Athletic children look up to athletes for seemingly natural mental and physical resilience, and achievements. However, contrary to popular belief, contact sport players are not moving indestructible walls or robots programmed to just win a game; they are human just like anyone else and are susceptible to injury. Football is one of the most popular contact sports and has a strong focus on head on collisions and aggression on the field, consequently, it has a strong link to the posthumous diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.) in former players. To protect players and practicing fans there needs to be a stronger focus on educating players on the long term health risks of playing football and other contact sports to supplement
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The NFL has made the illusion of caring about player safety by doing the bare minimum which is just putting medical professional on the field and passing no real bans or limits on collisions. As a matter of fact, the Florida High School Athletic Association has made more progressive contact limits in football such as: live contact during practices being limited to a maximum of three days a week and contact not being allowed for more than two consecutive days (Barnett). This does not prevent players from rushing back onto the field when they are hurt, as they feel the need to resist and deny pain due to peer pressure from their coaches, sponsors, and their fan base. By creating the illusion that they care about player safety by hiring medical professionals with perhaps a minute amount of their funds, they quiet down potential opposition, however, any real efforts to directly address the problem being a lack of education is ignored. “Stein convened a summit about concussions in 1994 and issued an explanatory paper on concussions awareness and prevention, which circulated among 32 teams and the NFL office but it was ignored” (Clarke). This is evidence that the NFL wants to prevent a shift in their fan base’s culture from praising the idea of aggressive injury resistant players to treating players as human and as vulnerable as anyone else. The former places the idea of a larger than life human being who …show more content…
A stark example can be seen when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell downplayed the risk of playing the contact sport by saying “There’s risk in life. There’s risk in sitting on the couch” (Belson). In addition, Goodell later implied that the real reason some players are quitting is because they lost their passion for the game, not due to being concerned about their safety (Belson). Clearly, if Goodell believed that this sport had its inherent risks due to frequent head on collisions he would have admitted it publicly, but doing so would be against his best interests: securing the sport in the interests of his fans and making money at the cost of players’ and aspiring fans’ health or, in a few extreme cases,
The NFL has made the illusion of caring about player safety by doing the bare minimum which is just putting medical professional on the field and passing no real bans or limits on collisions. As a matter of fact, the Florida High School Athletic Association has made more progressive contact limits in football such as: live contact during practices being limited to a maximum of three days a week and contact not being allowed for more than two consecutive days (Barnett). This does not prevent players from rushing back onto the field when they are hurt, as they feel the need to resist and deny pain due to peer pressure from their coaches, sponsors, and their fan base. By creating the illusion that they care about player safety by hiring medical professionals with perhaps a minute amount of their funds, they quiet down potential opposition, however, any real efforts to directly address the problem being a lack of education is ignored. “Stein convened a summit about concussions in 1994 and issued an explanatory paper on concussions awareness and prevention, which circulated among 32 teams and the NFL office but it was ignored” (Clarke). This is evidence that the NFL wants to prevent a shift in their fan base’s culture from praising the idea of aggressive injury resistant players to treating players as human and as vulnerable as anyone else. The former places the idea of a larger than life human being who …show more content…
A stark example can be seen when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell downplayed the risk of playing the contact sport by saying “There’s risk in life. There’s risk in sitting on the couch” (Belson). In addition, Goodell later implied that the real reason some players are quitting is because they lost their passion for the game, not due to being concerned about their safety (Belson). Clearly, if Goodell believed that this sport had its inherent risks due to frequent head on collisions he would have admitted it publicly, but doing so would be against his best interests: securing the sport in the interests of his fans and making money at the cost of players’ and aspiring fans’ health or, in a few extreme cases,