Bob Costas on the future of football: 'This game destroys people's brains'

[DanT]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sport...ins/842904001/

Quote from top of article:

Originally Posted by USA Today article

As far as longtime sports broadcaster Bob Costas is concerned, the future of football in the United States is clear — and bleak.

“The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains," he said Tuesday night.

Speaking at a roundtable discussion at the University of Maryland, Costas, who hosted Football Night in America on NBC for more than a decade, said the sport could collapse over time, barring a development in technology to make it reasonably safe. He said the decline of football, which was once “a cash machine,” is the most significant story in American sports.

“The cracks in the foundation are there,” Costas said. “The day-to-day issues, as serious as they may be, they may come and go. But you cannot change the nature of the game. I certainly would not let, if I had an athletically gifted 12- or 13-year-old son, I would not let him play football.”

[Simply Red]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

You do realize that people used to ****ing die on the football field and that it wasn't that uncommon, right?

Removing the facemask is a great idea until someone gets tackled, falls right into someones knee and gets both their orbitals shattered.

It also does nothing to stop the deceleration from hits.

so long as it's a Bronco or maybe Xfactor, should he somehow find himself in the middle of a ball game

[DanT]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

===quote from DanT====
Sure, it can result in long-term brain damage along with other chronic diseases that take away your life expectancy, but what a game, huh!
===end of quote from DanT=====


So does working in coal mines, oil rigs and many other jobs that people are just working stiffs trying to provide for their families.

That's a great point, BigRedChief. Thank you for reminding me of that. One of my colleagues at UC Davis has done a lot of work in estimating the costs associated with occupational illness and injury. There's a brief description of some of his findings at this link http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl.../etc/cost.html.

Here's a selective quote from that page

The most important findings involving socioeconomic and geographic characteristics are listed in the following.

Disabling injuries are strongly correlated with job experience. New employees, regardless of age, experience a high and disproportionate number of injuries.

Men are more likely than women to sustain a work injury. This is especially true for an injury resulting in death The nonfatal injury ratio for men to women is nearly 2:1, whereas the fatal injury ratio is about 11:1.

...

The self-employed, persons employed in small firms, and persons over age 65 are at high risk for sustaining an injury death.

Laborers, truck drivers, and taxi drivers generate among the highest death rates of all occupations.

Mining, farming, and construction are the industries with the highest rates of fatal and nonfatal injuries.

...

Operators and laborers generate the greatest numbers of deaths and nonfatal injuries among all broad occupation groups.

Laborers, truck drivers, nursing aides, janitors, assemblers, stock handlers, and cashiers generate the most disabling injuries among detailed occupations.

Being at work is not safer than being at home. People who work are more likely to be injured at work than at home. This is especially true for men. Moreover, work-related injuries are more likely to result in hospitalizations than injuries originating outside of work.

[Simply Red]

oh I wouldn't work in a coal mine DanT

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

This isn’t 1880.

Anyone that chooses to work in a coal mine knows the risks.

yep, just like the NFL players.

[Simply Red]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

yep, just like the NFL players.

except they pocket 200X the salary (at a min.)

[DanT]

I've also coauthored a few studies in occupational health, a lot of it with farm workers, but not all of it. One of them concerned older workers and the association of arthritis-related disability with broad occupational class. My dad was blue-collar (an autoworker, he retired from GMAD Leeds after 30 years and passed away in his early 70s) and my mom was pink-collar. Thanks to their hard work, I was able to make it to a white collar job. Here's the abstract from the arthritis paper, along with a link for anyone interested in reading more. The upshot is that arthritis is quite a bit more brutal for a blue collar worker than for a white collar worker. That may be obvious, but we were able to quantify the differences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154222/

Originally Posted by "Arthritis, Occupational Class, and the Aging US Workforce" article in the American Journal of Public Health

Objectives. The working poor sometimes delay retirement to survive. However, their higher risk of disease and disability threatens both their financial survival and their ability to work through the retirement years. We used the burden of disease attributable to arthritis by occupational class to illustrate the challenges faced by the older poor.

Methods. We merged data from the National Health Interview Survey, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, and the National Death Index into a single database. We then calculated and compared age- and occupational class–specific quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) between workers with and without arthritis by using unabridged life tables.

Results. White-collar workers have a higher overall health-related quality of life than do other workers, and suffer fewer QALYs lost to arthritis at all ages. For instance, whereas 65-year-old white-collar workers without arthritis look forward to 17 QALYs of future life, blue-collar workers with arthritis experience only 11, and are much less likely to remain in the workforce than are those in service, farming, or white-collar jobs.

Conclusions. To meet the needs of the aging workforce, more extensive health and disability insurance will be needed.

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by Simply Red

oh I wouldn't work in a coal mine DanT

I worked on the oil rigs in the gulf in the late 70's. Until the rig blew out across from us and 4 people died. Figured I couldn't spend this great money if I was dead.

[DanT]

Originally Posted by Simply Red

oh I wouldn't work in a coal mine DanT

That's a tough job, that's for sure. In some countries, the fatality rates for that job are absolutely atrocious. In China, for example, the fatality rates were more than 25 times as high as in the US at the beginning of this century.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056041/

[DanT]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

I worked on the oil rigs in the gulf in the late 70's. Until the rig blew out across from us and 4 people died. Figured I couldn't spend this great money if I was dead.

Do you think that most of your colleagues had a good understanding of how risky the job was?

I think a lot of us do dangerous things, especially as young adults, without truly appreciating the risks.

[Simply Red]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

I worked on the oil rigs in the gulf in the late 70's. Until the rig blew out across from us and 4 people died. Figured I couldn't spend this great money if I was dead.

Oh no.

Originally Posted by DanT

That's a tough job, that's for sure. In some countries, the fatality rates for that job are absolutely atrocious. In China, for example, the fatality rates were more than 25 times as high as in the US at the beginning of this century.
https://www.ncbi..nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056041/

Wish it were a hundred times - Oh no I'm kidding.

Originally Posted by DanT

Do you think that most of your colleagues had a good understanding of how risky the job was?

I think a lot of us do dangerous things, especially as young adults, without truly appreciating the risks.

Oh for sure!

[tk13]

The difference between all these other jobs and the NFL is guys who work on oil rigs and in coal mines are usually doing some kind of work that provides some kind of service to people that need it. The NFL is entertainment. It is a bit different.

I've seen more than one article recently about how participation in youth football is down in various areas. I don't think the NFL is going to be dead anytime soon, but I could definitely see them making changes to the game, and you wonder how the quality of the game will be affected. We are already right now at the point where the quality of the game has declined from 20 years ago, really even 10 years ago, because they've restricted how much guys can practice. The days of a coach like Vermeil or Marty grinding a team down through long grueling practices are long dead.

[chiefzilla1501]

I don't care as much about players who assume the risk but do it anyway. This game is on the decline because injuries occur at such an alarming rate. I don't want to watch backups. I don't want super bowls to be based on what team was lucky enough to make it through with the least number of stars injured.

Football is at its best with the best players on the field. That's not happening right now. And the product is suffered dramatically.

[Tribal Warfare]

Originally Posted by chiefzilla1501

I don't care as much about players who assume the risk but do it anyway. This game is on the decline because injuries occur at such an alarming rate. I don't want to watch backups. I don't want super bowls to be based on what team was lucky enough to make it through with the least number of stars injured.

Football is at its best with the best players on the field. That's not happening right now. And the product is suffered dramatically.

Too many teams,games, and rule changes.

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by DanT

Do you think that most of your colleagues had a good understanding of how risky the job was?

I think a lot of us do dangerous things, especially as young adults, without truly appreciating the risks.

Of course they knew. We use to go down to the bottom of the rig right off the water and burn some. We'd take welding rods, sharpen them, spear a shark as it swims by with them and watch the other sharks/fish devour the sharks body for fun. So yeah we knew if the fire or explosion didn't get us, the sharks would.

I was washing dishes at first making what is now, $3500 a week. Go out there for 4 weeks. Single, 18 years old, high school drop out from Missouri and I've got $14K in my bank account in a month? I can see why people accepted the risk to their lives.

Its a lot safer now, they know how to keep the sharks away from the rigs etc. pay is not as good but at least your chance of dying is way down from what it was in 1979.

[Sweet Daddy Hate]

I wish Bob Costas worked in a coal mine.