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Check out this article from USA TODAY:

Football kills. No other conclusion after autopsy finds CTE in college player

https://usat.ly/2tMdS67

(06-26-2018 02:17 PM)okgc Wrote:  Check out this article from USA TODAY:

Football kills. No other conclusion after autopsy finds CTE in college player

https://usat.ly/2tMdS67

The article drives a point about putting-off football until late middle-school/high school.

However, when my son asked to play football in 5th grade, I did some research on-line and found there are more head injuries/concussion suffered from kids playing soccer than football at the grade school/youth level. That changed significantly for high school.

Note that skate boarding and bike riding had even more head injuries than soccer, let alone football, for that age level.

Don't remember where I saw the statistics, that was many years ago. Bottom-line is youth tackle football is not the problem.

My son did play 5th grade football and enjoyed it. However, he gravitated away and was a solid cross country/track athlete in high school.

(06-26-2018 02:17 PM)okgc Wrote:  Check out this article from USA TODAY:

Football kills. No other conclusion after autopsy finds CTE in college player

https://usat.ly/2tMdS67

The topic of conversation on Valenti’s show today on 97.1. The more we find out about CTE the worse it looks for the future of the sport

Amyloid beta peptides that are linked to dementia are found in the brain of anabolic steroid users. Severe depression can occur during an off-cycle.

(06-26-2018 02:17 PM)okgc Wrote:  Football kills. No other conclusion after autopsy finds CTE in college player

That's a pretty big leap. His mother said she didn't believe Football was the reason he killed himself.

(06-27-2018 05:53 AM)MajorHoople Wrote:  

(06-26-2018 02:17 PM)okgc Wrote:  Football kills. No other conclusion after autopsy finds CTE in college player

That's a pretty big leap. His mother said she didn't believe Football was the reason he killed himself.

That was the original headline. I see that they’ve since changed it. USA Today editors must have gotten heat for that. It seemed click-bait-ish to me at the time.

Have we had an actual rigorous study of CTE in the general population? I'm sorry, but I'm of two minds. First, football (like boxing) involves some bodily risk. Anyone who believes otherwise is foolish. Second, I hate to see that risk defined as a sure sentence of mental issues, when we have no statistical basis for making that claim yet, as far as I have seen.

I will say that people are freakishly large in the NFL and increasingly college football. If you've even heard what lineman have to eat to maintain 300 pounds, it's unnatural. I would love to see if we could see a lot fewer injuries of all types if we somehow stopped the mutually assured destruction posture of coaches when it comes to beefing players up. Would the play degrade if lineman were 250 pounds and backs and ends closer to a max of 220 instead?

The problem is starting to appear more that it is not what what we'd typically refer to as a "head injury" that is what causes this, it's the repeated small jolts and impacts to the head that have such a profound impact on the presence of CTE, which is why it's so much bigger of an issue in Football as opposed to say, Soccer.

In the next 10-15 years, the game of football is going to need to adapt quickly. Youth participation numbers are already falling quite a bit, and we'll start to see the impact of that at the major levels of the game in about 15 years if nothing is done. It's adapt or die.

Participation in many youth sports is declining largely because the U.S. birth rate has been at all-time low (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), something the doom-sayers fail to mention.

Same reason there is a shortage of workers to replace Baby Boomers who are now retiring.