In the National Football League, technology has been super important for the players’ health. Over the last few years more and more bodies of former professional football players have been observed for brain injuries from football. Many of these players had multiple concussions that have affected them well after their playing careers were over. The Washington Post states that 40% of retired
Thesis Statement
The number of concussions in professional and amateur football has been rising and has sparked much controversy in recent years. These concussions are most likely linked with disease and even the deaths of some pro and semi-pro football players. New research is attempting to solve the problem but the issue is still prevalent in football today.
Head injuries in the National Football League
In recent stories local retired NFL player Junior Seau suffered many head injuries while playing in the NFL. Well known and loved in all surrounding San Diego communities had committed suicide in 2012. Coming upon the 2 year anniversary of his passing people still wonder what exactly did it to him. The problems of head injuries in the NFL is they are always occurring.
Athletes are one of the most highly paid professions, and with that comes a great responsibility to everyone but themselves, even it means putting their lives, and others around them at risk. A football player’s goal is to entertain the fans that tune in to watch them, however their only job is to win their games, and untimely a Super Bowl Championship, but not for themselves, for the franchise that owns them and their bodies. As long as they can run a play and take a hit foot players are gold to their employers, or if you will their owners. “Toughing it out, turns out, can kill people.” (Diaz Truman, M 2013), and cause irreversible brain damage to football players. Continuing to ignore evidence that supports the growing concern of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and how it relates to the NFL players is troubling because of the long term affects it has on a player’s mental s...
Junior Seau was one of the best middle linebackers in the NFL during his 20 playing years, amassing over 1,500 tackles, and delivering an insurmountable number of hits. In 2011, shortly after retiring, he abruptly committed suicide by shooting himself. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted a study on Seau’s brain and diagnosed him with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma (Pilon and Belson). Seau is among countless other former players whose careers’ of playing football changed their lives forever. Former quarterback Terry Bradshaw told USA Today about how poor his mental health has become. He says, “I couldn’t focus and remember things, and I was dealing with depression” (Breslow, “NFL Concussions: The 2013-14 Season in Review”). Seau’s death and Bradshaw’s decline link to a growing epidemic in today’s sports: concussions. Recently, concussions increased in contact sports, specifically football (Breslow, “What We’ve Learned from Two Years of Tracking Concussions”). This increase, along with better awareness and pressure from lawsuits and the media, led to research for better concussion diagnostic technology and rule changes in football. Concussions and the effects associated with them forced football to evolve, for the better.
The National Hockey League is not the first professional sports league to have issues with concussions. The National Football League, for example recently concluded a lawsuit that involved over a thousand former players, that resulted i...
As a response, the NFL developed an in-depth protocol to help further decrease the incidence of concussions. Despite the published concussion statistics in the NFL, there are limitations with this data. The data supports the claim that concussion rates vary from each season, with some seasons showing more concussions than the previous season. With this inconsistent information, it is difficult to conclude how successful the NFL protocol is. There is not enough consistent evidence to conclude that concussions rates have either increased or decreased since the NFL
Due to the recent findings on concussion based injuries, chief bodies of sports associations from professional to organized sports should take all possible steps to protect athletes from the dangers of concussions sustained on the field of play using medical based assessments and time restrictions in returning to play too soon. The NFL has been pushing player safety more and more over the past couple years. Slowly but surely rules and regulations have changed to better protect athletes from the dangers of concussions on all levels of play; professional, college, high/middles school and organized sports for children. However to protect players from the dangers of concussions, we must first understand them.
In June of 2012, 4000 former NFL players filed a lawsuit against the NFL. The lawsuit was filed because of the neglect of the NFL on the issue of concussions. The NFL didn’t have a system dedicated to concussions. Players played with concussions, they weren’t informed on what repetitive concussions could have on the brain and head to head penalties were not even thought of. On August 29, 2013, the NFL settled with the former players for 760 Million dollars. Despite of this settlement, concussions are still a prevalent problem in today’s game. The main cause of this concussions are head to head hits, most commonly intentional head to head hits.
Now concussions have been around forever, like since the beginning of humans. Concussions have been a problem also since the beginning of sports such as hockey, boxing, rugby, and soccer though I am going to focus on one in particular, and that’s football. Concussions and football go together like milk and cookies and it has stemmed from the beginning when the first football helmets were just made of leather and it goes all the way up to today with even some of the best helmets. Concussions, at the moment, are almost unpreventable. Though, it wasn’t until 2002 that it was discovered that too many concussions over time for one person would have some very negative consequences. That year a doctor from Nigeria, then at the time living in Pittsburg,