Official NFL 2012-2013 Thread

[antimatter]

I don't know, but something always seemed a little off with Junior to me. Very sad though.

[GovernorSilver]

Junior Seau is now the 8th member of the 1994 Charger Superbowl team to die.

[steadyb]

Junior Seau is now the 8th member of the 1994 Charger Superbowl team to die.

 

But to be fair, eventually EVERY member of the 1994 Charger Superbowl team is going to die.

[GovernorSilver]

Junior Seau is now the 8th member of the 1994 Charger Superbowl team to die.

 

But to be fair, eventually EVERY member of the 1994 Charger Superbowl team is going to die.

 

True, and also true for every member of every Superbowl team. It's just that members of this particular team have been dying at a faster rate than other recent Superbowl teams. Two dead by vehicular accidents. One struck by lightning,

 

http://deadspin.com/5867720/death-is-stalking-the-1994-chargers

[steadyb]

One struck by lightning

 

That one is ironic.

 

Now, should Eli Manning die while falling from a beanstalk...

[Joe Muscara]

Actually, from what I understand, Doug Miller was hit by lighting twice, the second time while they were giving him CPR.

[sakari lindhen]

Suggs out for year with ankle injury?

[Geoff Grace]

4 Saints suspended, Vilma for all of 2012

From that article:

 

Anthony Hargrove, whos now with the Packers, was given an eight-game suspension after the NFL said that he, too, targeted Favre in the NFC Championship Game. The NFL says that Hargrove eventually admitted his role in the teams bounty program, but that at first Hargrove also actively obstructed the leagues 2010 investigation into the program by being untruthful to investigators.

Wow. What must it be like for Hargrove in the Green Bay locker room now? Favre must still have some friends there.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[GovernorSilver]

Actually, from what I understand, Doug Miller was hit by lighting twice, the second time while they were giving him CPR.

 

Yeah, that one was particularly freaky.

[Dave Bryce]

Suggs out for year with ankle injury?

Achilles tendon. Yikes...

 

That'd likely have a pretty serious effect on Baltimore's D. He seals up that side of the D line tight as a drum. Heck, I'm not sure he's even really an actual human being - the man's helmet barely fits on his head...

 

dB

[Jeff Klopmeyer]

Favre must still have some friends there.

 

Hmm.

[Geoff Grace]

Oh, I certainly don't expect that they'd all be in his corner; but I wouldn't be surprised if a few were.

 

After all, how often is it that everyone reacts the same way?

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[steadyb]

Oh, I wouldn't say that.

[richwhite9]

Junior Seau is now the 8th member of the 1994 Charger Superbowl team to die.

 

But he's an ex-Patriot! And ex-Patriots die screwing super models! They die, go to hell, and re-live their losses to the Giants. Over and over again. For ever.

[GovernorSilver]

I gotta admit, it was bittersweet to see Rodney and Junior - the two guys who were the heart of the Charger D for some years - win a Superbowl with the Pats instead.

[Magpel]

I gotta admit, it was bittersweet to see Rodney and Junior - the two guys who were the heart of the Charger D for some years - win a Superbowl with the Pats instead.

 

Rodney won them all, but Junior didn't win one, if I am not mistaken. '07 was his first year on NE, and the defense couldn't make the stop.

[Joe Muscara]

Family of Junior Seau will allow his brain to be studied

[Griffinator]

I gotta admit, it was bittersweet to see Rodney and Junior - the two guys who were the heart of the Charger D for some years - win a Superbowl with the Pats instead.

 

Rodney won them all, but Junior didn't win one, if I am not mistaken. '07 was his first year on NE, and the defense couldn't make the stop.

 

Seau joined the Pats in '06, the year after their last SB victory.

[GovernorSilver]

I stand corrected. Junior never did win a ring after all, unlike his two-time teammate Rodney. It's a shame the Chargers didn't have a reliable offense during their best years together wearing the lightning bolts.

[GovernorSilver]

I gotta admit, it was bittersweet to see Rodney and Junior - the two guys who were the heart of the Charger D for some years - win a Superbowl with the Pats instead.

 

Rodney won them all, but Junior didn't win one, if I am not mistaken. '07 was his first year on NE, and the defense couldn't make the stop.

 

I thought Junior had to sit out the Superbowl because of a broken arm or something?

[GovernorSilver]

Family of Junior Seau will allow his brain to be studied

 

Long and passionate debate on another forum about the effects of multiple concussions/brain injury and suicide. I don't know if this is necessarily the beginning of the end of pro football but I wouldn't be surprised if the game was changed more radically than we have seen in recent years.

[Joe Muscara]

Family of Junior Seau will allow his brain to be studied

 

Long and passionate debate on another forum about the effects of multiple concussions/brain injury and suicide. I don't know if this is necessarily the beginning of the end of pro football but I wouldn't be surprised if the game was changed more radically than we have seen in recent years.

Yeah, I can see that. This is from 2009.

 

New Yorker Article

 

This is from February.

 

What would the end of football look like

 

I'd hate to lose the sport, but OTOH what's happening to these players is absolutely horrible.

[GovernorSilver]

Yeah, I can see that. This is from 2009.

 

New Yorker Article

 

This is from February.

 

What would the end of football look like

 

I'd hate to lose the sport, but OTOH what's happening to these players is absolutely horrible.

 

The first article isn't loading for me. The 2nd one makes many good points, but I'm not sure the NFL will disappear entirely. I could see the sport being changed by, say, removing the helmets and not allowing any leading with the head OR the shoulders on tackles - you are required to use your arms when tackling.

[Griffinator]

Yeah, I can see that. This is from 2009.

 

New Yorker Article

 

This is from February.

 

What would the end of football look like

 

I'd hate to lose the sport, but OTOH what's happening to these players is absolutely horrible.

 

The first article isn't loading for me. The 2nd one makes many good points, but I'm not sure the NFL will disappear entirely. I could see the sport being changed by, say, removing the helmets and not allowing any leading with the head OR the shoulders on tackles - you are required to use your arms when tackling.

 

That'd have to go both ways, though - you can't have ball carriers leading with their head/shoulder when running down the field. Most of the worst head injury stuff happens to defenders getting run over by a big running back leading with their head or an offensive lineman trucking them downfield.

[ProfD]

I would rather see more effort put into making the equipment safer and better medical screening and treatment rather than radically change the game of football.

 

IMO, athletes are made aware of the short and long-term risks associated with their chosen profession. As the boxing referee says, "protect yourself at all times."

[Joe Muscara]

One of the points the New Yorker article made was that it was the repeated subconcussive blows that led to a lot of trouble.

 

When we think about football, we worry about the dangers posed by the heat and the fury of competition. Yet the HITS data suggest that practicethe routine part of the sportcan be as dangerous as the games themselves. We also tend to focus on the dramatic helmet-to-helmet hits that signal an aggressive and reckless style of play. Those kinds of hits can be policed. But what sidelined the U.N.C. player, the first time around, was an accidental and seemingly innocuous elbow, and none of the blows he suffered that day would have been flagged by a referee as illegal. Most important, though, is what Guskiewicz found when he reviewed all the data for the lineman on that first day in training camp. He didnt just suffer those four big blows. He was hit in the head thirty-one times that day. What seems to have caused his concussion, in other words, was his cumulative exposure. And why was the second concussionin the game at Utahso much more serious than the first? Its not because that hit to the side of the head was especially dramatic; it was that it came after the 76-g blow in warmup, which, in turn, followed the concussion in August, which was itself the consequence of the thirty prior hits that day, and the hits the day before that, and the day before that, and on and on, perhaps back to his high-school playing days.

 

This is a crucial point. Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussionson diagnosing, managing, and preventing themand on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football players real issue isnt simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. Its not just the handful of big hits that matter. Its lots of little hits, too.

 

Thats why, Cantu says, so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: thats thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage. People with C.T.E., Cantu says, arent necessarily people with a high, recognized concussion history. But they are individuals who collided heads on every playrepetitively doing this, year after year, under levels that were tolerable for them to continue to play.

[MikeT156]

Prof D:

 

Those of us that love NFL football, and football in general really don't want anyone tampering with the game. One of the things that have affected the injuries is the size and speed of today's athletes. Collisions with other players at high speed can cause permanent brain damage. Even a body slam on Turf, which can be hard with no "give" can lead to permanent injuries. Grass fields in covered stadiums might relieve the situation, but Turf is so much easier to maintain, footing is so much better, and players can stoke up to high speed in short order. I doubt anyone would want to go back.

 

If the game is waterdowned too much, people won't watch it.

 

There's a limit to how much doctors can do once the brain is slammed against the inside of the skull.

 

 

 

 

Mike T.

[Joe Muscara]

If the game makes mush out of everyone's brains, people won't watch it.

 

If the game makes mush out of everyone's brains, moms won't let their kids play it.

 

Then where is the game?

[steadyb]

Interesting article...

 

The end of football as we know it?

 

BY RANDY BLASER Columnist May 4, 2012 3:00PM

 

 

With the tragic suicide of football great Junior Seau last week, could

we be witnessing the beginning of the

end of football as we know it?

 

No one knows what might have driven Seau to suicide, but speculation is rampant that repeated blows to the head playing football may have contributed to his decision to take his own life.

 

Like Chicago Bears great David Duerson, Seau shot himself in the chest. Duerson left a note asking his brain be studied to see if he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which is caused by multiple concussions. It has been determined Duerson did suffer from CTE, which can lead to depression.

 

Now we have the death of Seau, known for his toughness, who also shot himself in the chest. One cant help but think that CTE was a factor.

 

The long-term effects of repeated blows to the head is becoming more and more of a factor for former NFL players.

 

Everyone has known for a long time that playing football can lead to debilitating injuries later in life bad knees, bad hips, a bad back and those risks were an acceptable exchange for the moments of glory on the field. But this new evidence that serious brain damage could be the result of a life of football is frightening for former players and their families.

 

Already we have heard that

Jim McMahon, the Bears quarterback who led the team to its only Super Bowl win in 1986, is complaining that he is losing his memory. He walks into a room and doesnt remember why hes there. It sounds a lot like the early stages of dementia and Alzheimers disease.

 

Suing the NFL

 

Last week, more than 100 players sued the NFL claiming ongoing debilitating effects from head injuries. Those 100 players are joining about 1,500 former players already suing for the same reason.

 

Considering the average career in the NFL lasts only about four years, can former college players be far behind in bringing about a lawsuit? And if former college players begin suing, why would a college stay in the business of fielding a football team?

 

It may start with the small colleges, but could easily spread to name schools.

 

And if colleges eventually find football too risky and dangerous, would high schools be far behind?

 

How can high schools continue to offer a sport that may cause brain damage?

 

These ideas are not so far-fetched. Just last February, economists Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier speculated about how football can come to an end not tomorrow or next year but within 10 to 15 years.

 

As more young people, probably at the insistence of their parents, opt out of football, how can the feeder systems continue to replace NFL players every four years?

 

I gave up watching pro football years ago. The excessive violence and injuries especially to key players made it seem pointless to invest time and energy following a team. When Bears quarterback Jay Cutler went down with a season-ending injury last year and the team nosedived well, what was the point?

 

Football injuries are not just putting an end to a players or a teams season, or even a players career. The lingering effects of head injuries caused by playing football are destroying lives. Why should we live with this?

[steadyb]

And one more...

 

What Would the End of Football Look Like?

An economic perspective on CTE and the concussion crisis

By Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier on February 9, 2012

 

The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?

 

By now we're all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.

 

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it's not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

 

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits.1 Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a "contagion effect" with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL's feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.

 

It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don't like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.

 

This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players or worse, high schoolers commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn't worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it's mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

 

There's a lot less money in the sport, and at first it's "the next hockey" and then it's "the next rugby," and finally the franchises start to shutter.

 

Along the way, you would have an NFL with much lower talent levels, less training, and probably greater player representation from poorer countries, where the demand for money is higher and the demand for safety is lower. Finally, the NFL is marginalized as less-dangerous sports gobble up its market share. People American people might actually start calling "soccer" by the moniker of "football."

 

Despite its undeniable popularity and the sense that the game is everywhere the aggregate economic effect of losing the NFL would not actually be that large. League revenues are around $10 billion per year while U.S. GDP is around $15,300 billion. But that doesn't mean everyone would be fine.

 

Big stadiums will lose a lot of their value and that will drag down neighboring bars and restaurants, causing a lot of them to shut their doors. Cable TV will be less profitable, and this will hasten the movement of TV-watching, if we can still call it that, to the web. Super Bowl Sunday will no longer be the best time to go shopping for a new car at the dealership.

 

Take Green Bay as a case study: A 2009 study of the economic impact of the Packers' stadium estimated "$282 million in output, 2,560 jobs and $124.3 million in earnings, and $15.2 million in tax revenues." That's small potatoes for the national economy as a whole, but for a small and somewhat remote city of 104,000, it is a big deal indeed.2

 

Any location where football is the only game in town will suffer. If the Jets and Giants go, New York still has numerous other pro sports teams, Broadway, high-end shopping, skyscrapers, fine dining, and many other cultural activities. If college football dies, Norman, Oklahoma (current home to one of us), has noodling? And what about Clemson, in South Carolina, which relies on the periodic weekend football surge into town for its restaurant and retail sales? Imagine a small place of 12,000 people that periodically receives a sudden influx of 100,000 visitors or more, most of them eager to spend money on what is one of their major leisure outings. It's like a port in the Caribbean losing its cruise ship traffic. (Overall, the loss of football could actually increase migration from rural to urban areas over time. Football-dependent areas are especially prominent in rural America, and some of them will lose a lot of money and jobs.)

 

Outside of sports, American human capital and productivity probably rise. No football Saturdays on college campuses means less binge drinking, more studying, better grades, smarter future adults. Losing thousands of college players and hundreds of pro players might produce a few more doctors or engineers. Plus, talented coaches and general managers would gravitate toward management positions in American industry. Heck, just getting rid of fantasy football probably saves American companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

 

Other losers include anything that depends heavily on football to be financially viable, including the highly subsidized non-revenue collegiate sports. No more air travel for the field hockey teams or golf squads. Furthermore, many prominent universities would lose their main claim to fame. Alabama and LSU produce a large amount of revenue and notoriety from football without much in the way of first-rate academics to back it up. Schools would have to compete more on academics to be nationally prominent, which would again boost American education.

 

One of the biggest winners would be basketball. To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy), high-octane basketball is the natural substitute. On the pro level, the season can stretch out leisurely, ticket prices rise, ratings rise, maybe the league expands (more great athletes in the pool now), and some of the centers and power forwards will have more bulk. At the college level, March Madness becomes the only game in town.

 

Another winner would be track and field. Future Rob Gronkowskis in the decathlon? Future Jerome Simpsons in the high jump? World records would fall at a rapid pace.

 

This outcome may sound ridiculous, but the collapse of football is more likely than you might think. If recent history has shown anything, it is that observers cannot easily imagine the big changes in advance. Very few people were predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, or the rise of China as an economic power. Once you start thinking through how the status quo might unravel, a sports universe without the NFL at its center no longer seems absurd.

 

So Tennis, anyone?