Sports: The Role Of Concussions In Professional Sports

Concussions Are Serious Lots of people do not understand how critical a concussion can be today. Concussions are very common. They mostly come from contact sports like football, boxing, and hockey. These sports deal with a lot of contact and players take a lot of beatings.

The era of Football in America is slowly coming to a close. Football has been known as America’s sport next to baseball for many years now. The general physicality of every play isn’t(B3) matched by any other sport on the planet, and that is why football causes more injuries than any other sport on the professional, and youth levels. Parents are pulling their kids from their teams, even in the middle of the season because of the information that has been released over the past decade illuminating a big problem for the game.

Currently, in the United States, there are approximately 1.5 million young people participating in organized football leagues. These people are playing one of the most dangerous sports and have a high probability of becoming injured as a result of the game. To discover the chance of becoming injured directly from football a study occurred at 100 Texas high schools. This study tested only high school football players.

Just during the 2005-2006 season, high school football players received more than half a million injuries nationally (“How Dangerous”). One seemingly unexpected danger of high school football is something that falls completely on the decisions made by coaches and players. If a player comes off of the field injured, often times they don’t want to let their team and coaches down by having

Professional football presents dangers of concussions, needs to convey awareness regarding these dangers, and to bring the long term effects to light. In the early 21st century, concussions in professional football had become a noticeable health problem and was labeled "The Concussion Crisis. " Professional football concussions contributed too much of the epidemic problem and brings much of the awareness to the public.

Every football player aging from pee-wee all the way to the National Football League are putting their health at risk. In recent studies, researchers have found that football players are more susceptible to severe injuries in the head and neck area. A major injury that is quite common amongst football players is a concussion. According to the Mayo Clinic

In the Table above, we look at the number of concussions dealing with both teams and individuals. The two six year periods, one from 1996-2001 and the other from 2002-2007 prove that concussions were extremely similar when comparing the 2 6 year periods. I found this to be extremely interesting due to the fact that the NFL saw concussions as an on growing issue and they made many changes within the rules to help try to prevent this MTBI’s from occurring. Some of these rule changes included moving the kickoff up 10 yards resulting in more touchbacks, emphasizing no head to head contact, fining players for dirty and illegal hits and tackles and emphasizing sitting out players for longer periods of time to help reduce the risk of re injury.

About 7,500 hits that youth players experience, 8% are high magnitude (Robach). Think about this, 40 G’s is the hardest amount of force someone can take from a car crash and still be able to walk away with no sort of injuries (Robach), yet parents allow their 7 and 8 year olds to receive hits of 80 G’s, that is the same force college players are dealt with when playing (Scott and Don). Little kids are getting hit the same way and same force grown men are when they play football, this is a huge problem. The hits kids experience or have faced should be taken into account when parents decide if their child should step on a football field. People believe that the big hits that players are dealt with are part of the game, and without the booming hits the sport wouldn 't be the as entertaining to watch.

Football is a very popular sport not only in American high schools and colleges, but also in the entire country of the United States. Is playing high school football worth the risk and harm inflicted to high school football players? This is the main question raised by the author, Raymond Schroth, in the article “Abolish High School Football.” In this article, Schroth talked about the disadvantages and harms of playing high school football to the players. Schroth argued that high school football should be abolished because it had contributed more harmful effects than benefits to football players.

As stated in “High School Football Players Face Bigger Concussion Risk,” it shows that “High school football players suffered 11.2 concussions for every 10,000 games and practices. Among college players, the rate stood at 6.3. The authors cautioned, however, that their estimates are likely conservative because many concussions go unreported and because data on such injuries is limited. Even a helmet that passed industry safety standards for protection against skull fractures and other severe head injuries could still leave a player with a 95 percent likelihood of receiving a concussion(Breslow).” This shows that there is truly no way to protect yourself from things like this and when trying, you are only just wasting money through trying to buy the top of the line equipment when there can still be almost a 100% likelihood of an injury that can still occur which is another reason why we shouldn’t profit a football team in here at McKeel because it would basically be like paying for the students here to get a possible lifelong

64 percent of concussions from sports are from football. In the NFL, more and more head injuries are occurring. Concussions can have lasting consequences to your health and need to be taken more seriously by the NFL. Concussions can have long lasting effects on the brain. Symptoms

The NFL has seen an increase in concussions over the years due to the style of play, and the speed of the game is much faster paced. In the past five years, the NFL has taken steps to try to limit concussions. The reason why it has taken so long to make changes was because in the past no one really knew the dangers of concussions. Some precautions that have been put in place are fines when hits to the head occur to restrain player from violent head to head collisions. The NFL has restricted teams to only allowing 14 full-contact practices during its 18-week season.

From 2010 to 2013 players in the NFL suffered 219 ACL tears. That is a very high number for only ACL tears. There is many other knee injuries that are possible to happen. People need to make sure they don’t go back to sports too early after the injury. The risk of reinjury is a lot higher if you return to early.

A recent poll taken by ESPN says that almost half of Americans are fans of pro football or the NFL. The NFL (National Football League) is comprised of 32 teams that compete head to head in attempt to achieve the goal of winning the super bowl. However more recently the game of football has been revealed to be more dangerous than originally thought. Autopsies of former NFL players are showing extensive brain damage that could have contributed to their deaths. Today as the game of football progresses into a passing game wide receivers and cornerbacks are taking more punishment and suffering more brain damage.

In “The NFL Dodges on Brain Injuries” Hruby talks about how truly a big deal these brain injuries are becoming and that “ninety-six-perfect of former NFL players show some type of brain damage most often linked with concussions” (Hruby, 2014). Although these players receiving hit after hit, whether the player is blocking an opposing player or the defensive player coming in for the big hit, players are inflicting high amounts of contact on one another, which is resulting in each and every play. In an interview conducted by ESPN with Wesley Woodyard a linebacker for the Tennessee Titans, he talked about the extreme amount of contact in the sport. He was quoted saying "Definitely with all the new information coming out about CTE it 's cause for concern for parents. We 're taking the right strides as far as keeping the game safe -- safety is definitely going to always be No. 1.