Interesting read. The new elephant in the room. Hard to deny this risk to football’s future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/tom-brady-nfl-...

From the editorial page of the NYTimes today. It reflects a growing sentiment regarding football.

I read another take on this that made sense to me. Take any other sport: tennis, track, cross country, baseball, soccer, basketball and even hockey. People play these sports well into adulthood. Not football. It’s brutal and the risk of serious injury is great. I’m glad my mother wouldn’t let me play when I was a kid. It’s the modern day equivalent of the gladiators. And I’m not speaking of the happy Roman.

And yet, there are exceptions. I was never hurt playing football, but i have injuries that bother me every day from baseball and basketball. Today's kids play a lot less sports, so they will have less of those kinds of injuries, but I'm guessing they will have far worse problems from being too sedentary. I do agree, however, that football is a dying sport. Where I disagree is that I think it will not be alone, and hockey, rugby, basketball, and soccer will have to follow, as the concussion rates in those sports aren't dissimilar to football.

Lots of interesting info to unpack here. Football participation numbers are declining and I see it first hand. When you have school age kids you kinda of hear it first hand from your own kids and their friends. School and youth league participation in my area is really down. Now you will always have powerhouse football programs in the Columbus area (and other large areas of the state) do well but the days of most boys playing football at some time in their lives is gone. Concussions have something to do with it, but the hard nature of the game is another. This was driven home to me a few years back by some kids in the neighborhood when I asked if they was going to play middle school or high football. I though it a rational question since they play a lot together. Most of them said no. I was shocked. They told me it was a hard sport, they talked about playing other sports in high school, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, golf or tennis.

Now I went to a smaller school, but if you were a kid with some beef on his bones and you said the reason you weren't going to play football because it was hard and you might get hurt, you would probably get beaten up. Times are certainly different. A couple of dads in the neighborhood played small college football and they aren't letting their kids play football or hockey because of injuries they suffered, which had nothing to do with concussions. I didn't push back on this too much, but I did tell them I suffered more basketball injuries than football injuries.

The truth of the matter is football is far safer than when I was a kid, but that doesn't mean anything now. The dangers are talked about far more now than in the past. Football will always be popular, but it has reached its peak and that is for a variety of issues, including our changing culture.

We should probably just eliminate football and dump our money into becoming a national player in basketball and get ahead of the curve and establish ourselves as a national power in soccer.

Well, Akron’s already halfway there on that equation.

Yeah, I wish Damons was still in Athens.

Did somebody say Ohio University Cricket Grounds at Peden Stadium? I distinctly heard someone say Cricket Grounds

Cricket is a sport basically designed for people to have lots and lots and lots of time to get drinks from the bar. What could be a better sport for our fair alma mater than that? ;)


But speaking seriously: there are multiple formats of cricket (at the top level), ranging from the traditional test match format (played to a maximum of 5 days in the modern era) to a "one day" format (lasting approximately 8 hours), to the 20/20 format (which runs about 3 hours, or approximately half the length of a Big12 football game)

I have long been of the opinion that there's a huge untapped market for curling in this country.

"Why is insurance needed?" Asked the kid who could no longer play the game he loves when his school pulled the plug on his sport. "Well young man, because there are graduates of your university who went on and studied law and are stuffing their pockets by trying something other than chasing an ambulance." "But as you learned in English Lit, a rose by any other name is still a rose."