely believe that as a football player he can get by on less than $25k of his own money.
Good point. In most of the US, a decent 2-bedroom apartment can be had for <$1,000 / mo. An apartment that would be considered quite large by international standards.
Sure, but imagine a stereotypical American family with three kids, two cars, maybe a dog, and both parents working professional jobs. I don't see how you could consider it abnormal for them to spend $2000 a month to rent a house in the suburbs. If you're talking "globally normal" that's one thing, but by that standard nearly everyone within a thousand miles of me is in abnormally large and expensive housing.
> Sure, but imagine a stereotypical American family with three kids, two cars, maybe a dog, and both parents working professional jobs. I don't see how you could consider it abnormal for them to spend $2000 a month to rent a house in the suburbs.
That's a massively expensive and large house for the stereotypical American family in the majority of the country.
(They're also not going to be paying 2K to rent a house in the suburb, they're much more likely to be paying off a 200K mortgage, looking at the median US home price as well as the median in areas like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte...)
If you're paying a lot more than that you're either abnormal in terms of "spending way more than most / you have to" way or abnormal in the "you live in a super expensive area" way.
Let's suppose the median monthly rent in America was $1000. (It's actually $959 as of 2015, according to google.) Would you be shocked to find out someone was paying $500 a month? I mean, that's on the cheap side, but I wouldn't exactly call it weird, especially when they're probably living in rural Nebraska or something. Given that, why is it so shocking for someone to go the other direction, by the same factor?
> but by that standard nearly everyone within a thousand miles of me is in abnormally large and expensive housing.
Speaking from another side of the ocean, it's really true.
According to the statistics about energy used per capita, it's some oil producing lands and the US. And that even doesn't count all the stuff that ends on the US landfills.
i get out plenty. my apartment is even under market. i don't live with roommates. there is literally no way to get an apartment anywhere close to 50% cheaper by yourself in the market i am in. my experience is perfectly normal here.
even in my previous city (a major US city), my rent was only 50% less than it is now. and in that market it would be equally as hard to find one at 50% of that price.
if you live for a quarter of what i currently rent, then you must undoubtedly live with roommates or live in a not so great place (which is fine) or both, all of which i consider being frugal, which he stated he wasn't. or you simply live in a completely different market.
No roommates, just a different market. I live in Minneapolis which I do consider to be a great place. That said, the vast majority of Americans live in "different markets" than what you've described, so you might do well to understand how 24k/yr in rent is not normal for most people.
i suppose the disconnect happening in the replies is that people assume i meant normal in my rent amount. my original comment was meant to compare what an nfl player, with a family i might add, supposedly lives off of in entire year to my, me being a middle class single person, yearly rent (whether that rent is high or low or normal). so sure, he and many may live much cheaper. but cheap enough such that his taxes, utilities, food, family care, general bills, purchases, etc. all still add up to $24,000. i doubt it without heavy caveats to that number he gave.
I believe it. If he owns everything free and clear--I'm betting he does--and he avoids big purchases and fancy trips, he can basically get by on purchasing nothing but food, electricity, phone, and gas. Tack on some clothes and reasonable eating out, and you can live well on $25,000 per year. Everything else was probably paid for by the team.
During the season and much of the off season the team probably pays for accommodations, meals, transportation, healthcare, etc.
Also, this is Baltimore we're talking about. The only places you can reasonably spend that much in rent in Baltimore is luxury developments on the waterfront and around Patterson Park.
At least in the USA it is in no way FU money unless you are over 60 or something. Assuming you invested it all and didn't spend a single cent, that's 12K a year from interest (generous 7%). You can probably spend 30-40K for 30 years if you decide to dip into the principal. But if you are young, you will have to get a main income source.
"Safe withdrawal rate" is usually pegged at 3.5% to 4%. On an initial lump sum of $1MM, that's $35K-40K/yr, not $12K per year. (I'm not sure where the 7% came from in your post.)
You can login as HNHN : HNHNHN and look at the scenario I modeled using the information in this thread. That has a 100% success rate from now until 2080, assuming a 3.5% annual spend ($35K to start) AND ignoring any new money being added (from his mathematics or other work).
It's not Maserati money perhaps, but it's absolutely a secure retirement for someone currently living on $25K/yr.
> On an initial lump sum of $1MM, hat's $35K-40K/yr, not $12K per year. (I'm not sure where the 7% came from in your post.)
The original poster calculated the value off the $1.8MM (not the tax-deductible number), and simultaneously made a place value error ($12k/year is 0.7%, not 7%, of $1.8MM).
You put a decimal point in the wrong place. 7% of 1.8M is 126K, not 12.6K. Really it would be more like 77K from 1.1M once you factor in taxes, but for most people that's more than enough to live on without ever touching the principal.
> and how much do you think MIT professors are paid?
Depends a lot on department and situation. Course 18 (math) doesn't pay that great while course 6 does. If you have a chair you can pay yourself more; if you take a non-academic role (dean, provost, department head etc) you can get more. Even when you have tenure you get reviews and raises just like any other job.
Point of reference: my gf's ex is a tenured prof in a non-engineering field. B/c child support etc I know what he earns. Adjusted for inflation, my summer consulting gigs (before the 1980s AI winter) earned me over 50% of what he makes all annually including his own summer consulting. I'm sure if he were in computer science he'd make more in a month than I would have made all year.
Full professors at MIT on average make about $186k [1]. Assistant professors average around $124k [2], with considerable variation (I'd guess the full professors also have considerable variation).
People generally don't retire to $25k/year, especially if they eventually get married and have children. The only way to really make something like that work is to move somewhere extremely inexpensive like SEA. That's unrealistic for most people.
This is the one thing that has always struck me as odd abut the FIRE community. FIRE is a good goal but it's highly abnormal for people to retire early with these very low annual salaries for themselves. Sure, it works if you're a single childless 30 year old. But you also generally have to be comfortable staying single and childless if you're going to "retire" to $25k/year.
There are a lot of areas of the U.S. where people actually do retire on $25K/year. Having said that, they probably own their home, have cheap Medicare and have paid all child-related expenses at that point. So you're right, for most 30 year olds it's a different story.
Also, even if people budget a $25K/year retirement there is always the possibility of needing long term nursing home care in the last years of life. (Say, if you're a football player that suffers dementia later in life.) Depending on the quality of care, that can wipe out even a $1M nest egg. It's a big financial concern at that age. It's not covered by insurance the way that, say, a heart attack or stroke is.
Yes, I don't mean to exclude those people. Both pairs of my grandparents had a fixed income of less than that. But as you said, they didn't have many personal expenses beyond bills and food.
Well, he may not have every option in the world (e.g. he can't simply move to San Francisco and hope to have a nice life without working), but he does effectively have his own personal basic income, and it's a significant amount. Right now, I couldn't imagine the additional freedom I'd have if I had ~$30-40k coming in every single year, regardless of what I did for work (if anything).
That's enough to live on and do those things you would do that only requires you. If you ever want to leverage something into a larger undertaking, that requires serious capital rather than a basic income.
Unless you're a billionaire there are always going to be things you can't afford to do. For many if not most people, having enough passive income to live without having to work would be a dream come true.
If he put $1M in a bond fund, he could probably expect to get around $40k a year on the interest alone. He would only pay 10% capital gains tax on that, which would leave him with $36k. Well above his $25k yearly budget. The bachelor lifestyle is cheap.
Hell, he could put it in a municipal/tax-exempt bond fund and at the very least not pay federal taxes. If he lives in a state that has a state-specific bond fund, he could let it grow tax-free. 3-4% on one of those is not unreasonable. (But he'd probably want to diversify a bit...)
Not to mention the NFL pension on top of that. Not sure when he can draw it (at retirement, or does he wait until 55/60/62/65?), but even just modest investment returns + pensions puts him above the median US household income.
He's set for life if he keeps his expenses at $25k/yr. $1.8MM / $25k = 72. Even if he loses half to taxes, that's still 36 years worth of expenses in assets. If I had that much, I'd retire in a heartbeat.
On the cumulative salary of $1.8m over three years he's looking at an effective rate of around 35%. But he definitely won't lose half of his pension to taxes. That's one of the main advantages is that is spread out over a number of years. The NFL, with all its faults in neglecting players health, was wise to set players up with pensions.
Doesn't the average NFL player have a life expectancy of 53-59, and you can only collect the pension after 55? They can move it foward starting at age 35.
"A lot of money" is also known as "Fuck you money". Enough money that you can say "fuck you" to anyone without worrying about the consequences.
$1M is not even close to that, especially not for a young guy who has to pay for the next 60 years of his and his family's existence.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good starting point, and you can definitely be reasonably secure on it if you invest wisely and continue to work (e.g., buying a reasonably-priced house in a stable neighborhood and staying in it long term; this will take about 1/3 of that $1M, btw), but it's not enough to be truly independent. A single serious lawsuit will easily drain $1M, for example.
It's not about being "consequence proof", because as you note, it's never possible to avoid the consequences of one's actions. It's just about being independent.
An independent person does not need the goodwill or approval of any other person or small group for their well-being or prosperity. If you are ever going to need a paycheck again, this is by definition not you.
Independence ("fuck you money") is about being able to be honest with anyone, even if it means giving a measured, well-deserved "fuck you", without having to worry that your ability to feed and clothe your kids will be jeopardized. It's not about being above the law or anything like that.
Well he's only a student so somewhere between $30k and $40k, maybe a touch more if he gets a fellowship.
Also, how much professors make varies quite a bit. An engineering professor might make $100k from the university. If they are particularly motivated, you have professors who write books, play key roles at companies, consult, or give expert testimony. They can make quite a bit off those secondary activities but it isn't automatic.
Each contract is individual, but generally, endorsement contracts have a lot of termination clauses, so Bose could and will end the deal soon, unless Urschel's brand is so unique (MIT math PhD and NFL player? Nothing like it) that they decide to keep him on.
I think MIT math PhD former NFL Player has just as much marketing power as MIT math PhD backup center. So I could see Bose keeping it for a year. He probably has more star power announcing his retirement than all of his NFL career so far.
> 4) He was at end of his rookie contract, next year would be the "in the money" year for him so he is clearly leaving a lot of cash on the table.
The lifetime pension really helps, but if I were him, I would have stuck it out to see what I could get for my new contract. The rookie contract is low because of the changes made in the last CBA. His post-rookie contract could have netted him tens of millions.
But I'm greedy and would gladly sacrifice my health for a $40 million contract.
"Urschel is pursuing his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the offseason, focusing on spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra and machine learning."
Continue playing until his 30's, make a lot of money, and suffer pain and disability for the remainder of his life in addition to constantly diminishing mental acuity
- or -
retire now to pursue a PhD and be healthy, earn a living that could possibly meet his football earnings but more likely, keep him comfortable, and be able to use his mind for the rest of his life. Plus, he has a much reduced chance of losing a $150,000 earring jet skiing.
It's a better plan than almost every other NFL player has.
Most players have lived very football-focused lives from a very young age, and have been the star on the team all of their life. Their future has always been more football, and they haven't given any thought to what comes after that.
He clearly loves math so the CTE study may just have been the straw that broke the camel's back. He may have been yearning to fully devote himself to math for a while now.
Regarding the broader debate that seems to be swirling along the lines of 'should we ban Football or not', I strongly believe we should not.
If parents want to prevent their kids from playing football, great, that's their choice to make. But if they allow them to play, we have to keep in mind that only a very small percentage of players will continue on to play in college, and then only another fraction of those players will continue on to play in the NFL. I'm sure that people who play youth and high school football but stop playing after HS graduation have a much lower incidence rate of CTE than players who continue on to play at the collegiate and professional levels. So for the vast majority of football players CTE isn't much a risk.
Because those who do reach the highest levels of the sport make tremendous amounts of money, as long as they are aware of the risks, they should be able to make the decision for themselves.
Dude. Multiple blows to the head causes CTE. And it starts as early as high school which is when tackle football starts. At this point it is immoral and unethical to have tackle football in schools.
It isn't immoral or unethical to have sports where long-term injury can occur. Using that metric we would have to ban all sports. What is unethical is not educating the participants of the risks. We need to push for more studies and education, not bans.
We (society) typically require someone reach a certain age of consent before we allow participation in life-altering activities. e.g. drinking, smoking, driving, enlistment, marriage, tattoos, etc.
A 13 year old jr. high schooler who wants to play for their school's football team isn't able to fully assess and weigh the risks of long term brain injuries from an activity. Maybe parental education and consent is enough for some people, but at the same time, we flat out don't allow parental consent to buy cigarettes at age 13 either even if there are parents that would allow it.
> e.g. drinking, smoking, driving, enlistment, marriage, tattoos, etc
Marriage and tattoos are allowed with parent/guardian consent at quite young ages depending on where you live. And not allowed other places, of course. Laws on this vary widely, even just inside the US.
> Maybe parental education and consent is enough for some people
Right, that is the question. Is playing football more like smoking? Or is it more like marriage or tattoos? Or like downhill skiing or any of a host of other dangerous activities minors can engage in with parental consent pretty much anywhere?
But tackle football at a young age hasn't been shown to dramatically increase likelihood of CTE.
And for the highest levels where CTE is a risk, players are compensated for the risks they take in playing. No one compensates you for smoking or drinking.
Now there's a false equivalence if ever I saw one. I stiff hip or bum knee from playing sports seems way, way different to me than suffering irreversible dementia and chronic depression beginning in one's late 40s.
There's a difference between a small risk of long-term injury (a risk you run in different ways if you're not doing sports, I might add), and near certain brain damage.
Not all sports have so grim an outlook - and I bet football too could be fixed with some rules changes (e.g. I don't recall any stories of rugby having such effects, and that's at least somewhat related).
Further research can probably help, but it's unwise to wait for that if the results are already sufficiently clear as is.
The challenge is that football is inching from "where long-term injury can occur" to "where long term injury does occur". That is, from "If a play goes poorly, you may tear ligaments and break bones, which may have lasting effects" to "it should be the expectation that if you practice and play this sport for any length of time your brain will resemble a block of emmentaler".
> At this point it is immoral and unethical to have tackle football in schools.
That remains a normative claim, not a positive one. Some parents will be dissuaded from allowing their children to play football competitively, but you'll have great difficulty enforcing something like a ban.
I think a more nuanced approach, eg the Zack Lystedt law is appropriate until we under stand the science better.
The key part of that law is that athletes must be taken out if they are suspected of a concussion, and they can't play until they are cleared by a qualified professional. Unless and until we find scientific evidence that it is the absolute number of concussions in someone's lifetime, and not back to back concussions without recovery, that cause CTE this seems appropriate.
I thought the conclusion from that study was at least 9% of NFL players would gone on to develop CTE. This estimate was made by making a conservative (but very unrealistic estimate) that EVERY player that did not donate their brains did not have CTE.
Summary: a national football league player, and PhD in math from mit, John Urschel, abruptly retired 2 days after a study showing 99% of retired NFL players from a study group had chronic brain issues (Cte). This is right before training starts for the season.
Edit: updates. Will point out that any summary is going to miss some facts as it's a summary. But I think people might be more likely to read the article if they could decipher the title. I like the Ravens and I assumed this was a cto of a game company yc startup who quit from the title.
> a study showing 99% of NFL players had chronic brain issues (Cte)
Just to quibble but I understood that the study revealed that 99% of the group inspected had CTE. The group was not intended to be cross-section of the general population of NFL players. Not to trivialize the results but I think you extended them beyond what they said.
The study was definitely not a representative sample. On the other hand, if it turns out that the sample was as biased as possible, such that every single player with CTE was in the study, that would still put the incidence at 9%, which is crazy high.
Having played football through college then aussie rules football for another 9 years I'd definitely like to see some numbers on things like that, recreational hockey, rugby, etc. Not sure how hard it would be to be checked myself.
That said, according to my mom I was a complete ahole until I started playing football in 8th grade when I completely mellowed out and started focusing on somthing. Most other sports didn't click with me; I think I needed organized competitive team based wall punching to take out random teenage anger. It's just that maybe I would have taken up golf earlier :)
So if the contact or a certain form of contact is the issue, lets either change football to not really have these risks or invent another sport. I mean they're all invented anyway.
> if it turns out that the sample was as biased as possible
The researcher never claimed it was a sample that one would expect with a scientific study (e.g. control group, test group, variance by age, race, etc.) From the original NYT article:
> The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees. “There’s a tremendous selection bias,” she has cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that bias would be unexpected. I just wanted to point out that even in the absolute worst case where the bias of this simple turns out to be as high as it possibly could be, the results are still crazy bad.
Another important consideration is NFL carriers are also much shorter now, the average is less than 3 years which should make a rather dramatic difference.
Jackie Slater for comparison was a lineman for 20 seasons (1976-1995). And George Blanda had 26 seasons as a kicker and quarterback.
. . . a study showing 99% of NFL players had chronic brain issues (Cte)"
This is not exactly true. The study required volunteers, and from what I understand, the families who volunteered already suspected brain damage, so it's not really a representative study. It's still very alarming, though.
Totally agree. On the NYT article about the study:
"But 110 positives remain significant scientific evidence of an N.F.L. player’s risk of developing C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only after death. About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population."
Has "whether you let your kids play football" joined the long, long list of boolean values that separate members of the Red Tribe from the Blue Tribe?
If not, I think it's inevitable that it will. Someone will try to get their school to close its football program, someone else will complain that the health dangers are exaggerated by the liberal media because football is a red-state passtime, and pretty soon it'll be "Why do you hate America and apple pie" vs "Why do you want children to suffer and die".
I am deriding the sort of discourse that topics like this usually produce, not the people making the arguments. It's certainly possible that the public debate over kids' football will largely be apolitical and civil and productive, such things do happen, but I'm predicting that it won't be.
Pretty sure we're talking past one another here. Thought experiment: if I describe a topic in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, am I still being divisive?
One wonders why you would say divisive things aloud in an otherwise lonely forest. Saying something hurtful, offensive, divisive, unnecessary... is problematic regardless of the size of the audience. You can see that the original "divisive" comment [1] on this thread sparked a large response.
It's true that a HackerNews thread has a lower global-political impact than, say, a presidential tweet or a Supreme Court ruling. But that shouldn't prevent anyone from thinking through their HN comments. Words matter.
The comment we're both responding to [1] was unnecessarily divisive -- which partially obscured the commenter's otherwise good points (that team-thinking can obscure rational thinking). And that's particularly important on a website like HackerNews.
Original divisive comment: "[Has football joined the list of] values that separate members of the Red Tribe from the Blue Tribe? Football is a red-state pastime." [1]
The comment you responded to: "You're creating [divisive] discourse [by posing divisive questions]." [2]
I think your response, pointing out that a comment on HN usually won't "create" a nationally divisive discourse [3], is missing the point. If you look at the rest of the thread you can see that it created a divisive debate within HackerNews. I think the point you're missing is that divisive language creates divisions wherever it is used and it's worthwhile to point that out -- even if you think you're only talking to yourself.
I once accidentally started an argument at a party about whether to let the toilet paper hang over the front of the roll or the back by mentioning how funny it was that people would argue over something so trivial.
(It's extra-funny because all right-thinking people know that it's obviously better to have it hang over the front of the roll. Sheesh!)
> I am deriding the sort of discourse that topics like this usually produce
You have become what you hate - you are the one who introduced the subject. Its like "Has anyone compared $TOPIC to Nazis yet? This subject has a tendency to be Godwinned".
I think a distinction can be drawn between bringing up on HN the ability of an issue to become not just divisive but divisive along political lines, and the issue actually becoming divisive in society at large. Here we can discuss if it could be a political issue, what that would mean, what could be done about it, etc. That seems quite different that a discussion (on HN or elsewhere) wherein it has become a political issue.
Maybe we should stop pretending we all start in the middle and then get pulled to the extremes as we are exposed to either (un)biasing information. Maybe we should assume that all wells have already been poisoned (just a saying not a value judgement), science or religion, figure out which team already claimed you and defend your tribe.
I made a falsifiable prediction about reality. If I'd written an essay on Medium that ostensibly argued for one side's view, but which did so in a condescending and divisive manner more likely to show what a clever guy I am than to actually persuade anyone on the other side, then I would've become what I hate.
But you did take one side's view in a condescending and divisive manner. The side you took is the one that divides people into a Red Tribe and a Blue Tribe, ascribes stereotypical views to each, and makes lists of attributes to categorize people into one of these two tribes.
People are quite a bit more complex than that, and these kinds of arbitrary binary divisions get in the way of finding common ground.
It's a bit of a strange prediction. If we take boxing as a model of a formerly massively-popular sport now considered excessively dangerous, we can observe that minority (Latino and African-American) participation remains high. These demographics are generally not considered part of the Red Tribe coalition. If football follows the same trend, it will be a weak tribal correlate at best.
Not trying to argue, but just curious: was boxing as big as football is now in the US? I'm not much into sports in general, and I wasn't around when boxing was big (or just completely missed it), so I'm lacking context.
Boxing was the football of the 1920s, with saturation radio and newspaper coverage, and became the top sport of the early broadcast TV era. It has been declared dead or dying at regular intervals despite being a solid performer into the pay-per-view era. Like football, it would probably be somewhat safer if its "protective" gear was reduced or redesigned.
Maybe it's too far to prescribe "red v. blue" to this issue but it is indeed divisive. High school football has been controversial for many years because of safety concerns [1]. There is some anecdotal evidence that soccer is more popular in blue states [2]. For years, the NFL and its supporters claimed that concussion concerns were greatly overstated [3].
Also anecdotally, I had a Lyft driver who was also a high school football coach who was well versed in how many concussions occur in soccer. He wanted to tell me that football is as safe/dangerous as any other sport. That type of denialism--believing that mounting evidence can be safely ignored--is found in other "red" issues such as climate change, coal jobs, and Russia-gate.
As with a lot of these things, we can look at western Europe as a historical example.
Norway banned professional boxing over thirty five years ago for this reason, and it only returned very recently when a more conservative PM took power, and it happened amid plenty of controversy: https://www.thelocal.no/20161004/how-a-boxing-match-turned-i...
Hard for me to say, as I live in Seattle, but American football love is definitely non-partisan here.
But certain sports carry too high a risk for me to support my child getting into them before 16ish. They must have a glimmering of a perspective on what life means before choosing to engage in activities that are significantly likely to permanently damage themselves for life. Particularly for football, there are brain effects. Implication here: for boys, football is off the table. For girls, competitive gymnastics. There are likely other sports that could be found as way too high permanent risk.
For perspective on how I'm choosing: soccer is also risky and carries CTE risk, but less so than football. If boy wants to do skiing, running, or mountain biking, that is fine; crossfit, not so much (too aggressive). A certain amount of physical damage is far more acceptable than neurological damage. Things happen though; a friend of mine had his very young daughter fall into a pool and drown a few years after being preemie. That's this life on earth, sorrow and joy. I will give as much responsibility as I can, but the parent's responsibility to is to shape and limit around the ability of the child to react and foresee. Permitting choosing sports which have lifelong damage likelihood, when they are too young to understand the consequences, seems to be poor choice on my part.
> skiing, running, or mountain biking, that is fine
Perhaps it's not a red or blue split, but those sports you listed are definitely on one side of a major class divide. Basketball and football are moving towards the other. And while I understand that a competition between some farm hicks and big-city boys can bring two groups together, access to sports like skiing is fairly exclusive.
It's what came to mind as "sports that are likely to have injuries". Although I did plenty of skiing growing up a blue collar worker's kid. :-) I do hear you though, adult ski tickets are beaucoup bucks, it's why I don't do it anymore.
I wouldn't be bothered if my kid did baseball or cricket. Bored, perhaps, but not bothered.
Let's see, espn.com. Hockey can be super violent, but I'm probably ok with it, gotta check the numbers. Golf, boring, whatever. Fighting games - wrestling, MMA, etc, I'm probably ok with after a reasonable age. Certainly I would have no issues taking kiddo to Krava Maga.
(Personally I will go to Sounders (MLS) and Reign (NWSL) games, and I'm curious to see men's gymnastics at U of Washington this fall. It might be just a little Seattle)
e: The "red state" crew are, I think, more comfortable with idea of casual violence (and thus football). It's not as much of a Big Deal to them, often life is more rough and tumble IMO. I grew up in Idaho, so I do have some Life Experience in what I'm saying.
I played football in up through High School, and I'd definitely say I would be a different person today if I hadn't gone through it. The camaraderie amongst the team is unique amongst every experience I've had since. Plus working through something so challenging definitely provides a great level of satisfaction.
I like who I am today, even if I might have a higher risk for any symptoms, and I believe football played a key part in my development.
Don't you think any kind of challenge in a team setting would have provided the same growth without the side effect of possibly irreversible brain damage?
I'm happy you like football, but I don't think you can say it forms character in a unique way, it's just a team sport and there's tons of team sport where hitting people with your head aren't the bread and butter of it.
Try volleyball, if you have to fuck up something I would rather go with the knees and hips rather than the head.
There is a camaraderie born only of shared violence that seems to be expressed by football players, soldiers, mobsters, that might be hard to replicate in volleyball. I can't claim any firsthand knowledge of it however.
> Don't you think any kind of challenge in a team setting would have provided the same growth without the side effect of possibly irreversible brain damage?
Different sports are different. I don't think that's hard to believe.
I ran track and cross country for 9 years. Those are team sports but there was no camaraderie. People were friendly, sure, but there was no team spirit. There was more camaraderie in the half a year I spent on a rowing team than I experienced in either of those sports.
Sure, but I think the comparison would be easy to make among sports with a similar team dynamic, like between football and soccer, rugby, basketball, etc. Players of the latter sports train and practice just as much (if in different ways) as football players, and the game dynamics of all of them require coordination and teamwork to a similar enough degree that any differences aren't earth-shattering.
It's a bit ridiculous to me to suggest that there is nothing like football when it comes to training, teamwork, and camaraderie. That's easily not true.
No other sport works you as hard as Football does. Between three-a-days (practicing 8am to 8pm) for weeks, and each practice primarily consisting of basically playing football (running play after play, at 100%, for practice, with tackling), Football works you harder than any other sport.
I'll get told by some this is just my opinion, but the vast majority of other sports are not shear tests of strength the same way Football is. If you're a lineman in football, every play is practically you bench pressing another player your size over the field. And it's the same for every lineman, and anyone on offense has to do the same.
So yes, I believe Football works character differently due to the sheer difficulty of the sport physically.
For swimming at a college level, we got up at about 4:30, swam 5-7, lifted 7-8, then classes, then swam 4-6, then stretches/bodyweight exercises.
This was while classes were in session.
During the winter training trip, we would do the same, but also swam sprints in the middle of the day.
Sometimes other teams, including the football team, would try to use the pool for off-sport workouts. We would crush them. But when we ran, they would not outrun us.
And that's just one sport I have personal experience with. Please do not discount what other athletes are doing--any sport is an intentionally competitive environment, everyone is looking to gain advantage: that push to go harder is present and is not exclusive to football.
You might change your opinion after a week playing Water Polo. You've got the same level of energy required for sprints and man-handling your opponents as football, but then throw in the added bonus of getting repeatedly squeezed/kicked in the groin (on purpose!), scratched all to hell (no pads!), and the constant attempts at opponents trying to (almost) drown you. You don't just have to be physically strong to play, you've got to be mentally iron-willed to want to get in the pool with the other lunatics.
Feeling camaraderie is not exclusive to football. I felt that same thing being in the marching band and playing soccer. It is a good thing for young people to belong to a team and work together to achieve a common goal.
Because it's possible to experience the benefits of camaraderie without the risks of brain damage, it's sensible to question if football is too dangerous for children.
Your core argument that football builds stronger camaraderie [than other sports or team-like activities] is unsupportable. There is no reason to believe that football is the key ingredient to lasting feelings of camaraderie. What if we just put high school students through a marines-style boot camp?
Also, everyone from the marching band still remembers marching through Disney World in 100+ degree heat in full marching uniforms. It was tough and it was a memorable bond we all shared.
Physicality is just one aspect of teamwork and camaraderie. Ever played in a (good) band? The levels of shared precision and intimacy required to synchronize on complex pieces of music for hours is difficult to put into words and certainly not to be taken lightly as far as camaraderie goes, you have to rely on the competence of your bandmates on a level that is relatively uncommon compared to most sports.
This is an easy step that soccer has taken to reduce the occurrences of brain injuries. Anyone who is confused on this issue should note that any jostling of the brain can cause minor, short-term brain damage. It's bad enough to bounce a relatively soft soccer ball off your head to warrant removing the practice from the sport, especially for younger players.
Other sports, like football, present a much harder challenge. Even if you remove direct head contact as a variable, most aspects of tackling can result in concussions. The reason football is uniquely controversial is that minor concussions are mostly inevitable and severe concussions are commonplace.
By contrast, the most likely way to get a concussion in soccer is to head the ball, which isn't fundamental to gameplay. In any sport, you might run into another player at high speed but that's not typically a core part of the gameplay. Football is controversial because it's hard to fix.
The possibility of concussions is present in [nearly?] every sport. Typically, head injuries are not a core part of gameplay. In the case of soccer, there have been concerted efforts to remove "heading" from practice and from games. Football is being targeted because minor/severe concussions are commonplace and result from a core aspect of the game.
> The possibility of concussions is present in [nearly?] every sport
Tennis, golf, swimming, weightlifting, etc - probably have a pretty low incidence of concussion. Stuff with teams and fast movement are probably most suspect; hockey and football would intuitively seem like the worst offenders.
"Based on the national estimate, the majority of concussions resulted from participation in football (40.5%, n = 55 007), followed by girls' soccer (21.5%, n = 29 167), boys' soccer (15.4%, n = 20 929),..."
So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.
Looks like there are about 3 times more kids playing soccer than tackle football. I'd say a 3x lower concision rate isn't close to "nearly as bad".
In addition to concussions, football players are also believed to receive repeated microtrauma from running into each other repeatedly, which contributes to CTE.
Football is a full contact sport. It is inherently more dangerous. Collisions in soccer happen accidentally. They happen intentionally in football.
In addition there are new restrictions on heading the ball in soccer for younger kids, which will likely make the game a bit safer.
In 2016 (in the US) 1.08 million students participated in high school football while 821,851 participated in soccer.
I don't have stats available for middle school, but earlier than that the players don't hit nearly as hard, as they have considerable lower mass and speed.
Not sure where your 3x number comes from, but I don't think we need to include YMCA recreational league soccer any more than we need to include flag football.
Where are those numbers from? I know that football has a lot of extra bodies on the sideline, but it doesn't have a girl's team so I would guess that more kids are playing soccer than football. At the very least the number of man-hours played has to be way higher.
>"Based on the national estimate, the majority of concussions resulted from participation in football (40.5%, n = 55 007), followed by girls' soccer (21.5%, n = 29 167), boys' soccer (15.4%, n = 20 929),..."
>So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.
If 21.5% of girls (~6270) and 15.4% of boys (~3223) get concussions then 9493 (6270 + 3223) received concussions out of 50096 (20929 + 29167) total participants. 18.9% (9493 / 50096) for soccer vs 40.5% for football.
Unfortunately n, in this paper, doesn't seem to mean sample size like you would expect in statistics. It is an extrapolated number of concussions nationwide based on a study of 100 high schools.
That still doesn't mean you can just add the percentages. You cannot determine the percent of boys+girls soccer head injuries without knowing the sample sizes.
Or, if you can figure out the relative difference between the number of boys and girls who play soccer, you can do a weighted average of the percentages.
Either way, adding the percentages is completely incorrect.
With that said, the correct weighted value is more like 21.5x.48 + 15.4x.52 = 18.3%, which is significantly less than the 40.5% you quoted for football.
I've no axe to grind, my daughter did Tae-kwon-do and had no real interest in soccer and my son is special needs and wouldn't be participating in either. I'm not really a football fan, grew up in Indiana where basketball is king.
So if I have something wrong here, please educate me. I am willing to learn. And see my other comment, n isn't a sample size, at least not in that paragraph.
Interesting anecdote from Chomsky on football and how it's a way of building jingoist fanatacism. Training young people to cheer for my team is preparing people to submit irrationally to power. As long as my political party wins, etc.
Not to put too fine a point on it - Chomsky will find a way to illustrate how having beans for lunch will build jingoistic fascism.
Yes, submitting irrationally to power is bad, and so is purely tribal thinking. But as it turns out, human beings are a bit more complex, and many are fine maintaining critical thinking skills while simultaneously having a sports team they identify with.
> Has "whether you let your kids play football" joined the long, long list of boolean values that separate members of the Red Tribe from the Blue Tribe?
To the extent that such a list can be said to exist (some of them are Boolean values, but if it's a long list, it's only long because you are including lots of things that individually loosely correlate with tribal membership rather than separate it), attitudes towards kids playing football have been on it for decades.
(It also correlates with race, welath, and other socio-economic factors in a way which aren't what you'd expect if you thought it was simply a matter of left/right political tribal identity.)
Do kids face the same risk factors as professional NFL players? Someone who plays in high school isn't necessarily going to play football for their entire life; do four years of football from ages 14-18 significantly increase risk?
The NYTimes article said that they tested over 200 brains, half were college or high school players only. 87% came back with CTE. One would hope that it is untenable for institutions of higher learning to profit off of giving their students long term brain damage.
Specifically the percentage breakdown was 99% NFL players, 26% of high school players. It is a significant risk in high school, but clearly there is either a cumulative effect (very likely) and/or as you graduate to more competitive levels of the sport the character changes sufficiently to be more of a risk (also very likely).
I was raised in Texas and was more the thin runner body than the football build, so I never played, though lots of people do play high school football there. It's interesting imagining that 1/4 of them could be walking around with CTE.
Of course, keep in mind the study is biased by the fact that these brains were specifically donated for evaluation for CTE. It seems probable that CTE findings would be lower in the general population.
Dr. McKee, the study's author, acknowledged that and addressed it:
> But 110 positives remain significant scientific evidence of an N.F.L. player’s risk of developing C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only after death. About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.
But it should not be unexpected for the number to be higher. For years people who weigh hundreds of pounds are hitting each other repeatedly. And they are paid considerably well for it. Plus, we should compare this to other sports as well, as even most non-contact sports (soccer, basketball, even baseball) have collisions from time to time. Football should have a higher percentage than those, but without knowing the percentages in even 'safe' sports, these numbers are practically meaningless.
The real issue would arise if they can somehow test high school students and find similarly high percentages (90+ percent), but since you can't test right now until they are deceased (from what I understand), that would be extremely hard to do.
> The real issue would arise if they can somehow test high school students and find similarly high percentages (90+ percent), but since you can't test right now until they are deceased (from what I understand), that would be extremely hard to do.
I think that's seriously downplaying the issue.
Let's say hypothetically HS football players are developing it at 10% vs 1% in the general population. That alone would be a massive discovery, and grounds for seriously reworking or even eliminating HS football. You don't need these rates to be in the 90% range for this to be game changing, so to speak.
Early studies (2012) found that high school students had CTE [1]. When the issue broke nationally a few years ago, early indicators were that high school students were at higher risk than older athletes [2]. There have been some doctors that claim to be able to diagnose living people with CTE [3]. However, concussions are difficult to diagnose [4] and may go unreported. Sadly, one common side effect of concussions is suicidal thoughts [5]. Which is one of the main reasons people are asking if football is worth the risk [6].
The study found that, on average, there are 4 direct fatalities and 8.2 indirect fatalities among high school and college players per year, making indirect fatalities more than twice as common as direct fatalities.
I don't know about younger kids, but high school players die every year.
The risk of getting hit by a 14-year-old kid is obviously less than the risk of getting hit by one of the hardest-hitting 26-year-olds in the world, but the rewards are also less. Many Hall of Fame-level NFL players have said that the glory, fame, and riches were worth the lifetime of pain, dementia, etc. afterwards. It's not clear that someone who got 10% of the brain damage but 0.0001% of the rewards would say the same thing.
Depends on where you are from. In super blue Pittsburgh, not a chance on earth. Football will have to be nationally legisated against in order for its popularity to fall in Western PA. I am sure there are other, similar pockets in the country.
When Pittsburgh's mayor is no longer elected in the Democratic primaries, I will be inclined to agree with you. Pittsburgh proper is still blue. There are red parts in Allegheny County, but that went blue last November too.
Not today; but I think it will start to happen. Maybe it will be generational too. I love football but it's getting harder to justify the damage it does to the people doing it.
My recollection is the book Friday Night Lights lays out the racism and classism at the core of high school football and that's just in Texas and James Michener brought up these sorts of issues of societal opportunity cost/health cost/monetary benefit of the worship of football/basketball (from childhood to the 99% that don't make in pro or even college sports) in "Sports in America" decades ago.
So what's the big picture here? We've suspected for years that football leads to brain trauma. Does that mean the NFL should shut down? Should they continue to operate as normal?
There have been efforts recently to make the game safer for players, but the amount of concussions and injuries seen every season don't seem to be decreasing.
Can you make the game "more safe" without drastically changing the game? Any game played at this high of a speed, with this strong of players is going to have some inherent danger to it.
Do we just need to make the effects more widely known and understood by the players, maybe treat football like smoking with warnings printed on the outside of helmets? Anything less than that and you run the risk of not making your point.
Should I feel bad as a fan for watching football? Is it any worse than buying clothing made by child labor from a third world country?
Take the helmets off. Players would no longer run at each other head first, and be forced to grapple a bit more. Concussions are en extreme rarity in grappling/wrestling sports. They can still happen, but it's a freak accident rather than an inevitability each down.
I second this, american football derived from rugby.
Look at how rugby players tackle with no helmets and no padding.
It really looks like adding the protective gear doesn't help the players as much as they were thinking.
I've heard the same argument applied to automobiles. Would people drive more safely/carefully/considerately if a metal spike were attached to the steering wheel rather than an airbag?
I can't pretend to know the answer, but it's interesting in that behaviors definitely change if there are costs associated with the actions.
I don't know about a metal spike, but automakers could cheaply implement something if they put a sticker on the airbag cover that said something like "SRS manufactured by Takata"...
My understanding is that the problem isn't specifically related to the incidence of concussions, but rather more related to the continuous lower-level trauma to the brain from hits during practices and games. That is why you see a lot of football teams at various levels switching to non-contact practices.
With the stakes that high for the players you don't think the players will engage in dangerous behavior? It could be just as likely that we will see more skull fractures.
The rules need to be constantly adjusted to disincentivise dangerous behavior. If it hurts your team to injure others, injuries should happen less.
> Can you make the game "more safe" without drastically changing the game?
Depends what you mean by drastic. Removing helmets from the game seems like one possibility, bringing it closer to rugby. I don't know if there have been CTE examinations of rugby players, but the intuition is that people won't collide heads at high acceleration on every single play if they're not wearing helmets.
> Should I feel bad as a fan for watching football?
Yes, I'd say so without changes. Malcolm Gladwell in 2009 wrote that watching football is starting to feel like watching dogfighting. It seemed ridiculous at the time and is not ridiculous now.
> Is it any worse than buying clothing made by child labor from a third world country?
Depends on the factory, I guess? Some of those jobs probably pay well relative to other options for those workers, even accounting for danger etc. In comparison, watching humans give each other brain damage because it's fun is harder to find potentially redeeming qualities for.
> Yes, I'd say so without changes. Malcolm Gladwell in 2009 wrote that watching football is starting to feel like watching dogfighting. It seemed ridiculous at the time and is not ridiculous now.
But now the players know. It would be different if we kept the player locked underground with no contact to the outside world. The fact is that they're making the choice to play even though the risks have been outlined.
I don't watch football. I follow stats (which is like watching without watching) though. I don't feel bad, because now they're adults making an informed decision.
A couple or so year ago, Budweiser (or one of the other large beer companies) had a display at the grocery store I frequented depicting the concept of large anthropomorphic robots playing the game.
Imagine high-speed, large scale robo-soccer - for football.
I am not a sports fan in general, but I would watch the hell out of such a game if it could be created. Especially if everything was fully autonomous, and teams were made of machines created by smaller groups or individuals.
Basically, take today's "robot soccer" or "robot sumo" competitors, mix them up with the "robot combat" people, throw in a dash (a small dash) of SRL - and give them a way to organize and build the teams...
The robots wouldn't need to be anthropomorphic - specialized vehicle-style robots would work just as well. It'd have the spectacle of football wrapped up with robot combat and demolition derby. There'd likely be fire, explosions, smoke, massive noise - it could become an insane spectacle.
And - provided that the arena it is held in is constructed properly - no human injuries would occur.
Ultimately, easier said than done, and I am certain the first few games wouldn't be that much fun to watch until the building teams or whatnot got the hang of how to build such machines. But if that could be gotten past - it might be something grand to see.
Besides watching robots playing soccer being boring, you're ignoring the fact that people PLAY sports for fun. The millions of people in intramural sports aren't doing it so they can entertain family.
Yes, it is worse than the 3rd world child labor scenario. The kid in the 3rd world probably has no other choices, and along with his peers, may actually be improving things for his society. Nicholas Kristof (of all people) pointed this out when it was found that someone documenting the horrible conditions at Foxconn fabricated melodramatic stories. (This was a big kerfuffle on This American Life a couple of years ago.) The football player, living in a 1st world country, has other options. It is criminal that the responsible adults (coaches, recruiters) don't point out that they are signing up for virtually guaranteed severe brain damage.
The only reason you don't hear of NFL slump is that contracts between broadcast networks and the league are negotiated well into the future.
TV cord cutting is on the rise, TV usage is down, having to compete with online and mobile time, ESPN figures drag down the entire Disney empire, ESPN is going through layoffs almost each month, seems like. When the time finally comes for cable networks to re-negotiate the deals, NFL numbers won't look as pretty.
Which means lower expenses, higher consolidation, lower player salaries, etc. It won't disappear entirely, but will be just another sport like NASCAR or horse racing, reaching a rather narrow group of avid followers.
How is it fair to the people who want to sign up for it that you're making the decision for them? There's no social ill conferred on the greater public by their decision, what's the reason for meddling in their lives?
The general public shouldn't be interested in watching people give themselves brain damage for millions of dollars. Without the monetary incentive, people wouldn't be playing football at this level (or the high school and NCAA feeders), which sure looks like exploitation to me.
If the NFL has known about the risks for years and continued with its business model, it should absolutely face lawsuits and financial ruin.
The kids at the high school down the street from me have no monetary incentive either, yet they love playing, and have played since they were kids.
I agree with everything you said except "The general public shouldn't ..." That is a very dangerous method of thought.
I agree that it shouldn't be banned, but the risks is the thing everyone needs to hear first, they should be plastered everywhere.
I have no problem bringing bloodsport back if it's entirely voluntary and the public has an interest in it. What if two guys want to voluntarily duel it out to death? Why not build a stadium and let them?
There is a difference between banning something, which is imposed; and shutting down, which involves no 3rd party.
Boxing: Not banned, but a lot less popular in the USA than it used to be. Maybe this is due to better understanding of the physical toll (brain damage, the occasional death resulting from pummeling in the ring), although there were other factors too. People going in know, or should know, the risks.
Skiing: If you want to risk your knees, go ahead. You know about the risks.
Football: The risks are finally becoming known, but the NFL seems to have known the risks for years, and sought to suppress this information from spreading. The other physical risks are known, and participants make their choices, as in skiing. But the NFL has tried to fool participants about the extremely serious consequences, much like the tobacco companies did with the health risks of cigarettes. Coaches and recruiters -- even in high school -- know the risks and turn a blind eye. How an informed parent can let a child participate in football now is beyond me.
> Can you make the game "more safe" without drastically changing the game? Any game played at this high of a speed, with this strong of players is going to have some inherent danger to it.
I'm only a casual watcher of football, but I think it would be possible to change the game. My non-expert impression is that the game has evolved over the years (and I could certainly be wrong) and incentivizing players to avoid causing head trauma by penalties seems like the way forward (above and beyond current helmet-helmet collision rules). Maybe adding shock sensors to the helmets to objectively measure impacts is another thing they can do.
It would be interesting to learn what they already do today wrt measuring the forces on the head's of players.
Personally I wouldn't mind at all if the game changes. I would be satisfied watching them play the equivalent of flag football - high level strategy and athletic clutch plays can still occur with a safer game.
I've read it may be the case that the head collisions at the snap at the start of every single play is causing CTE via microconcussions, not just the dramatic concussions you can see overtly.
Also, teams practice more than they play. Practice causes concussions too, and penalties won't help.
>> By this definition football is basically modern Gladiatorial combat.
Why would you have ever thought otherwise? Didn't you notice the coliseum looks like an ancient stadium? Football is very much a man-v-man battle and that's exactly why a lot of people like it.
>> Should I feel bad as a fan for watching football? Is it any worse than buying clothing made by child labor from a third world country?
Those are personal decisions and I don't think anybody should tell you how you should feel. It's your choice how to feel about it. You get to define your own morality and live with your choices in the context of your own beliefs.
> Does that mean the NFL should shut down? Should they continue to operate as normal?
Saying the NFL should shut down is debatable: at least there we have adults making decisions (which can, after more research is published, be informed decisions) about their health and life.
However, if the incidence really is that high, at the very least high school football should be banned, or modified in such a way that the risk of head injury is diminished, if that's possible.
> Should I feel bad as a fan for watching football? Is it any worse than buying clothing made by child labor from a third world country?
I wouldn't say you should feel bad. NFL players are consenting adults who are being compensated (to some degree, at least) for the risk. We can't say the same of third-world child labor.
The evolution of boxing presents a template of how football will go. Boxing today is a rather fringe sport in school. Few parents put their kids in boxing enthusiastically. Similarly, boxing matches, although viewed by millions, are rather fringe in being grand and occasional pay-per-views. Football will go the same way, but perhaps much more slowly, given the cultural inertia. I firmly believe that these things evolve, rather than abruptly change. Whether it evolves into a safer form of the game or to become marginalized is hard to say. Already many parents are hesitant in putting their kids in football in school.
>Already many parents are hesitant in putting their kids in football in school.
That is what will change football. In 10 years or so, high schools will have a hard time fielding a football team. Then a few years after that colleges won't have them, and so on.
The thing with concussions is that it is definitely an injury football players used to simply play through, so any numbers on concussions that are more than >5 years old can't really be trusted.
They should definitely remove kick off completely, since they almost have already. Any run back is almost a guaranteed full speed head to head collision. At least with most plays the tackle is made from a considerable angle (for running backs there is rarely time for each player to approach full speed, or to come off unblocked).
Otherwise, I think it is what it is, just like people don't get up in arms about Boxing.
> Otherwise, I think it is what it is, just like people don't get up in arms about Boxing.
Doctors have warned about the long term health implications of boxing since the 50s, but nobody seems bothered by it. Boxing also isn't as popular as it used to be, so out of sight, out of mind I guess.
The average starting NFL lineman was around 325 in 2016[1]. The game does like lighter and faster players, but often that's a tradeoff against durability.
What's the big picture? In a few hundred years maybe this sport will look as unthinkable as gladiatorial games in Rome. That's certainly one possibility.
He was profiled in the most recent issue of Tech Review. He said his mother has been asking him to retire for a few years, but he still loved the athletic challenge of playing against top players.
Has he ever been recorded giving a lecture about the Math that he does? I found a paper of his [1]. Looking at his wikipedia he is specializing in spectral graph theory , numerical linear algebra and machine learning. I think following what his next steps will be might be interesting also. Might setup a scholar Google alert.
Well I think the results of the CTE study showed him that though no matter how much he wanted both things, only one of those would be consciously choosable while the latter would all he would have left if he continued.
>>In August 2015, he suffered a concussion when he went helmet-to-helmet with another player and was knocked unconscious.
"I think it hurt my ability to think well mathematically," Urschel said. "It took me about three weeks before I was football-ready. It took me a little bit longer before my high-level visualizations ability came back."
Losing a high-level cognitive ability must be terrifying; the flood of relief upon regaining his ability (probably slowly?) after 4+ weeks must have made him deeply question his continuing commitment, and then the CTE study pushed him over the edge.
I ran into this guy randomly at MIT once, during the offseason (last February). He was such a chill guy. Hearing this news makes me like him even more - he's not letting one of his passions get in the way of another.
Trying to watch NFL reminds me of the moment in "Django Unchained" when we meet diCaprio's character sitting in a chair watching to slaves beat each other to death.
That moment of that movie comes to me every time the TV producers cut to the team owner sitting in their fancy box in their fancy chair paying lots of African American men to beat each other up for our entertainment and profit.
The NFL started out as almost exclusively white, and is now very mixed-race and the demographics are pretty purely skills-based. So I'm not sure any slave fighting analogies apply.
NFL players are probably compensated the worst out of the 4 major US sports. That's just in terms of what they get paid and doesn't even look at the total package of the risk they expose themselves to in terms of chronic injury, painkiller addiction, etc.
>NFL players are probably compensated the worst out of the 4 major US sports. That's just in terms of what they get paid and doesn't even look at the total package of the risk they expose themselves to in terms of chronic injury, painkiller addiction, etc.
Especially when you factor in that they have been doing this to themselves from the age of 8 years old in most cases, all the way through high school and 4 years of college play for no compensation. All for the tiny slim opportunity of maybe one day having a 3 year career in the NFL and earning less total than an MLB rookie's first year signing bonus. The only reason the NFL has their pick of such top talent is because millions of kids in this country spend their lives putting schoolwork and health second to this dream of "making it". There's a massive externalized cost to society which the NFL has arbitrage on.
They have non-guaranteed contracts, meaning they could be cut at any time, only the top-tier players get substantial guaranteed money in their contracts, and their average career length is two years shorter than a baseball player and a year shorter than a basketball player.
You are, however, more likely to become an NFL player than an MLB, NBA, or NHL player.
The average career earnings for an NFL player is somewhere around $5 million. That's a lot of money, but I'd argue it isn't a crazy amount to make over an entire career while in the top 1% of the field.
Probably before. You should watch 30 for 30: Broke. I'm sure some of it is hyperbole, but I'm also I'm sure it's way worse for some players. They probably just get screwed.
I've seen it. Unless you are good with your money and have a lasting career as an above average performer, I'm not sure that a lot of pro athletes are as wealthy as people think.
There is a significant bias here in that its 99% of NFL players brains * which have been donated to the NFL *.
But honestly even if you could peek into every NFL players brain, I'm sure the likely incidence after 4-5 years of playing would be orders of magnitude greater than whats found in the general population.
There's obviously a bias, but the mentioned study claimed that even if the rate of CTE were 0% among brains not donated to the study, their sample would still be large enough to indicate a significant deviation from the general population.
Yes, however the NYT mentioned yesterday, even if the brains are the only cases of CTE, then the incidence rate among players would still be vastly higher than in the general population.
Yeah, I realize that my armchair comment was a bit flippant. If someone told me that writing software (insert profession/thing you love) led to CTE, I'd obviously be really torn about it as well.
And you're likely not even considering the Fame and fortune parts as well as the ability to parlay that money and noteriety into something with the degree.
I would imagine being in front of a stadium full of fans and nationally televised each week would also be hard to give up. Not that people necessarily need the adoration, but it has to give you a high of some kind.
I know people who used to play varsity sports in high school and college, and, even at that level, moving past those years was difficult. They had come to really enjoy being in stadiums full of people cheering.
I can only imagine how much more difficult it is when you're a pro, the stadiums are bigger, and you are on TV.
Urschel at least has another passion and career that he can focus on. I expect for a lot of players the problem is also that, if they quit, then what? What do they do with themselves? How do they support themselves and their families when they're no longer on a pro's salary?
I really enjoy boxing and specifically sparring, and did an advanced degree at a Harvard-esque university. It's fun. But you do get to a point where you realize you're no longer invincible, which is why I stopped playing rugby at the end of high school.
I abruptly stopped being a football fan last November.
The immediate reason was Bill Belichick staking his own reputation on Donald Trump's assaults on the media, in a close state in a close election. But CTE was making it hard to remain a football fan anyway.
So players killing people, players beating their wives and kids, and players breaking the law constantly didn't make you stop being a fan. But one coach exercising his political rights did. Fascinating.
To be fair, there are a lot of people in the NFL, and all of them are usually 20-40 year old men. The fact that some of them get convicted of crimes does not surprise me. It may be shocking if the percentage of criminals in the NFL was much higher than non-professional athletes I guess?
Bill Belichick didn't just exercise his First Amendment rights to nexpress an opinion I disagreed with. That alone is hardly a problem for me; for example, Danny Ainge's political views have no impact on my Celtics fandom).
Belichick went further, however -- he supported a pack of lies meant to undermine the value of First Amendment rights anywhere. And we've seen subsequently just how destructive lying attacks on the press can be. Anybody who, while knowing better, spreads those lies is damaging our country. I do not want them to succeed; hence I do not want them to have the kind of success that strengthens their reputations.
Football may get a lot of study recently, because its one of the most popular sports.
But Basketball injuries can ruin you for life as well. I have a cousin who has severe amnesia after getting knocked out during a Basketball match. Its like years of his life were wiped away after his concussion. He was a straight-A student too, these sorts of things are severely damaging to your student career.
Brain injuries exist in a lot of sports. Football is particularly dangerous but the dangers in other sports (Boxing, MMA, Basketball, Soccer) are severe as well.
Any head injury in all sports (or not sports for that matter) are incredibly devastating. That being said, what happened to your cousin (I am sorry about that) is an anomaly in basketball. Most basketball injuries are to legs then hands/arms. Concussions are rare in basketball. Not so much in football.
In my view, there is a very big line between head and spine injuries and any other physical issues long term. Today, people can have artificial hip and knee joints that are acceptable for every day life. If an athlete wants to destroy his legs in exchange for millions, I have no real issues with that. I start to struggle when these guys are doing lasting, unseen, and irreparable damage to their brains. It has become harder and harder for me to watch football over the last 5 years. I watch 85-90% less football than I used to. Most of this time has gone onto watching soccer (which does have some concussion issues of its own) and basketball. I don't think that LeBron James is comprising his future each play he runs. I did feel that way while watching each down in an NFL game.
The biggest difference is that most parents don't sign their kids up for Boxing in kindergarten.
I was a big kid (I'm 6'5" now), and I live in the south, so of course my parents signed me up to play football at 6.
In other sports where kids start very young, like soccer, the contact injuries are usually a result of accidents. You aren't trying to slam into people at full speed.
Its pretty common to use your head to physically stop or even change the direction of the ball in Soccer. There are accidents of course, but the standard norms of Soccer still don't seem very healthy for the brain.
I'm aware of the "Football towns" across USA. Basketball is bigger in my area though, which might be why I hear more about Basketball-related injuries.
Youth soccer in America has rules against heading the ball. Under 11 can't do it at all, and there are time limits and incidence limits for kids older than that (though it probably needs to be outright banned for minors).
In addition to concussions, football players are also believed to receive repeated microtrauma from running into each other repeatedly, which contributes to CTE.
Football is a full contact sport. In games and in training, you are repeatedly slamming into people at full speed. There is nothing comparable in soccer or basketball outside of accidents (which by nature of being accidents happen much less frequently).
I'll gladly hit a 450 gram[1] ball with my head, rather than a 110 kilogram linebacker[2][4].
Sure, the velocity of the ball is faster (average professional level is ~27 m/s [3]) and the relation with that variable is squared (E = ½mv²), but linebackers still run at 7.6 m/s [4]
That's already an order of magnitude difference, while not even counting the momentum and impulse: soccer balls are pretty elastic, compared to linebackers...
I think football is categorically different than other dangerous sports:
* Far, far, far more people participating at high levels (just based on team size).
* Impact is less obvious/direct, so youth and young adults have a harder time recognizing the danger: CTE tends to manifest long after players are out of the spotlight.
* The NFL has actively tried to cover up the danger of concussions; I'm not aware of any other governing body working so hard to harm those it should be protecting.
Something that wasn't pointed out in the article is that the vast majority of cases where a NFL player's family donates the brain to CTE study is where they already were showing some degenerative symptoms.
They can't test for CTE on living people and if someone has it but say dies from a heart attack before ever showing symptoms, they likely aren't donating to the CTE study.
>In August 2015, Urschel suffered a concussion when he went helmet-to-helmet with another player and was knocked unconscious.
>"I think it hurt my ability to think well mathematically," Urschel said. "It took me about three weeks before I was football-ready. It took me a little bit longer before my high-level visualizations ability came back."
Yeah, it is likely the smartest decision for him. I have watched him play his whole career (Ravens fan). He is good but he would have likely bounced around the league as a backup and got cut in the next few years due to age. With this decision he is starting a career that will be enjoyable, safe and well paying. You cannot beat that. Good luck #64.
Funnily enough, this story also isn't prominently displayed on their homepage aside from the sidebar in tiny font. Apparently within hours of the NYT study being released, ESPN's reblogging of it disappeared to several page refreshes down their homepage. I can't wait for them to be significantly downsized if not dissolved completely.
I admire this sort of decision making. In particular, I admire that he took the risk playing football in the first place but called it at some prerequisite level of damage he was willing to take. I'd imagine that is something he put a hard stop on before embarking on the career: "two concussions max then I'm out whatever".
Not entirely true. Anyone who's EARNED their PhD might very well have a brain worth preserving, but there's many PhDs out there who purchased their doctorate from degree mills, and are dumber than a box of rocks.
Everyone has a brain worth preserving...my point was when you google "John Urschel", most of what the news has to say about him is that he is a Math Genius, because he is doing his PhD at MIT, which I don't believe is the case.
I'm pretty damn impressed at ANYONE in the NFL with a secondary degree, but a Math PhD at MIT? That's incredible. This guy is clearly athletically and intellectually elite.
No, he's considered gifted in math because he has more than a few papers already published and in review. That's noteworthy for a guy who just started his PhD
1) 3 years of service vests into NFL pension plan, he just hit qualification - value pegged at $21,360 a year for life (3)
2) He has not publicly commented on his retirement or reasons for it.
3) He has a hugely awesome secondary option - doctorate of math at MIT
4) He was at end of his rookie contract, next year would be the "in the money" year for him so he is clearly leaving a lot of cash on the table.
5) Over three years he "only" earned ~$1.8m http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/baltimore-ravens/john-urschel-145... - which after tax is 7 figures but still not a lot.
6) He has been notoriously thrifty, living on $25k a year and driving a used car (2). So would imagine at some level he has been planning this outcome, or leaving option wide open.
(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/07/27...
(2) http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/bs-sp-ravens-john-urschel...
(3) http://firstquarterfinance.com/nfl-pension-plan-retirement-p...