At professional levels, the amount of risk workers are willing to take for money is a labor issue and should be mostly left to unions.
At amateur levels, all sports carry injury risk and many outdoor sports carry a real risk of death. I don’t think we should ban football any more than we should ban hiking, climbing, or surfing. There should be some safety regulations and participants should be well-informed of the risks.
College football gets tricky because some programs are hugely lucrative and others (especially at lower divisions) are truly amateur.
Brain damage in football is not a risk, it is a guarantee. All participants will inevitably suffer CTE.
College and even more so high school football should not only be banned, all people who have had a hand in promoting and promulgating them should be gulaged.
Brain damage in football is not a risk, it is a guarantee.
You really have to get specific to talk about this. What level? How long is a person participating? What degree of damage are we talking about? Someone who played a year or two of junior high football will not have the same outcome as a 10-year NFL veteran, and plenty of the latter will have damage of a type that is bad, but not debilitating. If people know what they’re getting into, there’s a real question about how different this is from having chronic knee or back or shoulder problems from playing other sports.
And while we’re comparing this to other injuries, the “a risk becomes a guarantee if you do it enough” logic probably applies to serious injuries in other sports, too, to say nothing of activities like drinking or smoking.
At professional levels, the amount of risk workers are willing to take for money is a labor issue and should be mostly left to unions.
At amateur levels, all sports carry injury risk and many outdoor sports carry a real risk of death. I don’t think we should ban football any more than we should ban hiking, climbing, or surfing. There should be some safety regulations and participants should be well-informed of the risks.
College football gets tricky because some programs are hugely lucrative and others (especially at lower divisions) are truly amateur.
Brain damage in football is not a risk, it is a guarantee. All participants will inevitably suffer CTE.
College and even more so high school football should not only be banned, all people who have had a hand in promoting and promulgating them should be gulaged.
You really have to get specific to talk about this. What level? How long is a person participating? What degree of damage are we talking about? Someone who played a year or two of junior high football will not have the same outcome as a 10-year NFL veteran, and plenty of the latter will have damage of a type that is bad, but not debilitating. If people know what they’re getting into, there’s a real question about how different this is from having chronic knee or back or shoulder problems from playing other sports.
And while we’re comparing this to other injuries, the “a risk becomes a guarantee if you do it enough” logic probably applies to serious injuries in other sports, too, to say nothing of activities like drinking or smoking.
Get in the football gulag
That’s Green Bay