Rip Junior Seau

Northeast has a lot of female hockey and lacrosse (rules very different from mens).

Funny enough, girls soccer has a very high head injury rate, probably not far off from the 'official' football head injury rate. Unofficially, football is likely much higher.

 

I knew female hockey had rules against checking and such.

You know, if I was a young lady and wanted to play hockey or lax, I would demand to be allowed to play by the same rules as the men, and I'd be irate enough not to play at all if that demand weren't met. Same for softball. Smaller hands can grip a baseball better and there's no reason for underhand pitching based on gender. It's really nothing more than a way to artificially preserve the masculinity of baseball.

I wonder if that's due to poor technique or neck muscle size and strength. I have no idea.

 

I see your point, but... I'm not sure that collegiate women's hockey differs from the male version of the sport. There are 34 Div. 1 women's hockey programs in the country. And it's been an Olympic sport since 1998.

 

There's going to be a state championship in hockey soon in Alabama. It's kinda shaping up like soccer did when I was in HS. My Alma won the city title my junior year and went to the semis of the unofficial state tourney (was then called the Dixie Cup), but only half the schools in town had teams. Sometime in the mid-late 90s, there were enough schools with a team that the AHSAA began to sanction a tournament. IIRC, there are only three classifications for soccer- 1A-4A, 5A and 6A. Basically, soccer was the rich kids' sport then, and we just happened to have a balance of money and talent. Hockey? I'm scared to death of what's going to happen there. Just another way of separating from the rest of us.

 

Always has been. Cars in the rink parking lot are always very nice.

Football, becoming a rich kid's sport would not be allowed.

 

Does college men's hockey allow checking (asking)? Anyhow, the popularity and focus I'm talking about is professional. Men's sports now take their cues from the top level.

 

Well, in a sense, it already is becoming one, if you think about the way GetaroundBrown Christian schools are recruiting athletes they'd never want in their classrooms if they weren't athletes. Plenty of exclusive private schools have won state titles in football with the help of ringers brought in from "undesirable" parts of town.

 

I can only imagine.

It already has. And they have soccer locked up because of the collective ignorance of the poorer schools.

Ever wonder why a college in Huntsville, Alabama would start (what eventually became) a very good hockey and a fair to middlin' soccer program but pay no attention to football? For appearances' sake.

Okay, thanks.

 

No, it isn't. Wernher Von Braun's bigotry founded that school and --perhaps intentionally-- helped to shape everything about its current persona to alienate people of color. There's a smaller town on the banks of the Tennessee, called Decatur. Uncle Sam offered them the first crack at the NASA stuff and the military base that became Redstone Arsenal, but the condition was that they'd have to desegregate. They refused, and as a result, they're still a monotoothed backwards Old South sewer, like Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Richmond, and to some degree, NOLA. Huntsville, OTOH, is... maybe a little better than that.

 

I've had nearly the same experience as you. I used to love football, especially NFL (Dolphins). Once Marino retired I almost immediately quit watching and following the entire sport.

I played football for 10 years. I played all through the offensive line and middle linebacker. I had some good coaches and a few horrible coaches. The good coach always made sure we were safe and didn't have us perform ridiculous drills.

High school was a different matter. We did bull in the ring drill everyday to open practice after stretching. My stomach used to turn in anticipation. Our coach was a sadist with it. He had the entire team form the ring, instead of breaking into groups. So the ring was massive, meaning the players got a huge run at the "bull", and the person in the middle couldn't charge. The worst part is that he wouldn't allow one player to run and hit and the call for the next player. He would stagger the players within a second or two of each other. He would call out random numbers which meant players would come from all angles. After the first person hit you, you had no time to recover before the next. Here's where it got really sadistic. If the player running at you was to your back, he couldn't warn you early on. Coach would make him yell out just as he was about to hit you. This lead to most people in the middle getting rocked to the ground. On top of that, if you didn't get up in enough time the next person was supposed to hit you anyway like a diving missile. I distinctly remember some of our fat, slow, weaker players getting knocked to the ground early in the drill and then the next 10 or more people just piling on diving hits one after the other. The worst part is that we would cheer. That shit whipped us into a disgusting frenzy.

I remember having two serious concussions and both were blamed on something else. The first one happened during the bull in the ring drill when I was in the middle. A player surprised me and hit me head first with helmet. This immediately made me start vomiting and gagging while unable to stand on my own. The coach blamed it on bad food that I had for lunch.

The second happened in a game during the opening kick off. A brutal collision left me completely deaf for a short while. I was also dizzy and confused. The coach said I had a hearing/ear problem.

Another thing that people don't talk about is the damage to joints and other body parts. I have a permanent neck injury that prevents me from turning my head as much as I should be. For years I always thought it was natural to wake up and not be able to walk normally. I thought you had to limber up and work out the pain in your ankles, knees, and back. It wasn't until years after playing that I realized it was due to football. Even though I'm much older now, I can jump out of bed in the morning without a problem.

I would never advocate for somebody to play football.

 

1. Did you ever say anything to your parents about the treatment at the hands of the rotten coaches? You should have. You and I both know the staggering of players was intended to simulate actual play against opponents (who aren't waiting for you to regain your balance/composure/speed before they hit you), and those drills are something we can eliminate now.

2. I'm not going to argue your point about not advocating for anyone to play because I pretty much agree with you.

But I still watch and I still cheer. I'm interested in how many of you do not watch the game at all anymore because of what you know about the injuries. How many of you do not watch boxing at all? No hypocrisy angle here- I'm saying that if you watch only the pros, you'll still be propping up the sport as a way to make a living. And someone, somewhere, will train for that job. The more you watch, the more they'll earn and the harder the hopefuls will train. Moving the responsibility for running the teams to a non-educational environment won't change that.

 

The gladiators were slaves.

 

Not all. Lots of them were in it for the pussy.

 

Of course I didn't say anything. Back then you didn't even think to say anything. Back then you didn't even think to see the trainer much less a doctor.

The staggering of players was not intended to simulate actual play. There is nothing in football that replicates it. It was done as coach used to say to, "toughen us up".

I don't watch the game because it's boring to me now. All the timeouts and stoppage in play. Once I started watching soccer regularly I became conditioned to continuous play and no commercials. I cannot go back now. Football is too boring and slow for me.

 

I love the NFL stating that it did not pressure ESPN to disaccoiate itself with the upcoming documentary about the NFL abd concussions. Saddam Hussein;s press secretary had more credibility.


In an email sent to reporters including SI.com, the NFL said, "It is not true that we pressured ESPN to pull out of the film. The lunch was requested several weeks ago by ESPN. We meet with our business partners on a regular basis and this was not unusual."

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl/news/20130825/media-circus-espn-nfl-frontline/

 

My older brother went to college with one of the great tight ends in Toronto Argonaut history, Pete Mueller. We used to watch the occassional game hidden deep on cable TV.

Do you guys even use tight ends anymore in the CFL?

 

I feel exactly the same way.

As implied above, I didn't' stop watching because of the violence, per se. But part of that decision was related to what I saw as the individualized glorification of the game's violence. Hard hits were a part of the game I had always enjoyed. But I couldn't stand the increase in taunting and ridiculous egotistical celebrations that had started to occur after every sack or somewhat harder than usual tackle. Shit, I remember one moron who tackled an opposition running back for a loss and jumped up like that one play should qualify him for league MVP... and his team was losing by about three touchdowns late in the second half at the time. Dumbass.

By the way, as yet another example of the immense distance our culture would need to shift in order for football to fade from prominence in this country, look no further than the front page item on yesterday's NY Times sports page:

The Legend of Jadeveon Clowney

 

Okay.

I must be in the minority, but player celebrations (and entrances, like Ray Lewis used to do) never bothered me even one bit. In fact, it's almost the opposite with me. Almost- I don't need to see celebrations to have a good time, but the way some people react to them causes me to shake my head. I've read similar comments so many times I can't count them all. It's like when college outlawed spiking the ball and group celebrations- why? No disrespect intended, but every time I hear or read someone speak negatively about celebrations, I can't help but think of houses built with small windows and a bunch of fireplaces. Build a house with big windows that allows sunlight to fill all the rooms and warm fresh air to circulate year 'round.

I feel the same way about hearing people say they hate the NBA and then in the next sentence talk about their fave school B-ball team.

That said, if you're celebrating a hit when you're losing badly, yeah, you're a dumbass unless it somehow motivates your team to come back and win.

That was a fantastic play- yeah, it was a hard hit, but I think you're listening to the hype intended for the casual fan. What people who know the game talk about is how freakin' fast Clowney got to that dude, and then grabbed the fumble while still on the ground.

You won't find a bigger critic of hyping college players on their college accomplishments than me (It's like lauding a med school student on his grades- no, we need to rate him when he becomes a doctor and we can see what his success rate is in the OR), but yeah, Clowney is a legend in the making. I think he'll be a great player in a couple years, and I'd love to see the Steelers try to move up in the 2014 draft to get him. The way our preseason is going, we might not have to try...

 

This is almost my exact same experience playing in northern NJ (where they've become just as nutty about football now as the deep South) from the late 70s to late 80s. I literally never came off the field in games being in a small school division so most of Sunday was spent recuperating and watching NFL games. Had bumps & bruises all over that didn't go away until basketball season started (had a 3-4 day break between sports around Thanksgiving if we didn't make playoffs).

I'm not too keen letting my kids play football either. The science of concussions is decidedly against such a notion of "safe" tackling. I know better from firsthand experience.