Bob Costas Gets It: Football ‘Fundamentally Unsustainable.’ Jim Nantz Doesn’t: ‘Women’s Soccer Players Twice As Likely to Get Concussion’

Bob Costas, on NBC’s Meet the Press, and Jim Nantz, on CBS’s Face the Nation, respectively commented on the future of football prior to yesterday’s Super Bowl. The scorecard reads: Of these two sportscasters with professional ties to the football establishment, only the former gets it.

Costas: “For all the drama, the excitement, the strategy, all the appealing things about football, the way football is currently played in the NFL is fundamentally unsustainable.” See the full transcript at http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/02/03/bob-costas-way-football-currently-played-nfl-fundamentally-unsustaina#ixzz2JxavEC9n.

Nantz: “Research shows that at the college level, a women’s soccer player is two and a half times more likely to suffer a concussion than a college football player.” See http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/02/03/jim-nantz-college-womans-soccer-player-2-12-times-more-likely-get-con.

And now for a word from my football ass-kicking friend Matt Chaney, author of Spiral of Denial:

“Jim Nantz is a clown. His numbers are skewed for brain trauma in head-knocking football versus women’s soccer at colleges — like the bogus NCAA report last fall, allegedly documenting a mere 2.5 concussions for every 1,000 contact exposures in the game. Ridiculous. Considering the so-called symptoms of concussion — which aren’t scientifically defined or established, by any stretch yet — I had a brain trauma every time I suited up in full-contact college football, three to four days weekly during season.

“And, no, liberalism isn’t out to eliminate football. Liberalism sustains public football for the masses. This blood sport is only about 10 times too large, draining billions of dollars annually, and the public sector should have no further business with operations, the mass carnage and consequences, medical damages, and liability, especially regarding juveniles (see boxing’s practical removal from public funding since the 1980s, excepting the national team and related bodies).

“Think about it: For all the conservative calls to completely privatize education, typically in strong argument, where does anyone think that would leave Public Football at schools? The game must be privatized, period, if it is to survive, with medical damages and liability paid upfront for immediate and long-term — and paid by users, not the public trough and our consumer markets of insurance and healthcare.

“That would be … conservatism.”

 
Irv Muchnick