[M T]

When I was looking up my grandfather's football info, I ran across an 1897 death of a football player attributed to concussion.  As a result of that death, within a couple of weeks, the Georgia legislature banned football at various institutions, but the bill was vetoed by the governor.  Still, the Georgia teams disbanded.

This lead me to this set of articles covering the various brain trauma problems and the sequence of purported solutions for football for more than a century:  Brain Injury History in Football  (click on the link at the bottom of each page to follow through the series).

I would guess history supports these ideas --

• A single high-profile tragedy will more likely precipitate immediate changes that years of tragedies to relatively unheralded individuals
  
• head trauma has always been a part of football.  The game continues because those in positions of power can believe/claim that new equipment/rules will solve the problem well enough (in 1897, it apparently was thought that enough hair would prevent/reduce injuries!)
  
• Football is doomed due to its bringing significant chance of permanent injury while being unnecessary to education
  
• Football isn't going to end anytime soon (say, 120 years) just because people die
  

Related links
In 1905, the fourth year of his [Teddy Roosevelt]  presidency, 18 players died and 159 suffered severe injuries.

http://news.blog.myajc.com/2015/10/29/11...most-died/

The process & some rule changes in 1898

...[Football] is "productive of the greatest variety of surgical injuries to every part of the body," and that the effect of such injuries is life long in a large proportion of cases.  This is a phase of the subject which is seldom regarded except  by the medical profession.  Unless a player is so badly hurt that he cannot enter the field again during the season, the injury is generally dismissed by both the young man himself and the public as a mere trifle, while really he may suffer for the effects always, and more severely as he passes on from middle life into old age

  Macon Telegraph, Nov 21, 1897

The arguments of professionalism vs amateurism were also evoked in 1897.

[M T]

When I was looking up my grandfather's football info, I ran across an 1897 death of a football player attributed to concussion.  As a result of that death, within a couple of weeks, the Georgia legislature banned football at various institutions, but the bill was vetoed by the governor.  Still, the Georgia teams disbanded.

This lead me to this set of articles covering the various brain trauma problems and the sequence of purported solutions for football for more than a century:  Brain Injury History in Football  (click on the link at the bottom of each page to follow through the series).

I would guess history supports these ideas --

• A single high-profile tragedy will more likely precipitate immediate changes that years of tragedies to relatively unheralded individuals
  
• head trauma has always been a part of football.  The game continues because those in positions of power can believe/claim that new equipment/rules will solve the problem well enough (in 1897, it apparently was thought that enough hair would prevent/reduce injuries!)
  
• Football is doomed due to its bringing significant chance of permanent injury while being unnecessary to education
  
• Football isn't going to end anytime soon (say, 120 years) just because people die
  

Related links
In 1905, the fourth year of his [Teddy Roosevelt]  presidency, 18 players died and 159 suffered severe injuries.

http://news.blog.myajc.com/2015/10/29/11...most-died/

The process & some rule changes in 1898

...[Football] is "productive of the greatest variety of surgical injuries to every part of the body," and that the effect of such injuries is life long in a large proportion of cases.  This is a phase of the subject which is seldom regarded except  by the medical profession.  Unless a player is so badly hurt that he cannot enter the field again during the season, the injury is generally dismissed by both the young man himself and the public as a mere trifle, while really he may suffer for the effects always, and more severely as he passes on from middle life into old age

  Macon Telegraph, Nov 21, 1897

The arguments of professionalism vs amateurism were also evoked in 1897.