William blount offseason thread

[GREYRIDERx]

2 hours ago, cbg said:

The damage has already been done and parents are not allowing their boy's to participate in football due to head injuries.  As long as you have kids getting concussions due to football injuries the participation rates will continue to decline.  The parents are not going to do any R & D and will allow the media to dictate the agenda.  If a helmet is ever developed that will significantly reduce head injuries you very well could see the participation numbers rise once again.  IMO, the horse has left the barn and it will be extremely difficult to reverse to the trend of kids not playing football.  

Thats where your wrong. 

[GREYRIDERx]

15 hours ago, williebgovs04 said:

You forgot the part about blaming the refs..

 

There will be some changes coming this season, I hope we can make you proud 

 

rw87, another new nic(coward hiding behind a keyboard) bashing a program that’s already down.. what’s new around here..

Im sure RW87 would like for you to call her that in person...

[Red Rebels]

5 hours ago, cbg said:

You are correct with numbers being down not just in Tennessee but all over the country.  Interesting fact is that schools where the parents have the most education have the lowest participation rates for kids playing football.  I could very well see where men's soccer becomes a fall sport and takes the  place of football as a major sport in 10 years unless something is done to stop the head injuries.

Larry Fedora went out on a limb, or off the deep end, depending on your point of view. The North Carolina coach said his beloved sport of football was “under attack” by those who are calling out the perils of head trauma, and furthermore, “our country will go down, too” if football succumbs to this assault. It was Vince Lombardi meets Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men.”

Fedora went on, sending Twitter into a frenzy in real time and giving columnists a sure-fire soapbox to stand on.

“I don’t think it’s been proven that the game of football causes CTE. We don’t really know that. Are there chances for concussions? Of course. There are collisions. But the game is safer than it’s ever been.”

It’s heresy. It’s also backed up by some people who know the subject well.

“I totally agree with him,” says Peter Cummings, a neuropathologist and associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine. “Association is not causation. CTE has also been found in individuals not exposed to contact sports. It’s not a settled matter by any means. And football is safer today than it has ever been. In fact, I would argue that no other sport has made a more radical transformation in response to safety concerns than football. His comments reflect the reality of the scientific uncertainty surrounding CTE.”

 

But there are many other factors that can lead to the frightening outcomes we fear, including drug use, opioids, genetics and even poverty. Multiple studies link economic status to later-life mental health problems. It’s currently impossible to control for all of those factors.

“It’s very likely there are people who have the [CTE] pathology and who don’t have a behavioral impact,” says Dirk Keene, an associate professor of neuropathology at the University of Washington. “Some people are more resilient to pathology than others. It could be that all football players after certain exposure get CTE, but not all will get behavioral symptoms.”

Here is the complete article: https://sports.yahoo.com/larry-fedora-ridiculed-speaking-truth-cte-143512561.html

 

It looks like mob mentality will prevail on this issue also.

Edited July 31, 2018 by Red Rebels

[williebgovs04]

1 hour ago, GREYRIDERx said:

Im sure RW87 would like for you to call her that in person...

Once again you’re out of your lane son.  I was telling her that I wasn’t gonna unleash a wrath on (shadroach) because he was a coward hiding behind a keyboard. Glad to see everyone excited for another season , but looks like somethings wont ever change. 

Edited July 31, 2018 by williebgovs04

[rebelwoman87]

4 minutes ago, williebgovs04 said:

Once again you’re out of your lane son.  I was telling her that I wasn’t gonna unleash a wrath on (shadroach) because he was a coward hiding behind a keyboard. Glad to see everyone excited for another season , but looks like something’s wont ever change. 

[GREYRIDERx]

1 hour ago, williebgovs04 said:

Once again you’re out of your lane son.  I was telling her that I wasn’t gonna unleash a wrath on (shadroach) because he was a coward hiding behind a keyboard. Glad to see everyone excited for another season , but looks like somethings wont ever change. 

I miss understood. My apologies.

But Im definitely not your son and i drive in any lane i wish Big daddy sideline . Looks like there is a bunch of that key board hiding going on. 

Edited July 31, 2018 by GREYRIDERx

[cbg]

2 hours ago, GREYRIDERx said:

Thats where your wrong. 

I hope that you are correct but I am truly afraid that I am not.

[GREYRIDERx]

Soccer will never be what football is . 

[osunut2]

5 hours ago, cbg said:

The damage has already been done and parents are not allowing their boy's to participate in football due to head injuries.  As long as you have kids getting concussions due to football injuries the participation rates will continue to decline.  The parents are not going to do any R & D and will allow the media to dictate the agenda.  If a helmet is ever developed that will significantly reduce head injuries you very well could see the participation numbers rise once again.  IMO, the horse has left the barn and it will be extremely difficult to reverse to the trend of kids not playing football.  

Alright, I'll bite. So we have one side of this debate holding a megaphone shouting that youth football, at all levels, is "CHILD ABUSE," that football inevitably involves collisions and head trauma, which leads directly to CTE, which in turn leads directly to major neurological changes and "CERTAIN DEATH." But on the opposite end of the spectrum lies another side that has their collective head in the sand, claiming that there is nothing wrong with football, there isn't a clear, direct link between it and CTE, that other activities/sports are just as (if not more) likely to cause CTE, and that anyone who thinks football is slowly "killing people" should get their head examined (oh the irony).

I would hope that on a high school football forum like the T, we can attempt to find some middle ground because, like so many polarizing things, the truth lies somewhere in between. The bottom line is that we have to learn more. In the grand scheme of things, we still know very little about CTE, but our understanding has come a long way in the past decade. I think it's pretty evident that collisions involving a person's head, regardless of the activity/sport, lead to brain trauma, and repeated collisions can cause some sort of long-term brain damage. This shouldn't be up for debate. Instead, we should be trying to determine 1) if this brain damage begins to manifest at the youth/prep level, 2) what the detailed physiology of CTE is, and 3) if it is preventable while playing contact sports. Given the popularity of the NFL/football, the sport is going to be an easy target, but I have the same concerns about other sports (e.g., ice hockey, soccer, lacrosse).

There was an NPR story earlier this year that touched on the subject of potential CTE risks and how it relates to high school football. I'm still on the fence regarding this issue, but it's important to point out a statement that one of the leading CTE researchers makes:

"Dr. Goldstein says the research on CTE is a lot like the early days of lung cancer research. The link to cigarette smoking was not immediately understood — or accepted. And it's taken generations to change behaviors and policies around smoking. He thinks it might be the same thing with football."

This is exactly why we have to learn more about the potential link between contact sports and CTE. I love football, and I don't want to see the sport suffer (and potentially die) simply because we don't fully understand this issue. This is probably worthy of a separate thread, but hopefully this will generate some good-natured debate.

Edited July 31, 2018 by osunut2

[GREYRIDERx]

FREEDOM

[AllRegion]

Football will be just fine. We will NEVER see a world without football, and that's the truth. Getting in your car and driving down the road is dangerous, yet people have their kids do it every day. You can't live in bubble wrap, and I believe that enough kids will always want to play for football to survive. The game is too important, it means too much to people, and it's just too big to completely go away.

[AllRegion]

Has cigarette smoking gone away? One look at the profits of Phillip Morris says "NO!" Smoking is one of the most harmful things one could do for their health, and has been proven to lead to death, yet people light up every day. On the other hand, HS football has NO proven link to long-term harm...so why would the sport shrivel up and die? It won't.