The Clock Is Ticking on High School Football

Look for our upcoming ebook UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero. Complete info on the Concussion Inc. ebook shorts series is here.

We’ve been talking for months about how football’s problem isn’t a business one but a sporting one; how concussion awareness reduces its long-term sustainability to zero by chop-blocking the legs out from under its mateur feeder system.

See, for example, “Why Public High School Football Is Doomed — Even If NFL’s Safety Double-Talk Threads the PR Needle,” October 7, 2011, https://concussioninc.net/?p=4808.

In a brilliant new article at Grantland.com, Jonah Lehrer makes the same point with scientifically devastating thoroughness:

If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model – football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency.

See “The Fragile Teenage Brain,” http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7443714/jonah-lehrer-concussions-adolescents-future-football.

Meanwhile, Matt Chaney is still waiting for Dr. Robert Cantu’s response to Chaney’s article establishing that the annual volume of catastrophic football injuries is substantially higher than is being reported.

Irv Muchnick