Football == Dogfighting?
Malcolm Gladwell writes a long piece in the New Yorker trying to draw a parallel between football and dog-fighting. I don’t buy the connection he’s trying to make, but some of the data he brings up on the football side is a little scary.
In case you didn’t know it, getting hit in the head an awful lot is bad for you. Not great news for offensive linemen.
The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times
It turns out that it’s not just the one big hit that does the damage. It’s the accumulation of all the medium-sized hits.
[Brain researcher] McKee is a longtime football fan. She is from Wisconsin. She had two statuettes of Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback, on her bookshelf. On the wall was a picture of a robust young man. It was McKee’s son—nineteen years old, six feet three. If he had a chance to join the N.F.L., I asked her, what would she advise him? “I’d say, ‘Don’t. Not if you want to have a life after football.’ ”
