Thread: Will Football (Literally) Die As It Was Born?

Imagine a world where a single football season KILLS A DOZEN KIDS, provoking such national outrage an avid football fan and president calls a reform meeting. Not some collegiate sports powers president: The President of the UNITED STATES. Well, you don't have to imagine, because it's reality—twice over:

Nineteen people died playing football in 1905; all but three were minors (one only thirteen.) Current reaction is apathetic compared to US reaction then (but this is about football, not America. ) Roosevelts conference began by ultimatum: Fix the game or he'd criminalize it. The response to that transformed US rugby into what we call football:

1. The flying wedges often lethal roving scrums were banned by mandating exactly six (later seven) men on the line of scrimmage at the snap, no more, no less; look up the flying wedge now and all you'll find is military and paramilitary tactics, with only a brief footnote about its FORMER sports usage.
2. To discourage post-snap re-creation of the flying wedge, "spread offense" was instead created by legalizing the forward pas. The original pass was a hopelessly crippled (e.g. passers had to be 5+ yds behind the line, and incompletes were turnover) desperation play, but became the thin end of its own "wedge."
3. As the conference itself devolved into arguments failing to agree on the above or ANY change, the lone exception was creating the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the US to devise, implement, enforce, maintain and improve rules; it now governs most college sports, but adopted a shorter name (i.e. the NCAA) in 1910.

We've not only been here before, but come full circle: It's how we GOT here. In a critical sense, we never left, just got so lost over the century since that we forgot where we are (Hmmm, that goalpost looks familiar....) The new centurys critics go to the same logical extremes as when the old one was new. Meanwhile, brutalitys enablers trot out the same absurdist apples to oranges comparisons as THEIR logical ancestors, both rhetorically asking if drownings killing far more people justifies swim bans.

Yet, source statements notwithstanding, "the clearest parallel is" the aim and effect of high profile but low "impact" reforms:

In the short term, none of these measures made football safer. The true accomplishment was a matter of public relations: The new rules silenced the universities threatening to cancel their football programs and the public outcry resulting from these threats. "They at least got the public off the backs of the football programs," Crippen said. "They said, 'Hey, at least we're trying something.'"

Any casual observer of football's current head-injury crisis should immediately recognize this sentiment. Nobody quite knows what to do to make a fundamentally unsafe game any safer, but the sport, on both the professional and collegiate levels, has to be perceived as trying to do something about it. So we have national campaigns demonstrating how one armored human can "safely" force another armored human to the ground against his will. We have new rules trying to influence the split-second decisions tacklers must make. These measures are working in the same way the 1906 measures worked: Fans see football as moving in the right direction despite little evidence the game is actually safer. The changes aren't about mitigating the violence and its ramifications; they're about mitigating the moral qualms of observers. Reform isn't for the players; it's for us.

With the rule changes of 1906, people got the absolution they were looking for. The panic had passed. The following season, according to Crippen, more people died from football than they had in 1905. Or so we think. Nobody can agree on the exact number. http://deadspin.com/did-football-cau...ing-1506758181 (Boldface and highlighting added for emphasis)

Through it all, the same note as a century ago: "The surprising thing is that so many parents who love and are proud of their boys will consent to their taking the risks inseparable from the game."

The difference is, a growing number of parents are asking THEMSELVES if they should let their precious vulnerable children play football—and ANSWERING with an emphatic negative. Not just squeamish overprotective mommies and scrawny bookish daddies nursing grudges over inability to get on their own HS fields: Former NFL players like Scott Fujita, even HoF players like Iron Mike Ditka, love their kids and grandkids far more than the game, so want the former nowhere near the latter.

Nationally, youth football participation has fallen in recent years, and school boards are disbanding even championship teams out of concern for student-athlete health. One national poll found the MAJORITY OF AMERICA DOESN'T WANT ITS KIDS PLAYING FOOTBALL. A Rand Corporation poll shows 90+% parental support for all sports EXCEPT football and hockey, which barely got the majority the other poll denied football:
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A more nuanced and perhaps more accurate view comes from NPR:


Only 7% say HS football's too risky to play, but 44% say it "needs to be safer." That invites the kind of elaborate sham "reforms" that spawned the NCAA and the modern game ITSELF, and spurred the League Offices ongoing sound and fury signifying nothing.

Yet statistics do show far greater risk of serious injury specifically in amateur YOUTH football compared to the pros, and research offers several likely explanations. Ignore visceral hyperemotional rhetoric and the reality is pro and top college football programs have the resources to provide all players state of the art protective gear and trainers, but many HS and JHS victims of school funding cuts rely on worn out gear and no medical staff. Many Pop Warner teams rely solely on parents and local businesses for even LESS.

The perverse paradox is that PLAYER PROTECTION IS INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO VULNERABILITY. That is, adult NFL and most NCAA players have full access to the best preventative gear and medicine—but that's TOO LATE for many: Their most serious and permanent injuries came while their bodies and brains were still developing, yet already being knocked around in the scuffed, dented and ill-fitting helmets and pads their older brothers wore, with no medical attention except a sideline paramedic AFTER injury.

I don't pretend to know the future, whether it's a 1905-esque reform so sweeping and radical it makes 21st Century football as unrecognizable to us as the SB would be to Walter Camp (who largely created directly from the English rugby Ivy League colleges played when he was a student, and strenuously but vainly protested 1905s changes,) a pablum-filled facade for continuing youth massacres, abolition modern football merely postponed for a century, or something entirely different.

I DO know there's rapidly growing public opposition to severe permanent injuries turning people—especially CHILDREN—into impulsive, irritable sociopaths just for "love of the game" (read: Billion dollar pro and "amateur" football profits from merchandise and broadcast contracts.) I also know there are potent obvious ways to make the game safer—again, especially CHILDREN—without making it into the slapfight for dandies that "real men" declared 1905 reforms to be.

I also know one other thing: If todays kids continue to stop watching and playing football, tomorrows NCAA and NFL football can't exist.

Sorry if Football 101's the wrong place; it fits here better than anywhere else that came to mind. (Most) of how (and why) rugby became football is Football 101 anyway.