TB12 Performance Safety Bubble. The NFL has no answers.
I assume this is the “current” NFL thread; if not, sorry!
Russell Wilson is on a new diet designed to make him more fit and able to get him into better shape and to help him lose weight. His nutritionist has changed his calorie intake from 2700 to 4800 per day:
The nutritionist explains it thusly:
My question to people who know this stuff™: WTF? Does this make any sense?
The Reddit thread has a good discussion on this.
I believe it. I think Brady does a similar thing. No gluten, dairy, or junk food, lots of meals and lots of calories. But Brady works out year round, doing 2-a-days even in the off season. He takes like 2 weeks off after the season ends then gets right back to it.
I think some of it is genetics, obviously, I mean you don’t get to the NFL without superior athletic genes on top of the hard work. But if you’re busting your ass twice a day you need to eat a lot of food. Michael Phelps, The Rock, etc, these guys eat a shit load of food every day.
Yeah. Athletes can burn every calorie thrown their way.
The guy who plays the mountain in game of thrones is a weightlifter. He consumes about 4,500 calories before lunch.
RoboQB is making a comeback. Well, not to the NFL, but he’s trying to play again:
Former NFL quarterback Todd Marinovich, less than one year after being arrested with drugs while naked, wants to play again and is attempting a comeback at age 48.
Sixteen years since he last played for the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena Football League and after being released by the Los Angeles Raiders in 1993, Marinovich will don the uniform of the SoCal Coyotes of the World Developmental Football League.
Where do you put your drugs if you’re arrested and nude? Wait. On second thought, I guess the answer is A) obvious and B) not something I want to think about anymore.
Study: CTE Found In Nearly All Donated NFL Player Brains
Surprising approximately no one, except of course every NFL front-office person.
As per usual, the NFL’s response is to throw money at it and hope it goes away.
OK, maybe that’s not entirely fair, they have made some equipment changes and such. But I think we can all agree that the concussion protocol is a joke, and I don’t see player safety taking precedence over big players in big moments any time soon.
As for that money funding her research, Dr. McKee isn’t holding her breath:
Look, I agree it’s a huge problem, but the study is a bit skewed in that the brains were donated by family who suspected CTE in the first place. Even the researcher notes that there’s a “tremendous selection bias.”
The real number is likely smaller, but it’s still enough that it will kill the sport.
I don’t know why anyone thinks this will kill the sport. Its THE sport in America. It’s going to water down the talent pool as more and more kids stop playing. But 50 years from now, 100 years from now, any number of years from now, we are still going to have football.
All you need is a breakdown of the player pipeline. Parents withholding their kids from football in high school and/or insurance premiums priced so high that high schools drop the sport. That affects the college game, which will affect the pro game.
Unless there’s some kind of massive breakthrough in regenerating brain tissue (highly unlikely), football will have to change drastically to survive. Limiting hits or weight restrictions or something.
There are going to be plenty of players in the pipeline. Even if, say, 30% of parents withhold their child from football, there are still plenty of players left. Perhaps the quality of play drops a bit in the NFL due to a talent drain, but as long as the games are competitive, fans won’t care.
When young men can make millions playing a game, there will be a lot of young men willing to play.
For sure the player pipeline is already being affected. It just means better athletes for other sports.
But the pipeline is never going to dry up and football is always going to be a thing in America. Will it be the most popular sport 100 years from now like it has been since the 70s? Maybe not. But its not going to stop being a sport ever.
Like all problems, I expect technology will solve this one. Just re-designing the helmets could help dramatically. Putting sensors in the helmets that monitor when collisions exceed a certain force threshold and a player should be taken out of the game, this is already starting to be a thing. UT installed a system like this last year https://www.si.com/tech-media/2017/06/15/texas-football-riddell-helmet-technology I think we’ll see some kind of air bag technology eventually, between the helmet and skull.
It’s also worth pointing out that the brains for this study were self selected. What is the level of CTE for all brains? For all football brains? For all athletes brains? We don’t know. But again, football is king and it isn’t going away.
While true, does this really matter? There’s a ton of people suffering from CTE due to the sport. Maybe a lot of others aren’t, but it seems damning enough to me that there are so many that a report like this is possible, self-selected or not.
Taken together I think this is true - as long as there’s money, people will play. Maybe not as many, maybe there will be better athletes in other sports, but it won’t die. There are two ways football eventually dies: 1) the money leaves or 2) the sport changes so much that it’s not really football any more in anything but name. Either is possible, but seems highly unlikely in the short-to-medium term.
If this happens, then football certainly sticks around. I’m not as confident as @olaf that it will, but it’s certainly possible. The possibility goes up if the NFL puts its weight behind R&D as well as adoption of these kinds of new technologies.
I personally don’t think it’s solvable. The brain is still going to slosh around in the skull no matter what kind of helmet you wear, and if the change the game enough to limit sudden, violent, stops, it won’t really be NFL football anymore…
Atari predicted the outcome a long time ago.
“Welcome to Cyberball”
Yeah, the players are big and fast and hit hard. There’s no way to cushion the brain from banging into the skull. I don’t see how this is fixable other than through rule changes.
NFFL - National Flag Football League.