Biggest headache in the NFL: Concussions
If the vision of Brian Westbrook is not too diffuse, and the fog that envelops his conscience too dense Corridor concussion the Eagles can thank Joseph Mason Reeves.
Reeves also was a football player, an athlete's gender highlights by their tendency to both voluntary and weak head. His teammates called him "The Bull", but often was too stunned to hear them.
An undersized team deal in 1893 of the Navy, the unpleasant duty of Reeves was plowing headlong into wedges flight ran opposing offenses with a deadly – Literally, sometimes – efficiency.
In retrospect, "head" was probably an unwise strategy, taking into account that football Reeves heads as they were not yet old. In what was childhood sport, the players really believed they could protect their heads just because you grow your long hair.
Few hairstyles are put in low season. Many concussions.
Reeves, who as Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, must have had fine hair. He was knocked out so often that by the end of the year 1893 that a doctor warned of the Naval Academy the next could cause death or insanity snapshot ".
While the deaths were not uncommon in an era of football so brutally violent sport almost kill himself, madness was something else. The prospect of a naval officer to head nut of an American battleship, the first of which was then under construction in shipyards in the U.S. Navy was not something that the superintendent of the Academy could tolerate.
So, while the fourth annual meeting with the Army was next on schedule Navy Captain Robert L. Phythian summoned the 21-year-old in their care. "Reeves, good man," said the old man "can not in good conscience allow play the next game with the Army. "
But Bull Reeves, who despite not recognizing the danger of head injuries persistent provided the value of aircraft carriers, had the wit of a future officer. The future admiral sought a shoemaker in Annapolis and asked him to create a head protector moleskin.
The result was viewed as Attila could have led to a party looting – as conical as it was comical. Yet the strange-looking device Phythian satisfied. Reeves starred in a 6-4 victory for the Navy and the football helmet, although it would not be compulsory for almost half a century, was born.
In the decades Reeves maintained its status as game and presumably his sanity, helmets have been subject to constant change and considerable. Doctors, trainers, engineers, pilots and All coaches have tried to perfect them. Straps are added, then the filling. In the 1940s, change began with molded plastic skin. Masks soon joined later and the air-cushioning devices.
Today's state-of-the-art helmets are shiny, elegant and beautiful as the car sports. Costing hundreds of dollars each. They are effective marketing devices, with tens of thousands sold each year not only to computers, but for collectors and and obsessive fans.
Yet, as illustrated in the problems of Westbrook of Philadelphia, Washington, Clinton Portis and at least a dozen other players have suffered this season, head injuries remain a headache for the NFL.
According to estimates by the league itself, there are 120 to 130 concussions a season – a number a recent Associated Press poll suggests could be enormous underreporting. "The kids today are much larger, much faster than it used to be," said Sam Huff, the Redskins broadcaster and former linebacker. "The game is violent and always will be."
That reasoning does not help much in a hyper-litigious era. So Commissioner Roger Goodell recently ruled that any player suffers a concussion be allowed to return to action. Players also are under increasing pressure to sit out the game after his injury.
\ "Once we eliminated during the term of a practice or game, "Goodell note says that" the player should not be considered for return to football activities until fully asymptotic both at rest and after exercise, has a normal neurological examination, standard neuropsychological tests, and has been cleared to return by the team physician (s) and independent neurological consultant. \ "
Football faces in this puzzle of health conscious age cuts the very nature of sport: How to remove the violent impact of a violent impact sport? With a better headset? Harsher penalties? Stricter policies care?
Until Now, none of these options has done much to stem the epidemic. Baseball, if he could simply legislate away its most violent, beanballs. Basketball Police has been successful and elbows street robberies in-the-lane.
Hockey is probably closer to football among the four major sports in their propensity for head-jarring hits, but on the ice not take place near regularity.
All that the NFL knows that at this early stage of what is becoming, League anyway, an issue increasingly unpleasant, is that something must be done.
In addition to new edict Goodell, a Consultative Forum Player, directed by Tony Dungy, formed. Its aim is to gain entry to burning issues of the players in the league and commissioner Roger Goodell feed. It has asked the manufacturers to get helmets to design a safer place. What happens after that is anyone's guess. \ "The players are still a precious resource in the provision of guidance and penetration in a wide range of programs and policies, \ "the Commissioner said in the statement announcing the formation of the committee. \" Tony \ 'S experience and expertise in working with the players makes him an ideal leader. "
The Committee will almost certainly discover what a survey recent University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research found. The study found that 6.1 percent of players were suffering from the disease respond to Alzheimer's, dementia or a memory disorder from others. That's five times the national average for men their age.
The numbers were even worse For younger pupils in the NFL. Those between 30 and 49 reported suffering from illnesses at a rate 19 times higher than the U.S. average.
A survey Associated Press after the 160 current NFL players found that half had suffered serious head injuries – and many had hidden the fact his team.
Much of the blame, of course, can be attributed to the peculiar physics of football. Big, physically gifted linebackers and defensive missiles are launched as each other. Helmets, designed to protect, often become dangerous projectiles as players of RAM in the back, pelvis and head occasionally others.
Less obvious but equally insidious, even more great men in the regular line butt heads in the steel cage of the battles of the wells.
And the runners and receivers diving for extra yards often get kneed in the head – as did Westbrook – hit by the defenders. Not surprisingly, these repetitive convulsive events can have a dangerous cumulative effect.
According to a recent New Yorker magazine, the researchers believe that most of these affected by former players has a neurological disorder called CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the result of repeated brain trauma.
Autopsies found varying degrees of CTE, the magazine said, in the brains of Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, an inmate who was homeless when he died; Andre Waters, the hard-hitting Eagles safety, severely depressed, committed suicide with a bullet in the head, and Justin Strzelczyk, Steelers lineman who died while driving his car the wrong way on a highway and hit a truck at 90 miles per hour.
If football players retired after his first serious head injury, experts say it probably had less trouble in life. But the players, unfortunately, there would be many left for forming a league.
Virtually all NFL players, at some point in his career, was beaten unconscious during a game or practice. Too many do not reveal the depth of their problem, because they fear losing their position. Dungy, for example, said in a radio interview that he had done just that. And then Westbrook suffered a concussion earlier this season, sat out two games, returned, and was concussed again.
The New York Times reported that security of Pittsburgh, Troy Polamalu had suffered six documented concussions since high school. The total was three of the Steelers quarterback Ben Roethligsberger, who recently lost a match after being eliminated.
How many will end up like former Steelers Webster and Strzelczyk?
"It's not that you just lost cognitive skills, "Douglas H. Smith, professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, Brian Center of injury and repair, The Philadelphia Inquirer said, "but also increased the chances of having a worse problem in the future." At this time, the NFL can not think of a problem even worse.
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