Football will not last forever. Eventually someone will die on the field...

If I'm an AD, I start pouring money into lacrosse

We've seen (recently) a young man's life completely changed, forever, by a spinal cord injury. Gruesome as it was.

The game continued.


I see no reason why a death -- which, if it ever happened, would be because of an undiagnosed heart condition -- would have any different result.

Your body takes a pounding when you play sports. Tennis players have shoulder and elbow pains as they get older.

It is a life choice. I would rather compete for something at an elite level for years and years and live with some pain later in life then go through life just sitting around all day and do nothing.

You only live once and you gotta decide what you will do in your life. Compete or just sit on a couch?

(02-06-2016 05:57 PM)DogPoundNorth Wrote:  Football will not last forever. Eventually someone will die on the field...

If I'm an AD, I start pouring money into lacrosse

Unfortanely people can die from impact. People have died in low speed car crashes. People have died from getting hit on the football field. Sadly I think there were 2 or 3 at the high school level this season.

It is life. I know that sounds mean and harsh, but in life, based on the way our bodies developed through evolution, it can't absorb all of the pounding.

When humans didn't wear clothing they died early life because of the diet. They had a lot of pain in their lives too.

500 years from now people will still die from an impact. People will still find a way to compete. If we did nothing in life, then all we are is cells duplicating until there is no heartbeat.

(02-06-2016 05:57 PM)DogPoundNorth Wrote:  Football will not last forever. Eventually someone will die on the field...

If I'm an AD, I start pouring money into lacrosse

People die driving cars. So let's stop driving. People die constructing buildings, so let's all live among the trees, grass and nature (not a bad idea imo but I digress).

There are inherent risk in many things in life. Football isn't as essential as the other things I mentioned but if people want to play it understanding the risk, I see no reason to stop them. If/when they get hurt, they were the ones who signed up for it.

Players die on the field every year in junior high and high school, those sports have withered and disappeared.

Obviously a death in a primetime telecast would have a different impact, but the only reason the NCAA exists is because the death toll every year was deemed too high.

(02-06-2016 05:57 PM)DogPoundNorth Wrote:  Football will not last forever. Eventually someone will die on the field...

If I'm an AD, I start pouring money into lacrosse

Lacrosse isn't the "safest" sport either. People have died in that sport too especially from things like stick checking to the chest.

(02-06-2016 07:11 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  Players die on the field every year in junior high and high school, those sports have withered and disappeared.

Obviously a death in a primetime telecast would have a different impact, but the only reason the NCAA exists is because the death toll every year was deemed too high.

And to clarify for those who didn't read that right, he's saying that the body we know as the NCAA was created by Teddy Roosevelt at a time when football players were dying left and right.

I'm also assuming he meant to say that those sports have NOT withered and disappeared.

I don't think we'll ever see a player in a major telecast die, on-screen right then and there, from a game-related impact. That would have to be an incredible impact.

You don't die immediately from head or spinal cord trauma, at those "low" speeds. Not drop dead on the spot.


What it would be, I think, is a heart condition. THAT you can drop dead, right there. And sadly you do hear about those from time to time. But hopefully they would've caught it by the time you got to that level.

I'm just praying for a day when Rugby is more popular and more televised than football... Until then, I'll watch college football as long as there is players still willing to risk their bodies to play.

(02-07-2016 09:44 AM)MplsBison Wrote:  What it would be, I think, is a heart condition. THAT you can drop dead, right there. And sadly you do hear about those from time to time. But hopefully they would've caught it by the time you got to that level.

Like Hank Gathers. Thank God that wasn't on TV.

I think we may be looking at this the wrong way. On the one hand, we might say that young men play football despite the serious risk to life and limb. I'm inclined to think they do it because of the risk. They do it to impress young women with their nascent virility. If they just wanted to have fun and get some exercise, they could do that playing flag football. But if you want to get laid (and what teenager doesn't?) you display your "courage" and physical strength, like young men have been doing for millennia.

And, while mothers will cringe and try to talk their sons out of playing, there will always be enough fathers who want to bask in the reflected manliness that is the "proof" of the athletic genes they passed along to the next generation.

The publicity earned by the TV exposure of horrific physical injuries only makes the lure of playing football that much stronger to the adolescent male. Why else would they take a relatively benign sport like skiing and morph it into the X-games? Boys become daredevils because girls give it up for daredevils. Until that changes, we're just pissing into the wind.

Of course it means being laid, nothing is like being the captain or star of the high school football team.

Meh, Football wasn't for me. Still got laid early on in high school. Then I found my real love, working on cars.

Unfortunately the love of my life pays like horse manure and is a dying industry or at least one where anyone with a functioning brain can imitate.

(02-08-2016 09:19 PM)_C2_ Wrote:  Unfortunately the love of my life pays like horse manure and is a dying industry or at least one where anyone with a functioning brain can imitate.

Care to share?

I was previously in the journalism industry. Meager pay and 3-4 times the expected workload as well as politics (if you work for a local rag, one high school's girl's volleyball team wants nearly as much coverage as another's football team). On top of that it's a dying industry everyone is trying to get their hands in (blogging for example) and the incumbent writers/editors/publishers get mad if you don't start with the newspapers first even though as a young man getting into the industry I was told about how many people were getting laid off and pointed in the direction of blogs.

I'm not where I wanna be but it's better trying to carve out a niche in other various places than trying to keep climbing to the unsubmerged part of a sinking ship.

Not looking for a debate, but I would think the newspapers will survive, at least the major ones (Mpls Star-Tribune, for example), as online entities. Maybe print editions will go on for decades more, too.