NFL Players With Long and Short Careers Have Similar Death Risk, Study Finds (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared 2,933 athletes who played in the National Football League for an average of five years to 879 "replacement players" who filled in for three games during a mid-1980s strike, finding no statistically significant difference in rates of death from all causes. Critics said the research had several flaws and pointed to a study released last year that found 99 percent of deceased former NFL players whose brains were analyzed post-mortem showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease linked to repeated hits to the head that can lead to aggression and dementia. The latest study found that the leading cause of death among the NFL career players was cardiometabolic disease, which entails greater risk of heart attack and stroke, followed by transportation injuries and unintentional injuries.

"This new study seems to support other previous studies that have not shown an increase in mortality among NFL players when compared to similar cohorts," an NFL spokeswoman said. "As with all new research on this topic, we will look at it closely to see what we can learn to better enhance the well-being of our current and former players," the spokeswoman said.

Comments

It's time.

[Gravis Zero]

It's time we start ending school sponsored football programs. There are plenty of other sports that don't involve brain damage. I'm not saying outlaw it, just don't promote it at schools.

A football career doesn't start in the NFL

[Pinky's Brain]

They start their competitive career in inducing brain damage in high school.

Why would it kill you any sooner? Headaches aren't lethal and you don't need to be a genius to get old. It's about quality of life, not duration. Of course for NFL millionaires it might all be worth it, it's the much larger number of players who don't get drafted but are still forced to live with migraines and other fun consequences of concussions who are the real losers.

Re:A football career doesn't start in the NFL

[Aighearach]

And guys like these "replacement" players, who were obviously already playing frequently. It isn't like the brought in tennis players during the strike, they were all still football players putting enough time into it that they were aspiring pros! So even if the problem was early death rather than quality of life, this would still not really be very significant; just comparing players with fancy uniforms to players who only got to wear fancy uniforms a few times.

Re:I don't give a fuck about sportsball players

[Immerman]

Mostly because athletes get glorified in our society, encouraging mimicry by impressionable youth and idiots, while their celebrity insulates them from the consequences of their actions. That hits on two fronts.

First, you get a bunch of kids too young and stupid to know better inflicting brain damage for the chance at home-town celebrity and the perks that accompany it. And oft-times their parents aren't a whole lot better informed.

Second, that brain damage makes it much more likely that Joe McSportsball player is going to violently beat his girlfriend or that guy who looked at him funny at the bar, while his celebrity will get him off with a slap on the wrist and a lot of publicity. That sends a message to people everywhere that such violence is actually acceptable behavior.

Re:Soccer, too.

[Gravis Zero]

It's time we start ending school sponsored football programs. There are plenty of other sports that don't involve brain damage.

Soccer, too. That involves hitting the ball with your head, hard, repeatedly, and was shown to be causing brain damage even before (pigskin-style) football.

Soccer has an easy fix, just prohibit hitting the ball with your head.

So?

[Kohath]

NFL players don’t spend their time worrying about your problems. And if they did, wouldn’t you tell them to mind their own business?

Re:Football will be gone in 10-20 years

[quantaman]

The CTEs don't kill you (unless you count the suicides), but they will turn you into a drooling wreck like Jim McMahon.

CTE leads to dementia, and that will shorten your life expectancy.

There seems to be two main criticisms of this study. First they're talking about players from the mid-80s, so even if they were 30 at the time they'd still be early-to-mid 60s, more likely they're late 50s. That's earlier than you'd expect CTE to really start shortening life expectancy (plus you might not have enough deaths to detect a smaller difference).

Second, they're comparing people who played football at a very high level to people who played football at a slightly higher level. If one group has CTE issues I'd expect both to.

The main thing that's been keeping the NFL afloat is gambling, and thanks to the much higher incidence of injury, the gamblers are finally starting to abandon it for more interesting games, like basketball, baseball, hockey. As a veteran fantasy football player, I can tell you that practically all of the skill has been taken out of it, making it much less fun. This year, I lost my stud, #1pick running back, David Johnson very early in the season, and I only made the playoffs because the other good players also lost their best picks as the season wore on.

And football continues to be a game of exploitation. Parents are putting their kids in football programs in the same numbers any more (except in the South, where brain damage is less noticeable) and I expect football to go the way of boxing. Another fine sport that just got to be too depressing to enjoy.

The attraction isn't gambling it's culture. Especially in the US South it's extremely ingrained into communities and football does have a number of fairly unusual characteristics among sports:
1) Virtually every male body type is well suited towards a position on the football field.
2) It has large rosters so significant portions of high school populations can participate.
3) It creates a very strict social hierarchy.
4) It has a much higher level of planning and organization than other sports

However, the large rosters are also its weakness, I expect CTE worries to drop a lot of schools below the critical mass of kids needed, and a lot of regions are going to lose high school football. And the kids who didn't play football will become adults who don't watch it, and football will become a regional sport in the south.