From Julian Assange:
One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.
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Tag Archives: Football
He Said That? 1/14/18
Have We Reached Peak NFL? by Charles Hugh Smith
SLL’s response to the title question is: let’s hope so. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
How will the owners and managers of the multi-billion-dollar NFL empire handle the league’s decline phase?
OK, I get it: pro football is so popular because it’s one of the last refuges of modern life that hasn’t been ruined by politics. Oops, scratch that. But we shouldn’t pin the decline of pro football’s popularity (as measured by viewership) solely on player protests, as the decline predates the recent politicization.
As this chart shows, viewership has been sliding for years across the entire demographic spectrum:
Even more troubling for the multi-billion-dollar NFL empire, the youth demographic is evaporating like mist in a scorching summer day in Death Valley. The problem for the NFL is two-fold: the number of young people who are dedicated NFL viewers is modest, and even worse, it’s declining at a fast clip.
I am sure there are plenty of 25-year old fans, but anecdotally, I don’t know a single Millennial who has any interest in sitting through a 2-hour pro football game at home, or ponying up the big bucks and huge chunk of time required to attend a game.
Again, anecdotally, young people seem more likely to watch a short clip of the game’s highlights on Youtube than devote 2+ hours to sitting through endless annoying TV adverts for a few moments of action.
Or they’re investing their sports-related time and money in college or local sports; if they’re parents, their time may be devoted to their kids’ sports activities.
In other words, pro football is an interest of the older generations that isn’t shared by the younger generations. We can chart this progression with an S-curve, which in the case of the NFL, is marked by the “boost phase” of viewership in the 1970s and 1980s as Monday Night Football expanded the TV audience and the league added franchises.
To continue reading: Have We Reached Peak NFL?
The Relief Valve, by Eric Peters
Sports allow people to blow off anger that would be better blown off, or better yet, expressed towards the correct target—the government. That’s one reason governments encourage sports. From Eric Peters on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
Strong passions can erupt in unpredictable ways.
The government understands this – and desires that strong passions be diverted in a harmless – to the government – way.
Enter the cultivated, culturally and socially enforced obsession with organized, mass spectacle sports.
Fuuhhhhhtttttball especially but also the others.
These games – a new one to keep people busy almost every day, year-round – are not so much “bread and circuses,” as they are often called. They are the vivification of the fictional Two Minutes’ Hate in Orwell’s 1984. A means by which the passions – the frustrations and anger of men in particular – are diverted and dissipated.
In order that they aren’t directed at anything important.
Such as the ever-increasing control exercised over men by the state.
In red giant stage America, the average man has little meaningful control over his life. He does as he’s told – from driving the speed limit to paying “his” taxes. In the land of individuality, collectivism and conformity is the rule.
He must Submit and Obey. He must never raise his voice to question authority.
This stifling of independent action, punishment of deviation from any official orthodoxy and relentless suppression of independent judgment and self-reliance… this systematic thwarting of a normal man’s inclination to be a man. . . well, the pressure builds.
The movie, Falling Down, captured this brilliantly. Unfortunately for Michael Douglas’ character, he wasn’t interested in “the game.”
To continue reading: The Relief Valve
New: 87 Deceased NFL Players Test Positive for Brain Disease, by Jason M. Breslow
Hopelessly out of step, SLL has never understood the mania for football. It’s not just the players who are brain damaged. There is about a half-an-hour of action in a three-and-a-half hour game. There are only a few skill positions; most of the players push and hit each other most of the time. The commentary is inane and the replays incessant. It must be the gambling, fantasy football, and the opportunity to socialize, drink, and eat with like-minded friends. Unfortunately, the violence that is a big part of its appeal has a terrible and tragic downside for the players. Save the nasty comments; SLL is aware that football is a religion and makes no apology for its blasphemy. From Jason M. Breslow, at pbs.org:
A total of 87 out of 91 former NFL players have tested positive for the brain disease at the center of the debate over concussions in football, according to new figures from the nation’s largest brain bank focused on the study of traumatic head injury.
Researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University have now identified the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in 96 percent of NFL players that they’ve examined and in 79 percent of all football players. The disease is widely believed to stem from repetitive trauma to the head, and can lead to conditions such as memory loss, depression and dementia.
In total, the lab has found CTE in the brain tissue in 131 out of 165 individuals who, before their deaths, played football either professionally, semi-professionally, in college or in high school.
Forty percent of those who tested positive were the offensive and defensive linemen who come into contact with one another on every play of a game, according to numbers shared by the brain bank with FRONTLINE. That finding supports past research suggesting that it’s the repeat, more minor head trauma that occurs regularly in football that may pose the greatest risk to players, as opposed to just the sometimes violent collisions that cause concussions.
But the figures come with several important caveats, as testing for the disease can be an imperfect process. Brain scans have been used to identify signs of CTE in living players, but the disease can only be definitively identified posthumously. As such, many of the players who have donated their brains for testing suspected that they had the disease while still alive, leaving researchers with a skewed population to work with.
Even with those caveats, the latest numbers are “remarkably consistent” with past research from the center suggesting a link between football and long-term brain disease, said Dr. Ann McKee, the facility’s director and chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System.
“People think that we’re blowing this out of proportion, that this is a very rare disease and that we’re sensationalizing it,” said McKee, who runs the lab as part of a collaboration between the VA and BU. “My response is that where I sit, this is a very real disease. We have had no problem identifying it in hundreds of players.”
