01-09-2018, 10:12 AM
(01-08-2018, 05:16 PM)XenoMorph Wrote: You can if its in the contracts the players agree to sign...
There are actually a lot of issues here. One for instance is you can't sign negligence away. The NFL as an employer has a responsibility to protect their employees to the best of their ability, the same way your workplace does. There are risks to many jobs, however in these cases government regulators tend to step in to tell the business/industry certain standards they must enact to protected their employees. They in the past hid those dangers from their players, see CTE info they didn't release, and they even encouraged dangerous behavior ("Jacked up"). In the not so distant future the NFL, as a means to avoid future lawsuits, very well may have to announce publicly that everyone who plays the game basically has CTE. Government regulators could say tackling is now banned, or that a concussion requires athletes to sit out 45 days similar to boxing and MMA rules on being knocked out.
What does something like that do to the sport? If Tom Brady got a concussion and now has to sit out for what amounts to 6 weeks of the season can the sport survive knowing that a large portion of their players do get concussions? I don't know, but while people look to boxing and MMA the reality is Football is worse. It has been said that an NFL lineman basically suffers the same trauma as a boxing match every game due to 40ish head on collisions into the guy across from him. The issue is that trauma occurs weekly instead of months apart like Boxing and MMA bouts. Boxing and MMA are also doing more to protect their athletes, In Nevada they are implementing post fight CT scans so they can basically see what is going on. As mentioned above they have mandatory no work out periods after a knock out (Major Concussion).
I know I kind of combined a reply to you and another person, but the reality is thinking something will always exist because it has is kind of sticking our head in the sand. We are still early in the CTE era and I think as we continue to learn more we will figure out an expectation of these type of games every week is simply not safe for the human body.
