(November 14, 2013 at 7:48 pm)Minimalist Wrote: It will be interesting to see what impact the NFL settlement has on kids' participation in football.The cat is out of the bag in regards to the risk of long-term problems. The NFL has to find a way to make football safe enough to alleviate parents' concerns while also retaining the sports' long-term popularity. I'm not sure that they can do that, so they might be fighting a battle that ends with their defeat in any scenario.
I used to love watching the violent collisions and crushing hits in football in the past, but knowing about the risk of long-term brain injury makes it more difficult to watch now. Not only do I not expect players to "walk it off" when they get leveled by an opponent, even seemingly harmless plays make me flinch sometimes. Watching a receiver catch a ball and have his head whiplash backwards when he lands on the ground always leaves me wondering just how much damage he did to himself at that moment.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
