Injury and concussion protocol in American football has been a hot topic over the past few years, heating up even more in 2015.
Rule changes have been implemented in order to protect the defenceless players from being hit in the head area. If you’re like me it drives you nuts.
I catch myself at least 15 times every Sunday yelling, “Why don’t they just play two-hand touch?” This is especially the case when it comes to the quarterback, which is the most protected position of any sport.
It almost seems like a caste system, where the quarterbacks are the king of the battlefield and all the other players are just interchangeable foot soldiers.
So okay, the sport is changing and technologies have been implemented in order to ensure player safety, but there have been more injuries this year than any other. The issue is that players are bigger, faster and stronger. The game is moving so much faster that we even see its effect on officiating, with the referees making awful calls and then going back to watch the replay and change the call.
Watching the NFL on Sunday, we easily notice that the defence-men don’t know how or where to hit players anymore. They are hitting lower and this is resulting in more ACL and MCL injuries.
Professional football is in serious danger of becoming extinct. This sounds absurd, I know, but with more and more parents not allowing their kids to play the sport it is a possibility.
There were 11 deaths in high school football this year directly caused by on-field injury. While college coaches are making a lot of money, their players – who make the money – are being overplayed and by the time the get to the NFL they are so beat up, especially in the running back position, they end up having their career cut short, losing out on lots of money.
I love watching football – it’s a big part of my life and I would hate to see the sport go away. But it’s hard to watch these guys week after week killing their body for our entertainment. There have been 108 concussions this season, and there are still four games left in the regular season, and then the postseason.
There were 123 concussions in 2014, and we are sure to pass that number this season. The integrity of the sport is being questioned and the league is not doing a great job in addressing this problem. It is uncomfortable to talk about because players and even kids are dying from football.
Then there are the post-career problems. Junior Seau was a Hall of Fame NFL player who committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest, directing his family in his suicide note to have his brain studied because he knew something was wrong from playing football.
Players are dying and have a poor quality of life after football, children are dying, and fewer and fewer people are choosing to play football. With this combination of issues, a breaking point is approaching in the near future, in which football will either change so drastically you won’t even be able to recognise the sport or it will become extinct.
Hopefully, with the amount of information available and scientists studying the problem, preventive solutions can be found to help football players stay safe both physically and mentally. I hope we can get to a point where watching football on Sunday is fun, entertaining, and safe.
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