Ranoria wrote:Baltimore-Ravens wrote:
I did edit the post somewhat. Your response was quick.
Listen, parents (of which I am one) are going to steer their kids away from this sport if it maintains it's current form. That's the hit I am talking about for football in general.
Ratings are down last season and this one so far and maybe this CTE deal is a part of the reason. Time will tell.
You don't doubt this is an epic tragedy, do you? Aaron Hernandez was probably not sane when he killed these people. He was suffering from severe brain damage.
He is now also a victim of what is the real culprit, many repeated hits to the head. How do you fix that and keep football as is?
I don't think parents, for the most part, are going to do that though. Granted, I'm not a parent, I don't plan on being one in the near future (fingers crossed), and perhaps you're right about the ratings thing. But I don't think this has much to do with it, unless perhaps parents, as you somewhat ish said, want less exposure for their children.
And no, I do understand that this is awful. I don't want to go mentally insane because of playing a sport that I love, and anyone dying, especially like this, is horrible. But I also wouldn't sacrifice what football has done for me, personally, if it took forty years off my life, and I mean that wholeheartedly. I would not be who I am today, or anywhere near it, without football. And that's what I'm saying when I say that I don't think people will quit playing football.
As you know I am a big fan of the game, but I never look past indisputable facts even if they might undermine my own wants and desires. That is wisdom.
I hope the game can address this adequately enough to save itself from these horrible facts about the prevalence and seriousness of CTE. The ramifications are now medically undeniable.
As for what parents want (or even more broadly decent people) is to not see children hurt in traumatically irreversible ways which are obviously quite preventable.
