Well over 1 million American boys and young men play football every year. The game is a rite of passage. Further these studies have implications for head contact that occurs in other sports and in general.
>these studies have implications for head contact that occurs in other sports and in general.
Football is clearly the worst offender, but at the high school level the rate of concussions really isn't that far behind for hockey, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, and basketball. Even a complete non-contact sport like baseball has a concussion rate that is 10% of football's rate. So the question isn't really what percentage of American children play football, it is what percentage play any sport and how can these sports be changed to increase safety.
Most importantly addressing behaviour is the only way to get injuries down, buying more useless protection gear does not work. The cult of the helmet need to stop.
I have said it elsewhere in the thread, but will repeat it and expand on it here. The helmet is a big red herring in the brain trauma debate. The trauma in football is caused by a simple physics problem.
Imagine a person moving at full speed. That person collides with an identical person moving at the same speed in the opposite direction and they both hit each other at their center of mass. These two people now come to a complete stop. Newton's laws of motion say that every part of their body wanted to continue moving forward, but this collision causes a chain of events that stops the entire body. First their torso might stop. Their extremities might lurch forward until they are eventually stopped by the pull of the bodies muscles and ligaments from the stopped torso. But even as the head stops, the brain still has inertia of its own. The brain doesn't stop until it collides into the front of the skulls. This is the type of trauma that is common in football and will occur regardless of whether a player wears a helmet or not.
The reason other full contact sports like rugby aren't as dangerous is because football is unique in that it has regular stoppages that realign all the players in the direction of their objective. You therefore have offensive and defensive players colliding head-on regularly on each play. In rugby this doesn't happen because the game is mostly continuous so offensive and defensive players are often moving in the same direction so collisions are less intense.
For a little video evidence, this [1] is the first result for "rugby biggest hits" on Youtube and this is the first result for "football biggest hits" [2]. Notice how in a majority of the rugby hits either the offensive or defensive players is at a complete standstill before the hit while in the majority of the football hits the players are both moving towards each other. It is a physics and rules problem not a problem with protective gear.
The bigger problem with helmets is that they feel like they protect you from concussions when in reality they don't at all. That makes people go out there feeling invincible and leading with the head.
I don’t think concussion rate is the right metric. Football’s CTE risk is supposed to be from the incidental head to head contact that happens every play.
You are right, it isn't a perfect metric, but it is the best one we have until further studies are done about sub-concussive hits. Measuring hits like that would change the relative rankings of the each sport (soccer probably becomes more dangerous while baseball less so), but the overall point still stands that most sports involve some risk of head trauma.
I'm not trying to diminish the suffering/risks/etc of a million people, but that is about one-third of one percent of the US population so I think woolvalley's comment is pretty on point.
That’s just the quantity that are actively playing it now. The important thing is, what proportion of adults played as children? According to statistics online, football is the most popular high school sport, with participation twice that of the nearest, basketball, and 2/3 of children participate in organized sports.
I looked it up, and apparently the stats for tackle football are about 4.5% of kids 6-12 and 9% in the 13-17 range.
