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from the getting-your-head-whacked-is-bad-for-you dept.
The largest study of its kind has found damage in the vast majority of former football players' brains donated for research after they developed mental symptoms during life. Of 202 former players of the U.S. version of the game whose brains were examined, 87% showed the diagnostic signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with repetitive head trauma. Among former National Football League (NFL) players in the sample, that number jumped to 99%. The findings will likely ratchet up the pressure on leaders at all levels of football to protect their players. Still, the authors and other experts caution against overinterpreting the results, because the brains all came from symptomatic former players and not from those who remained free of mental problems.
"I think it is increasingly difficult to deny a link between CTE and repeated traumatic brain injury, be it through contact sports or other mechanisms," says Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who was not affiliated with the study.
The researchers, led by Boston University (BU) neuropathologist Ann McKee, used brains from a bank maintained by the VA Boston Healthcare System, BU, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation. They were donated by families of former football players. The team defines CTE, a diagnosis made only at autopsy, as "progressive degeneration associated with repetitive head trauma." The designation remains controversial with some, who call it a muddy diagnosis that doesn't include an iron-clad clinical course and the kind of clear-cut pathology that defines classical neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.
Clinicopathological Evaluation of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Players of American Football (open, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.8334) (DX)
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday July 27 2017, @04:04PM (1 child)
The thing is, that there are plenty of other sports with interesting tactics and logistics and strategy that don't involve giving opponents concussions on a regular basis. For example, ultimate [usaultimate.org], while being a cheap and simple game to play casually, also has deep strategy and intense athleticism (playing often involves running full-tilt and trying to out-jump opponents), and is much safer than football.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 27 2017, @11:07PM
I know a guy who plays that, aside, apparently, from you. The problem with "basketball-football-frisbee" is like basketball its a single note of a passing game so it doesn't have the tactical depth of football's passing and running game, and there's no emotional build up to plays its an aerobic grind game like soccer or to a lesser extent basketball.
If you took the cool parts of football and embedded into the game, you'd have touch football with a disc instead of a football, so I'm not seeing that. Or if you went for the height athleticism of basketball you'd have, well, basketball, with a disc thru a basket instead of a basketball thru a basket. What makes this game specifically a flying disk game and not a variant of polo or rugby that trivially has a disk instead of a ball? Note there's nothing "wrong" with playing water polo with a disk on land, its just not a disk game. Its hard to fix, if the fixes result in something already inferior or broken.
Its like fusion cooking. Sometimes you get tex-mex which is pretty cool. Sometimes you get Thai-Scottish and I'm not eating that haggis.
I'm trying to think up some game rules that rely on the unique physics of a flying disk. Hmm... passer can't throw until the receivers stop running? A running game where you can carry the disk as far as you want until you're touched by an opponent? With modern tech and "infinite" pro money the field need not emulate a suburban park, you could make the field the size of a golf course. Being a throwable disk it should be "easy" for the goal to be a target some distance from the in-bounds field, that's an interesting idea.
Note that games like dodgeball are fun to play but pro-sport TV coverage is unimaginable bad. Its possible American Football is the reverse, its an interesting slow way to die without any fun at all, but at least the TV coverage is impressive. That is an interesting aspect to consider when re-engineering a game. Its not necessarily a tradeoff all the time, but often enough seems to be.