Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged football

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

High School Football Inc. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.
  • convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.
  • Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • IMG is at the forefront. It is trying to enhance its academy brand with football, perhaps the most visible sport. And it is applying a business model to the gridiron that has long been profitable for tennis and has expanded to golf, soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track and field. The academy has nearly 1,000 students from more than 80 countries enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade and postgraduation. About half the students are international.
  • Although it is private, IMG Academy has received more than $7 million from the Florida state budget over the past two years, according to news accounts. An additional $2 million was pledged by lawmakers in June but was then vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott.
  • The full cost of tuition and boarding for a year of football at IMG Academy is $70,800, although need-based financial assistance is available. School officials would not provide specific figures, but they said that payments by families could range from tens of thousands of dollars to a competition fee (between $3,750 and $4,500) to nothing.
  • IMG bought the academy in 1987, and it now covers more than 500 acres. Football began in 2013 as part of a $197 million campus expansion. Games are played in a 5,000-seat stadium outfitted with suites and a jumbo video screen. Digital screens depict each player’s name and face on his locker. Some N.F.L. players train there in the off-season, as do college players preparing for the pro draft.
  • The school, 45 miles south of Tampa, recruits football players from around the country, offering high-performance training, college preparatory courses, coaches with N.F.L. playing experience, facilities that resemble a small college more than a high school, and a chance to play a national schedule and on national television on ESPN against some of the country’s highest-rated teams.
  • Mickey McCarty, who has coached three state championship teams at Neville High School in Monroe, La., and who lost a senior receiver to IMG Academy days before fall practice began, said the academy seemed less a traditional football team than a showcase for individual talent.
  • Many high school football coaches and officials are closely following IMG Academy, wondering whether it portends the growth of similar academies or superleagues featuring top teams.
  • “I’m 50-50 split,” said John Wilkinson, the coach at Cocoa High School, who faced IMG Academy last week and said he would do it again. “They’re high school kids, just like us. We’re playing a football game. The other 50 percent thinks the competitive advantage they have is kind of alarming, if they’re allowed to recruit. But it is what it is.”
  • Other officials express fear that football might follow the path of high school basketball, which many feel has been corrupted by so-called diploma mills and the heavy influence of club teams and recruiting middlemen.
  • “We run a business,” said Chip McCarthy, a co-managing director of IMG Academy. “We call it sales and marketing. Some people call it recruiting. We’re promoting our program. If you look at any private school that emphasizes sports, they’re typically doing it to promote their school. A lot are trying to survive. You’re not going to curtail that.”
  • “It sounds to me like they’re playing for self, to be promoted and recruited, which takes away everything we stand for,” McCarty said.
  • Academy officials said that 186 athletes from IMG’s 2015 graduating class were playing various college sports, including six at Ivy League universities and four at service academies. Academics and athletics are intended to simulate the college experience with dormitory living, alternate-day classes, block scheduling and a focus on time management.
  • “I came here assuming it was going to be easy, it’s just going to be a football school, but I learned within the first week I was completely wrong,” said Kjetil Cline, 17, a senior receiver from Minnesota who plans to play football at the United States Military Academy. “That really opened my eyes about what college would be like, and I think it’s really prepared me for going to West Point and being able to handle that.”
  • “Academy teams, while they may be good teams and give great educations, it’s not something that we really believe in or would promote or espouse in any way. We think the high school experience is best served by the student-athlete who lives at home with his family and is part of his school, family and community.”
  • The players at IMG and their families consider that approach to be antiquated. For Patterson, a quarterback who won state championships the previous two seasons at a high school in Louisiana, IMG Academy is serving as a finishing school.
  • Patterson said he transferred to IMG in June to work on his speed, strength and conditioning. He plans to graduate in December, enroll for the spring semester at the University of Mississippi and challenge for the starting quarterback position there next fall as a freshman.“It’s definitely a professional decision,” he said.
  • teve Walsh, IMG Academy’s director of football, and Rich Bartel, the offensive coordinator, both played quarterback in the N.F.L. There are also sports psychologists, strength coaches and speed coaches to assist Patterson. He has at his disposal a 10,000-square-foot weight room; a sports science center to aid with hydration and nutrition; a biomechanics center; a vision lab, or “mind gym,” to enhance perceptual and cognitive skills; and a hospital for special surgery and sports rehabilitation should he be injured.
  • When IMG Academy played in Texas this month, it trained at Texas Christian University, and Wright, the Ascenders’ coach, said, “We’re thinking, ‘Hey, our practice fields are maybe a little bit better.’ ”
  • At the top levels of high school football, some teams routinely travel to play teams in other states. Games are frequently broadcast on regional or national cable channels. Some players are offered college scholarships as early as eighth grade.
  • “It’s all driven by money, and you can’t beat money,” said John Bachman Sr., who coached Patterson to state titles the past two seasons at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La. As a freshman, Patterson played at a high school in Texas.
  • Even so, he added, “I don’t think anything’s ever going to take the place of the local public high school or private school that pours itself into the kid, and it’s a family atmosphere and it’s about the team and sacrifice and so on.”
  • Sean Patterson Sr., Shea’s father, said, “If your son’s a great musician, you want to send him to Juilliard,” adding that for Shea, IMG Academy “is the spot” for polishing his football skills for college.
Javier E

Can America Quit Football? - Patrick Hruby - Entertainment - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • To discuss the wider cultural implications of Seau's death, the Saints' scandal, and football's ongoing identity crisis, The Atlantic spoke with documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon. He recently released audio of former New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams imploring his players to injure opponents and is working on a film, The United States of Football, which explores the sport's dark, beloved place in America society.
  • What is The United States of Football about? Why are you making it? It's a cultural examination of football from pee-wee to the pros. It's about the motivation for playing and enjoying the sport. The escapism. The violence, for sure—it feeds something in our culture. There's a reason why baseball isn't the top sport anymore. It's too slow. People aren't getting the shit knocked out of them. We're a very aggressive culture.
  • I started working on it because I realized I was basically training my son to play football. Playing in the park all the time. We had this one patch of grass in a park in Brooklyn that was our field. It was our special place. In 2004, I was interviewing Kyle Turley for Run Ricky Run. He said to me, "If you have a kid, don't let him play football. Let him play any other sport." He was adamant about that. My son was six at the time. We kept playing in the park. Five years later, I read an article about Turley having a seizure. I had heard of CTE before. It never stuck with me. But after reading about Kyle, it did. I felt a personal connection with him. Because of his issues, I was becoming more interested in the health issues that players were having. And I had to decide: Did I still want my son to play football?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • So what does football mean to our culture, and why does it occupy such an important place? I think it means everything. I think it feeds and fills a lot of gaps.
  • Football means money for television networks. It means escapism for most of the country. I read a book by Mariah Burton Nelson called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. That's a really interesting concept. The game feeds something that's primal in males; in a lot of women, it feeds something sexual.
  • You've also written, "Any parent who has a young tackle football playing child with an underdeveloped brain is committing apathetic child abuse if they do not educate themselves on this issue." Why? I wrote that because I interviewed a neurorehabilitation specialist. She talked to me about when she has kids in her office. I asked her, what's the difference between the times when she has the kids by themselves versus when the parents are there? When the parents are in there, it's scholarships. How they can make it in football. When the kids are alone, it's a different story. They feel so much pressure. They feel they have to do this to mitigate the financial damage they're going to cause their families by going to college
  • They don't understand that it's not just about second-impact syndrome killing you. It goes way deeper than that. There are people who literally do not become the people they were supposed to be becoming. Or they experience huge bouts of depression.
  • Are you allowing your son to play football? No. Now, if he's a 16-, 17-year-old kid and says, "Dad, it's in my blood, I have to do this," I would have a hard time saying no. I honestly would. I don't want to live his life for him. But I think my kid is smart. The last thing he wants to do is affect his brain because he knows it's his future. If you give him enough information, he can make smart choices. I hope people who see my film can make informed decisions. I think there are young kids who will watch this film and actually be able to challenge their parents, to say, "You know what? I don't think football is a good idea for me." I'd love to give young people the strength to stand up to their fathers. And it's not me saying that. It's all the people in the film.
Javier E

Pop Warner Football Limits Contact in Practices - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In response to growing concerns over head injuries in football, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth football organization, announced rule changes on Wednesday that will limit the amount of full-speed collisions and other contact allowed in practice.
  • The issue of brain injuries sustained on the football field has forced a reckoning at all levels of the sport in recent years. Pop Warner’s new rules, which will affect hundreds of thousands of youth football players, some as young as 5 years old, were seen as the latest acknowledgment that the nation’s most popular sport poses dangers to the long-term cognitive health of its athletes.
  • Under its new rules, effective for the coming season, which starts in August, contact will not be allowed for two-thirds of each practice — a move prompted by research showing that most of the hardest hits in youth football occur not in games, but in practice. The organization is also forbidding all drills that involve full-speed, head-on blocking and tackling that begins with players lined up more than three yards apart, as well as head-to-head contact.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The group was persuaded to take its more drastic step when a study of second-grade football players published in February — which used data from sensors installed in helmets — showed that the average player sustained more than 100 head impacts during the course of about 10 practices and 5 games. Though most of those hits were moderate, some exceeded a force equivalent to a big hit in college football.
Javier E

With Fears About Safety, Football Faces Uncertain Evolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said he believed that concern over head injuries would cause football to be eclipsed in popularity by soccer and other sports within 10 years.
  • “Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.” In other words, less a lucrative American colossus and more a niche sport beloved for its brutality.
  • there is a growing sentiment among those who love the sport and those who loathe it that football has come to a critical juncture.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “Football is resting on this foundation of parental and cultural and masculinity-issued support that could be pushed to the background once people start to realize that taking the chance of brain damage isn’t worth proving that you’re a particular kind of man,” Coakley said. “We’re beginning to see the erosion of that support.”
  • He also advocated flag football as a worthy substitute for young players, who can learn rules and fundamentals in a controlled environment where the risk of head injury would be significantly diminished. He deflected the concern that children who start playing late are at a disadvantage, saying that talent is the ultimate determining factor.
  • “There’s plenty of ways to get exercise without risking not only head injuries, but the accompanying orthopedic problems that come with playing football.”
  • “It’s really a serious discussion and a secret fear that I think all of us feel. We’ve accepted the knees and the other ailments, but we really never thought about the deterioration of your brains as a result of concussions in football.”
  • If the suit goes to trial, he predicted, data that would be made public would prompt some parents to not allow their children to play football.
  • Entities from Pop Warner to high school could require parents to sign waivers preventing officials or the league itself from being sued.
Javier E

In stunning admission, NFL official affirms link between football and CTE - The Washing... - 0 views

  • Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety, was speaking at a roundtable discussion on concussions convened by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. When asked by Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) if a connection between football and CTE had been established, Miller replied, “The answer to that question is certainly yes.”
  • Miller’s admission followed comments by Dr. Anne McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University who focuses on neurodegenerative diseases. “I unequivocally think there’s a link between playing football and CTE,” she told the panel Monday
  • “We’ve seen it in 90 out of 94 NFL players whose brains we’ve examined, we’ve found it in 45 out of 55 college players and 26 out of 65 high school players,” McKee continued. “No, I don’t think this represents how common this disease is in the living population, but the fact that over five years I’ve been able to accumulate this number of cases in football players, it cannot be rare. In fact, I think we are going to be surprised at how common it is.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When pressed by Schakowsky for an “unequivocal answer,” Miller replied, “You asked the question whether I thought there was a link, and certainly based on Dr. McKee’s research there’s a link, because she’s found CTE in a number of retired football players. I think the broader point, and the one that your question gets to, is what that necessarily means and where do we go from here with that information.”
  • Schakowsky referred to comments made shortly before the Super Bowl by Dr. Mitch Berger, a member of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee, that denied the existence of a clear link. At a league event on Feb. 4, Berger, who, like Nowinski, played football at Harvard, was asked by Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur if there was a link between football and degenerative brain disorders. “No,” replied Berger, according to Arthur
  • On Monday, Nowinski said, “I can’t imagine that this [Miller’s admission] was on purpose.”
  • “I honestly think that Dr. McKee made such a clear answer to the question of whether there’s a link, and provided such strong evidence that, I think, Miller got caught up in it,” Nowinski told The Post, adding with a chuckle, “and, unfortunately, the truth came out of his mouth.
  • the biggest impact of the NFL’s denials of the football-CTE link has not even been on its own players. “The dramatic mistake they’ve made is pouring money into recruiting children to play the game,” he said.
  • The 37-year-old Massachusetts native wants to see kids only begin playing tackle football in high school, likening it to young people not being allowed to drive cars until they reach the age of 16. The more years people play tackle football and expose themselves to concussive impacts, he asserted, the greater their risk of developing CTE or other neurodegenerative diseases.
Javier E

College Football Is in Denial - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • college football is in the midst of a coronavirus crisis, and the sport’s prevailing attitude seems to be the shrug emoji.
  • For the third straight week, the number of games postponed or canceled this past weekend was in the double digits. The pandemic has compromised even some games that were played as scheduled
  • Since college football teams aren’t required to provide information as to why players miss games, the secrecy allows colleges and universities to hide just how pervasive the problem really is.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Before the season began, those who championed the return of college football argued that having players return to their team was a safer option than having them sit at home.
  • Just as the federal government left the coronavirus response up to individual states, the NCAA never instituted a broad, comprehensive plan for playing football safely. The governing body for college sports merely offered suggestions and left individual conferences on their own
  • While the NCAA could have done far more, university presidents ultimately decide which chances their teams will and will not take. Athletic departments and schools more generally have become dependent on the income generated by college football. For the leading powers in the sport, going without millions of dollars in television money was never likely.
  • Despite what the authorities in college football may think, history will not look back on this season and give them points for trudging through a pandemic and unnecessarily jeopardizing the safety of unpaid players who are unable to fight against a system that specializes in exploiting them. History will wonder whether this messy, muddled, and repeatedly interrupted season was worth all the risk
Javier E

A Son of Football Calls His Mother - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • These articles are important, & I'm glad the Times is bringing this issue to awareness. However, the hyper focus on football alone creates a misperception that only football is dangerous & risky. That is simply not true. Parents here who pat themselves on the back for not enrolling their child in football - or in leveling charges of child abuse on those who do - are the same parents who enroll their child in: lacrosse, ice hockey, cheerleading, competitive soccer, skiing, ice skating, wrestling, & many other sports that have very high risks of brain injury as well. I realize some of the spotlight is on football because of all the money involved, but I have to wonder if it's also because football is filled with African American & lower income parents.It's definitely disgusting how college football uses their players like meat, risking players' health & reaping millions. By the time they're at NFL level, it can be egregious. But let's not lose sight of the risks in so many competitive sports. My friend's daughter actually broke her neck because of the style of dance where you whip your head all over (most competitive hip hop). When I taught high school, the worst concussions I saw were girls basketball & wrestling. Wrestling had the highest concussion rate, far over football. And they were treated less.The bigger issue is our culture, which awards so much $ in scholarships & extracts so more $ for those who risk nothing. And all for sports. Not learning. Sports.
Javier E

From the Civil War to the football field, we have been celebrating the wrong values - T... - 0 views

  • Hallowell “was a power in Harvard athletics,” according to one of the earliest histories of football, who enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 just after graduating. But what you can be sure of is that he was a hell of a rower and a swimmer. During the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, the 22-year-old swam across the Potomac River three times through bullet-pocked water to rescue trapped and wounded comrades.
  • Pen Hallowell had something more than physical courage, and so did his elder brother, Edward “Ned” Needles Hallowell. “The Fighting Quakers,” as they were nicknamed, were sons of a Philadelphia abolitionist whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As boys they spirited fugitive slaves to safety in the family carriage. As men they volunteered as officers with the legendary all-black 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments.
  • While those men were towing a locomotive by ropes, Pen Hallowell was beating in the doors of Congress trying to get them paid equal to white soldiers. The 54th and 55th were offered just $7 a month, while white soldiers got $13. Largely thanks to the brothers’ efforts, Congress finally approved equal pay for black soldiers in 1864.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • As for Ned Hallowell, he was shot three times charging with the left wing of the martyred 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, just behind his doomed friend Robert Gould Shaw. With Shaw’s body lying in a sandy ditch with his troops, Ned Hallowell assumed command of the regiment. Assigned the rear guard during a perilous retreat in a battle called Olustee, he and his men spent 20,000 cartridges checking the Confederates and then countermarched to save a train of intermingled black and white wounded soldiers that had broken down. When they couldn’t fix the motor, they attached ropes to the engine cars and manually hauled that bloody train to safety, with Confederate gunfire guttering at their backs.
  • Then there was that Princeton academic and assistant football coach named Woodrow Wilson, who rewrote the Civil War in volumes of purported American history so racist that they enraged Hallowell because they so “abounded with apologies for slavery.”
  • The vague phrase “systemic racism” is not just perpetuated by men with badges. It’s also propagated by our false victory narratives. There have been few more powerful cultural narrators than the NFL and the NCAA, with their close association with military triumphalism. They have been terrible teachers of historical truth, lousy with misplaced definitions of valor
  • Pen Hallowell was alive to hear Harvard football coach W. Cameron Forbes declare in 1900 that American football was “the expression of strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of the dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hope of permanence.”
  • every well-meaning but unread white athlete, coach, owner, athletic director and sportswriter needs to understand that Pen Hallowell, to whom black lives really did matter, lost his war. And football had no small part in that.
  • Hallowell tried to fight back in the post-war battle of values. He wrote essays and speeches devoted to the bravery of black soldiers and those conscientious outliers, abolitionists. On Memorial Day in 1896, he gave a remembrance address at Harvard. Sickened by romantic war myths in which the treachery and slave-driving of the Confederacy were painted over as cavalier spirit, Hallowell said, “To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war.”
  • Yet isn’t that what we have done? We have degraded that war — to the point that we hardly know what real honor is anymore, much less how to coach it on our playing fields.
  • Degraded it to the point that Pen Hallowell has faded to a relative obscurity, except among war buffs and historians, while the University of Mississippi kept Colonel Reb as a mascot until 2003. Even now frat boys will dress in the costumes of traitors to the flag at cotillions, without the first blush of hot shame
  • If we want football to be something worth preserving, we should demand that it celebrates the right qualities — and people.
  • most important is what Hallowell has to teach about courage and protest. “The courage necessary to face death in battle is not of the highest order,” Hallowell wrote. He saw a “higher and rarer courage” in the “long suffering and patient endurance” of the soldiers so invested in their equal pay protest that they fought for 18 months without accepting a cent until they won fair treatment.
  • Hallowell and his brother are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., with headstones so small they seem like chips compared with Confederate monuments. When Hallowell finally died in 1914, his close friend and compatriot Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called him “the most generously gallant spirit, and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew.” If there was a peerless man who deserves to be on a height, it’s Pen Hallowell. Yet look what we have done to him. Look what we have done to all of us.
Javier E

Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history' | World news | T... - 0 views

  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'worldnews'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on theguardian.com because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.theguardian.com/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on theguardian.com ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } comp
  • Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".
  • Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Creating an army more or less from scratch and then sending it into combat against the Germans was a recipe for disastrous losses. And if one asks whether this was the best way for Britain to deal with the challenge posed by imperial Germany, my answer is no.
  • "Even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a pretty massive challenge on its hands trying to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms. Given the resources that Britain had available in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when Britain could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability."
  • He continued: "The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain's military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war.
  • He concedes that if Britain had stood back in 1914, it would have reneged on commitments to uphold Belgian neutrality. "But guess what? Realism in foreign policy has a long and distinguished tradition, not least in Britain – otherwise the French would never complain about 'perfidious Albion'. For Britain it would ultimately have been far better to have thought in terms of the national interest rather than in terms of a dated treaty."
Javier E

How One Lawyer's Crusade Could Change Football Forever - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Every addition to the increasing number of ways that Americans amuse themselves — D.V.R.s, streaming content on computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon our watches — benefits the lords of professional football. Their game only becomes more valuable as the number of people watching TV programs in real time shrinks
  • The sole non-N.F.L. event on the 2013 list of the Top 10 most-watched television programs was the Academy Awards broadcast, at No. 7, between two postseason playoff games. The Oscars had 40 million viewers, the Super Bowl 108 million. N.F.L. revenue last year was about $9 billion, but the stated goal of its commissioner, Roger Goodell, in 2010 was to increase that to $25 billion by 2027.
  • And yet, past the halfway point of the season, the game is as popular as ever. Ratings are up. The N.F.L.'s associated spinoffs, like the sale of licensed merchandise and participation in the fantasy-football phenomenon, continue to grow. The Buffalo Bills, one of the league’s least valuable franchises, recently changed hands for more than $1 billion. The Dallas Cowboys are worth an estimated $3.2 billion.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • what if the template for football’s future is not the fate of boxing but rather that of the tobacco industry?
  • About 18 percent of American adults now smoke — fewer than one in five. Tobacco’s shift from integral part of American life to its fringes took about half a century.
  • The proposed settlement has been almost universally perceived as a victory for the league. With it, the N.F.L. bought itself — cheaply, considering its $9 billion in annual revenue — a degree of short-term business certainty. It initially agreed to set aside $765 million for brain-injured players or, in the case of those who died, their heirs. After Brody, who presides over the suit, said the fund might not cover payments to all those who qualified, the league agreed to a deal with no upper limit on its liability. But because of how the settlement delineates which afflictions qualify for financial compensation and caps the awards on what can go out to individuals, the N.F.L.'s total liability, paid out over decades, may not rise much beyond $1 billion
  • That’s nothing for an entity as rich as the N.F.L. Goodell, the league’s commissioner, made $44 million last year — or nearly nine times the maximum payment for the most severely brain-damaged N.F.L. retiree.
  • But the settlement does get money into the hands of some players who need it desperately, perhaps soon. It also sets aside $112 million for lawyers, who, if the case had gone to trial, might have waited years to be paid.
  • It is shortsighted, however, to assume that the N.F.L. and its owners will emerge from the settlement unscathed or that the league’s economic and cultural status are not under threat. Now that the N.F.L. has acknowledged that its product comes with dire health consequences, the sport, below the professional level, faces legal and regulatory challenges that will most likely intensify in the coming years.
  • It’s possible that the very thing meant to protect players — new protocols that define how they should be evaluated for a possible brain injury, and how long they should be kept out of play if one is diagnosed or suspected — will actually put school districts, administrators and coaches at more legal risk. Now that they have, in a sense, been forewarned, what happens if they don’t follow the protocols or don’t have certified athletic trainers on staff or coaches smart enough to deal with possible concussions while they are also deciding on the right third-down play?
  • What’s more, insurers may in time deem the sport too risky. Health insurers might treat it as a costly risk factor like smoking or a bad driving record. As football becomes more and more regulated, many districts may reasonably conclude that it’s more than they can handle.
  • “but you have to ask how the concussions issue changes the landscape from a law-enforcement perspective. I think it has to over time, because we now know that players are suffering repeated insults to the parts of the brain that cause changes in behavior.” Rates of smoking plunged and the industry declined because tobacco use could not be made safe. The N.F.L. may be at a similar juncture now. It has instituted rules changes to make its own games less violent and is funding and promulgating supposedly less dangerous ways to play at the youth level. But there is no assurance that any of it will make football any more healthful than low-tar cigarettes made smoking. The burden will fall on the N.F.L. to litigate the concussion issue in public and prove that its sport does not rob participants of their consciousness.
  • Between 2010 and 2012, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth-football program, experienced a 10 percent drop in participation after years of steady growth. It attributed the decline to concerns over concussions. There’s no reason to think its numbers won’t continue to fall.
Javier E

Pop Warner Football Rules Limiting Contact Raise New Questions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • he future of youth football may be determined by research that continues to redefine what the sport considers safe.
  • “The N.F.L.’s bore the brunt of this in terms of P.R., but how do we know that it’s not the adolescent exposure?”
  • But with a number of studies now detailing football’s link to brain injuries, some parents may conclude that playing the sport is not worth the risk to their children.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Research has been difficult to quantify, Duma said, because “no one knows how many times or how hard players have been hit.” Until recently, it was common to hide or minimize concussions.
  • research has shown that the damage from concussions can be cumulative, and that the brains of younger athletes may be particularly susceptible.
  • if the country’s largest youth football organization were to outlaw all contact and go to a flag-football approach, about 90 to 95 percent of the players would leave and find tackle football elsewhere. He also predicted they would sustain concussions in other sports.
Javier E

Amid Tumult, Michigan Football Aims to Reclaim Its Footing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Michigan, once the class of the college football landscape, suddenly embodies the struggle between athletics and academics playing out at universities throughout the country. Michigan’s new president, Mark Schlissel, has suggested that academics may have taken a back seat in the athletic department and made it clear that the university’s sports culture concerned him.
  • “We have to get this right,” said Mark Bernstein, a university regent. “I believe the stakes at this university are unusually high in the sense that this university aspires to be exceptional academically and with respect to athletics. If those two worlds can coexist without comprising the integrity and values of the university — that’s our goal. If they can’t coexist, then intercollegiate athletics is truly an illusion.”
  • “The incentives are really strong for them to be as successful on the field as possible, and some of those are in dollars and others are in performance,” said Schlissel, according to the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. “If we had won Nobel Prizes this year, we wouldn’t have gotten as much attention as did our A.D. It’s sad, but it’s really true.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Schlissel, a former provost at Brown University and a scientist, expressed concern to a faculty group recently that Michigan, annually ranked among the top-rated public universities in the nation and owners of the most victories in college football history, had admitted football players who were not as academically qualified as the rest of the student body.
  • Michigan fans do not readily welcome change. They even have a name for one of their own: a Michigan Man.
  • When Gee was president at Ohio State, he was asked if he would fire the football coach Jim Tressel, who had come under fire for an N.C.A.A. investigation into violations involving his players. “I’m just hoping that the coach doesn’t dismiss me,” he said, a line that landed him in hot water.
  • Schlissel, who apologized to Hoke for his remarks to the faculty group, declined to comment on his concerns or his future plans. Schlissel is trusting Hackett to decide Hoke’s fate, but he will surely play a role in deciding the future of Wolverines football.
  • “I’m amazed that the regents would hire a president with so little grounding in intercollegiate athletics, so little understanding of it,” Bay said. “I have sympathy for the man, that he’s been put in a position where he has to deal with a major part of the university and has no experience. He’s never been in a culture like this.”
  • “If this university can’t get this right,” Bernstein, the regent, said, “then no university can.”
Javier E

Ban College Football? Breaking Down a Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Two prominent writers argued for banning college football on Tuesday night at New York University’s Skirball Center as part of the Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates series. Their opponents were two journalists, who also happened to be former players.
  • Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against. The undecided vote had plunged from 31 percent to 8 percent.
  • Gladwell was not amenable to modifications, calling the idea that brain injuries could be minimized by better helmets or medical care “a fantasy.”“I’ve seen pictures of the brain scans of people with C.T.E.,” he said, referring to a trauma-induced disease, “and it looks like someone drove a truck across their brain.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • said he had “grave concerns” about concussions, but also denied the problem was as widespread or severe as Gladwell implied. Citing a study from the University of North Carolina, he said there were more direct fatalities in lacrosse, water polo and baseball than football, so why not ban those sports?
sarahbalick

ISIS: Leaked documents reveal fighters' preferences - CNN.com - 0 views

  • What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?
  • Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.
  • If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • as I have a headache because (of) shrapnel in my head."
  • Search »U.S. Edition+U.S.InternationalArabicEspañolSet edition preference:U.S.InternationalConfirmU.S. Edition+U.S.InternationalArabicEspañolSet edition preference:U.S.InternationalConfirmHomeU.S.Crime + JusticeEnergy + EnvironmentExtreme WeatherSpace + ScienceWorldAfricaAmericasAsiaEuropeMiddle Easthpt=aGVhZGVyXzE0Y29sX21pZGRsZWVhc3RfYXJ0aWNsZV9wb2xpdGljc19uby12YWx1ZS1zZXRfbm8tdmFsdWUtc2V0X3pvbmUtbGV2ZWxfbm8tdmFsdWUtc2V0;hpt2=aGVhZGVyXzE0Y29sX21pZGRsZWVhc3RfYXJ0aWNsZV9wb2xpdGljc19uby12YWx1ZS1zZXRfb
  • The words include answers to simple questions such as the would-be militant's birth date, blood type, address, marital status and countries visited.
  • German intelligence officials said they, too, have similar if not identical documents, though they didn't detail how they got them.
  • That means the people questioned could have gone into ISIS-controlled territory, have been turned away or perhaps fought for the terror group in Syria and Iraq and then perhaps left. If they aren't in the war zone, one fear is that they may bring their ISIS approach, tactics and mindset elsewhere -- perhaps proving a threat to other countries.
  • Koths said. "We are taking these into consideration of our law enforcement measures and security. "
  • We have seen the attacks perpetrated on mainland Europe over the past year,"
  • That is why it is so important for us to work together to counter this threat."
  • Form has 23 items
Javier E

Brain Trauma to Affect One in Three Players, N.F.L. Agrees - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.
  • They also appear to confirm what scientists have said for years: that playing football increases the risk of developing neurological conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that can be identified only in an autopsy.
  • Concerns that the fund might run dry are largely moot now because the N.F.L. agreed in June to pay an unlimited amount in awards to address concerns raised by the judge
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For those who file claims, the vast majority would be for players who received diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease or advanced dementia. They would be expected to receive more than $800 million in awards.
  • both sides expected only several dozen former players to receive the largest monetary awards, up to $5 million for diagnoses of Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or C.T.E.
  • about 28 percent of former players, totaling 5,900, will develop compensable injuries. Only about 60 percent, or 3,600, of those players are expected to file claims,
sarahbalick

Euro 2016 football tournament in France could be terror target, US warns - BBC News - 1 views

  • Euro 2016 football tournament in France could be terror target, US warns
  • The US has warned that the Euro 2016 football championship being held in France next month could be a target of militant attacks.
  • "The large number of tourists visiting Europe in the summer months will present greater targets for terrorists," the State Department said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In March, 32 people died in neighbouring Belgium when suicide blasts hit Brussels airport and a metro station. So-called Islamic State said it was behind both the Paris and Brussels attacks.
  • The attacks could hit tourist sites, restaurants, commercial centres and transportation, it warns, with large events such as Euro 2016 singled out. @media only screen and (min-width: 1px) { .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: none; } .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 100%; padding: 0; } } @media only screen and (min-width: 480px) { .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 40%; padding: 0.5em; } .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: url(http://news.files.bbci.co.uk/vj/live/idt-images/data_pic-Euro_2016_data/marseille_r13sr.jpg); } } .ie8 .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper .ns_inner_wrapper { max-width: 40%; padding: 0.5em; } .ie8 .ns_datapic_stat--euro-2016-data .ns_outer_wrapper { background-image: url(http://news.files.bbci.co.uk/vj/live/idt-images/data_pic-Euro_2016_data/marseille_r13sr.jpg); }
  • An unnamed US official told the Reuters news agency they had no particular threat information that gave rise to the latest alert.
  • More than 90,000 police, soldiers and private security agents are being deployed as well.
Javier E

Of Course Putin Is Being Canceled - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The ancient Greeks understood the power of creating outcasts. Athenians had a range of punishments available to them that would make even a southern Republican governor queasy, including death by exposure or being thrown into a chasm.
  • A true cancellation typically involves the subject being cast out of their professional network, denied the ability to make money, and rejected by their social circle.
  • Economic devastation and cultural deprivation are powerful punishments. They are also an accurate description of what is happening to Russia as Western sanctions bite, private companies break links with the region, and Putin’s regime is excluded from international organizations and alliances.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Russia’s status in the world has abruptly and obviously changed. Russians cannot escape their isolation as long as they cannot watch Netflix, access TikTok, or see their footballers play in international competitions. Pro-regime oligarchs, who once spent holidays in Europe, bought mansions in Mayfair, and visited their children at English private schools, now face visa restrictions and asset seizures. They have been denied the ability to use the rest of the continent as their gilded playground.
  • When a Russian spymaster complains about his country’s cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.
1 - 20 of 131 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page