Joel Mathis

• Individual choices matter, as long as they're informed. • The NFL settlement of a suit regarding this issue suggests that for many players prior to the last couple of years, they were not adequately informed of the dangers. • Nonetheless, let's say they're adequately informed now. • The incentives to play football still make playing football an attractive prospect to many people, disproportionately poor. • Those incentives are created by the large audience for football, one that generates money as eyeballs for advertising and spends a good deal of money on the game directly. • When taken together with college football and high school football, the sport has disproportionate cultural power to the benefit it generates, which makes its costs worthy of extra attention. • The potential costs of football are high enough, that the incentives to play it are, essentially, incentives for grown men to injure, occasionally maim, and outright harm each other. • The bene

A letter I just wrote to a McClatchy journalist: Sir: I just read your  Cedric Benson story on the KC Star website , which concludes with this: While Benson suffered from a variety of lower-body injuries in the NFL, there are no records of him ever suffering a concussion.   Perhaps your story was edited to exclude additional information. If not, let me suggest the line — as it stands — omits so much information that it's possibly misleading. Simply put: One needn't experience concussions to experience head trauma as a football player. Here's what the CTE Center says about the issue : How do you get CTE? Can I get CTE from one concussion/hit to the head? We believe CTE is caused by repetitive brain trauma. This trauma includes both concussions that cause symptoms and subconcussive hits to the head that cause no symptoms. At this time the number or type of hits to the head needed to trigger degenerative changes of the brain is unknown.  I'd wager that Mr. B

1. Be a nearly all-white state. 2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive. 3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players. 4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in! * Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

I was trying to remember this afternoon, a story I read in sixth-grade English about how professional sports had declined because people had come to enjoy video simulations of them much more. It struck me as possibly prescient, so I plunged into Google. Turns out the story, " The Last Superbowl, " was written by none other than George RR Martin. * The story is actually two tales, as he covers the last Superbowl which takes place in January 2016 and interjects the depiction of that Superbowl, between the Green Bay Packers and the Hoboken Jets, and the downfall of real sports. Real sports, in the 2016 of Martin’s fictional world, have been overtaken in popularity by simulated sports.  Simulated sports are controlled by a computer that can put any team, from any era, against any other for the enjoyment of the spectators. The technology he describes in the computers that control the simulated sports may have been a thing of science fiction in 1974, when I assume he wrot

This guy: Arians came to football’s defense yet again on Friday here at the Cardinals training facility. He delivered the keynote address to over 130 high school football coaches at the “Arizona Cardinals High School Football Coaches Clinic,” and, as always, Arians was full of passion and energy for the sport, and he didn’t hold back any punches when speaking on stage in front of the men.  “We feel like this is our sport. It’s being attacked, and we got to stop it at the grass roots,” Arians said. “It’s the best game that’s ever been f—— invented, and we got to make sure that moms get the message; because that’s who’s afraid of our game right now. It’s not dads, it’s moms.” Well. It's not just moms.

The NFL has spent this week being shocked -- shocked ! -- that the violent game it promotes is, well, violent . The league has spent this week levying fines against particularly egregious hits from last weekend's games, but as Pittsburgh Steeler lineback James Harrison and Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder have pointed out, in their various ways, football is game of hitting, and hitting hard : You're supposed to hit the ball-carrier as hard as you can to bring him down; the carrier tries to hit you as hard as he can so that he can stay on his feet and keep going. It's rough business, and there's growing evidence that it destroys the bodies and minds of the people who play the game. I don't really watch games anymore -- it makes me a bit queasy to cheer on people in the process of hurting themselves and each other -- though I still check in from time to time on the progress of the Kansas City Chiefs: a lifetime of fandom is hard to put away. But today -