[stupac2]

Seems like the writing is on the wall. They said his brain looked like a 65-year-old's at 21. What parent wants to let their kid do that to themselves?

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Seems like the writing is on the wall. They said his brain looked like a 65-year-old's at 21. What parent wants to let their kid do that to themselves?

The vast majority of players don't have trauma this bad. 30,000 people a year die in car accidents but everyone's still fine driving.

I also think that our understanding of CTE is going to change dramatically once it can be diagnosed before death.

Fatalities in cars are a side effect not a design feature. For a number of positions in football, repetitive head trauma is part and parcel to the game. Either that has to be eliminated or the sport will be. Will you let stupac jr be the test case for medical advancements in brain trauma? I sure as h$ck wouldn't let my kid be.

...Fatalities in cars are not a side effect. It's a design feature every bit as much as it is in football. You're giving people with limited informational intake, awareness, and processing capacity a one-ton machine capable of going in excess of 100 mph, putting them onto inadequately maintained, regulated, and patrolled streets, and having them go at it. Fatalities are expected and for some damned reason tolerated despite being a national crisis. People's blindness to the insanity of our car-centric transportation regime is beyond baffling. I don't see how you could possibly look at this situation and the situation in football and think they're totally different. In both cases there's a set of rules and goals and they're inadequate to prevent harm. You can argue that the economic gains from driving make it inapt, but that's ignoring that, unlike football, the alternative isn't "no driving", there are lots of non-insane transportation methods out there.

Regardless of my analogy, does football need to change? Maybe. I think people are wildly jumping the gun on the available evidence here. For instance everyone seems to say that the sub-concussive impacts are more important than actual concussions, but where does that come from? How do you possibly track that? Animal models? Those are great. And the compositional problems in these studies are massive, something that I don't think gets nearly enough coverage.

It just seems to me that, given cases like this one where someone who played an already-protected position, hardly accrued any time in college, and still had a super-advanced case of CTE, there's a lot more going on here than we understand. Given his progression damn near everyone who's ever played football (or soccer or hockey or rugby) should have it. They don't. So clearly something else is going on, and the question is what. Until we can study this in living people I don't think we'll really understand it.

As for letting my kid play, he's currently 2, so no. In a dozen years when it becomes relevant: maybe? (I am disinclined to do pop warner or equivalent because it seems pointless.) He seems to be a lefty (vastly preferring the left hand for throwing, which he's started to do with gusto right now) so baseball seems a more enticing prospect. But insofar as one can plan for these things I'd rather let him make his own decision.

[stupac2]

Seems like the writing is on the wall. They said his brain looked like a 65-year-old's at 21. What parent wants to let their kid do that to themselves?

---

Seems like the writing is on the wall. They said his brain looked like a 65-year-old's at 21. What parent wants to let their kid do that to themselves?

The vast majority of players don't have trauma this bad. 30,000 people a year die in car accidents but everyone's still fine driving.

I also think that our understanding of CTE is going to change dramatically once it can be diagnosed before death.

Fatalities in cars are a side effect not a design feature. For a number of positions in football, repetitive head trauma is part and parcel to the game. Either that has to be eliminated or the sport will be. Will you let stupac jr be the test case for medical advancements in brain trauma? I sure as h$ck wouldn't let my kid be.

...Fatalities in cars are not a side effect. It's a design feature every bit as much as it is in football. You're giving people with limited informational intake, awareness, and processing capacity a one-ton machine capable of going in excess of 100 mph, putting them onto inadequately maintained, regulated, and patrolled streets, and having them go at it. Fatalities are expected and for some damned reason tolerated despite being a national crisis. People's blindness to the insanity of our car-centric transportation regime is beyond baffling. I don't see how you could possibly look at this situation and the situation in football and think they're totally different. In both cases there's a set of rules and goals and they're inadequate to prevent harm. You can argue that the economic gains from driving make it inapt, but that's ignoring that, unlike football, the alternative isn't "no driving", there are lots of non-insane transportation methods out there.

Regardless of my analogy, does football need to change? Maybe. I think people are wildly jumping the gun on the available evidence here. For instance everyone seems to say that the sub-concussive impacts are more important than actual concussions, but where does that come from? How do you possibly track that? Animal models? Those are great. And the compositional problems in these studies are massive, something that I don't think gets nearly enough coverage.

It just seems to me that, given cases like this one where someone who played an already-protected position, hardly accrued any time in college, and still had a super-advanced case of CTE, there's a lot more going on here than we understand. Given his progression damn near everyone who's ever played football (or soccer or hockey or rugby) should have it. They don't. So clearly something else is going on, and the question is what. Until we can study this in living people I don't think we'll really understand it.

As for letting my kid play, he's currently 2, so no. In a dozen years when it becomes relevant: maybe? (I am disinclined to do pop warner or equivalent because it seems pointless.) He seems to be a lefty (vastly preferring the left hand for throwing, which he's started to do with gusto right now) so baseball seems a more enticing prospect. But insofar as one can plan for these things I'd rather let him make his own decision.