Opinion: Concussion and East Coast Schools Essay

Concussions In Football

Could Concussions actually kill football? Doug Farrar the author of this article seems to believe so. At the beginning of the article there is a quote by Jonah Lehrer saying, “If the sport ever dies, it will die from the outside in.” By this, it is being emphasized that there is problems within the sport of football, which is highlighted throughout this article.
The first time the controversy of how the NFL handles head injuries became more noticeable to the public eye was after Colt McCoy received a brutal concussion against the Pittsburg Steelers in 2011. James Harrison and McCoy went helmet to helmet during the game. McCoy was knocked out cold. After being attended to by the several trainers on his team he was brought off the field for a closer examination. McCoy was unable to recall what his name was and was exhibiting many obvious signs of a concussion. The coach and trainers neglected these symptoms and threw him back in the game only after two plays of sitting out. When the game was over and McCoy was being interviewed about the colossal hit he took, he told reporters he didn’t remember the hit. This was also another apparent indication of his evident concussion. Later in his interviews, the cameramen were asked to turn off the lights on their cameras due to McCoy’s sensitivity to light. At that point, there was more than enough evidence to conclude that McCoy was definitely suffering from a concussion. This could be noticed and diagnosed by someone with very minimal and basic knowledge of warning signs for a concussion. Browns coach, Pat Shurmer, Eagerly told reporters that McCoy was “fine to go back in”. Just like any other parent would, McCoy’s father, Brad, had an unpleasant reaction to the way the NFL and Surmer handled his son’s injury. He told reporters, “I talked to Colt this morning and he said, ‘Dad, I don’t know what happened, but I know I lost the game. I know I let the team down. What happened?’ ”. Brad aggressively challenged Shurmer’s decision to let his son back in the game, as well as his judgment when he told reporters, “He never should’ve gone back in the game. He was basically out [cold] after the hit. You could tell by the ridgity of his body as he was lying there. There were a lot of easy symptoms that should’ve told them he had a concussion. He was nauseated and he didn’t know who he was. From what I could see, they didn’t test him for a concussion on the sidelines. They looked at his [left] hand.” Jonah Lehrer, mentioned earlier in this report, has done a lot of research on concussions and other head injuries in football. He found that from high school football up to pro football, players would suffer over two million concussions every season. Lehrer also pointed out that those statistics were solely the concussions that were actually reported. Numerous concussions go undiagnosed every year. After a 2002 study, it was concluded that hundreds of high school football players who had suffered three or more concussions were ten times more likely to exhibit multiple “abnormal” responses to head injury, including loss of consciousness and persistent amnesia. With this new information, results were compared with other students who didn’t have any history with concussions. Athletes with two or more concussions demonstrated significantly lower grade-point averages than the other students with no history of any concussions. In another article by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier titled, “What Would The End of Football Look Like?” they address the possibilities of white might unfold in the process of ridding football in society permanently.
“This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years, Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players – or worse, high schoolers – commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes an award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that

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Opinion: Concussion and East Coast Schools Essay

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