The NFL is set to haul in $14bn this year. But the league is beset by racially charged protests, a ratings dip and players brain damaged by the contact sportWilliam Walter “Pudge” Heffelfinger was America’s first pro football player: he earned $500 for a single game for Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Athletic Association in 1892. Thirteen years later, he saved the game itself. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt was under pressure to ban football after several much-publicized player deaths. But Pudge, a friend of the president, is thought to have talked Roosevelt into giving the game a second chance, suggesting the introduction of padding and helmets and outlawing some brutal “pig pile” tactics such as the flying wedge. Given current events in the...
Football’s head trauma epidemic is affecting the NFL, but in ways that could unpredictably affect the sport’s heretofore bulletproof business modelLike training camp stories on the upside of undrafted rookies, the reports of the NFL’s death are greatly exaggerated. When the latest study with sobering findings on the sport’s impact to its participants brains hit last week, revealing that 110 of 111 brains of former NFL players were found to have CTE, the result was the now-standard concussion news cycle punditry proclaiming that the NFL could face extinction in the not-so-distant future. That argument was only bolstered two days later when Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman (and MIT PhD candidate) John Urschel abruptly retired from football at age 26, adding to...
World Rugby’s new laws may eventually result in fewer concussion cases but it will take time to remove legacy of rugby league’s influence on the 15-man gameWhen two rugby worlds collide, concussion is the outcome. Five players sustained head injuries during the draw between Saracens and Exeter last Saturday, but only one was due to a high/reckless/dangerous tackle. The rest were suffered by the tackler, going low and not getting his head position right.World Rugby’s two new laws govern tackles that involve contact with the head. Those who say there is nothing new about them and that they are a re-emphasis of what was already written down, should look at the governing body’s website which describes them as “new laws...
The decision not to sanction Northampton for the botched handling of North’s injury is further evidence that while there is an increasing crackdown on the slightest on-field indiscretions, no one is ever at fault behind the scenesThis is supposed to be the season of wise men but rugby union, just at the moment, has lost its marbles. How else to explain the decision not to issue any sanction against anyone connected with George North’s recent botched head‑injury saga? At a time when player welfare is meant to be twinkling at the top of everyone’s tree, the game is in danger of sliding back into the self-policing dark ages.The only good news is that North himself is apparently OK and cleared...
Against Leicester the Northampton wing hit his head hard, went limp, and lay motionless – so why was he allowed to play on in the match?George North never much liked to talk about concussion. In 2015 he was ordered to take a four-week lay-off because he had taken four bad blows to the head in five months. In the end it was nine weeks before North could say he felt OK and almost six months before he was able to play. In one of the few in-depth interviews he did give on this topic, to Rugby World, North explained that he considered quitting for good. “I thought: ‘I don’t deserve this, I don’t need this hassle in my life.’” At...