Thursday Thoughts - Braindroppings

Today, we want to jump all over the landscape and ask a ton of questions, point out a ton of interesting thoughts, and...well, if George Carlin were still around, he'd call these "Braindroppings"! So, here goes!

What makes a team a dynasty? Three titles in a row, like Hawthorn just achieved in the AFL? Does five in fifteen years count, like the NBA's San Antonio Spurs? What about the Patriots, who've won four and been to seven Super Bowls in the Belechick/Brady era (about fourteen years)? Certainly the 1950s-60s Boston Celtics count - they're the very definition of a dynasty! Eight in a row, eleven in thirteen years...but which of those is more important? Is winning over a long period of time, even if you missed a couple in between, "better" than the string over three or four years? What do you think?

Concussion protocols...without question, better than it's been in previous years, when you could convince your coach you were good to go play even when the other team seems to have twice as many players as they legally should have. But please, footy, football, every other kind of real contact sport - don't assume the problem's fixed! The iffy nature of concussions to begin with makes dealing with them nebulous in the best of times, and as we learn more and more about how much time it actually takes to recover from the hit, we have to change how we deal with it. Opinion?

Specials... which is what many coaches call "trick plays". Washington pulled a good one last night, a double pass which scored their first touchdown and led to an upset of USC in LA. SC State had a great one that I first saw the Rams pull on Seattle last year, where you have a punt returner fake like he's getting the punt, when in reality it's the guy on the opposite sideline who's catching the ball and (in last night's game) scoring a touchdown on the runback! (Bethune-Cookman won anyway, however, in a game which may have decided the MEAC.) So, the question that bugs some people is this - are "specials" basically cheating? If you can't win playing "correctly" (or "like men", if you want to really get machismo on this), you have to "resort to trick plays" to try to "cheat" your way to victory! My response - first of all, the plays are legal, so it's not cheating. Second of all, it's the brain versus brawn argument, and football has room for both. If you're okay with a team using the forward pass to win, which many in the early days of the AAFC and NFL weren't for the same reason (c'mon! Be a man and run at me!), you really can't complain about the double pass, or any other "trickeration", as our idol Chris Petersen would say. Petersen, of course, was the one who called the double pass that beat USC last night, and famously brought the house down in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl with a host of trick plays at the end of the game to pull out the Boise State victory over vaunted Oklahoma. What most people forget is that, until a great OU drive and a brainfade interception, Boise had OU soundly beaten (28-10, late in the third) with old-fashioned, hard-nosed, "my linemen are better than yours" football. You've gotta have the guys who can pull it off, too. Your thoughts?

Speaking of Boise v Oklahoma, the perpetual argument over whether a school from outside the Power Five conferences should ever play for a national championship rages, and will continue to until one gets in and then wins the tournament. The CFP folks threw the Group of Five conferences a nice bone by guaranteeing their best team a spot in the high-paying bowl games in the New Year's Six, which is more than they've had. But what if (to choose a team besides Boise, our personal favorite!) Temple or Toledo, both of whom look spectacular this year, goes undefeated in 2015, looks phenomenal in doing so, and two of the power conferences fail to produce any team the committee feels is worthy of a playoff bid? Who's to say that an undefeated Temple isn't a better choice than, say, a three-loss Florida State? What would be wrong with that? Think back to that 2007 Fiesta Bowl, which some say was the best game of all time (as much as I love Boise St, I'd go with USC/Texas in the BCS title game the year Vince Young won it for the Longhorns). Utah had been the first "mid-major" to qualify for a big bowl, but they played a five-loss Pitt team from a pathetic Big East, won, and proved nothing. Boise was the first mid-major to play in the spotlight against a top ten team - and not just any, but 7-time national champion Oklahoma, Big 12 champs, one loss, Adrian Peterson at RB. Somehow the screwed up rankings had BSU #7 and OU #9, but the Sooners were absurd betting favorites - David and Goliath was referenced multiple times in the intro. BSU dominated the game, and if it weren't for a Bronco punt coverage mistake late in the 3rd, Oklahoma was ready to give up. In fact, over the span of games that mid-major teams played in BCS bowl games, their record was 5-2. (And one of those losses was to another mid-major, when they pitted TCU and BSU against each other the year they both qualified. The other was Hawaii's debacle loss to Georgia, proving there's an exception to every rule.) Why can't a Boise St, a Houston, a Memphis, a Toledo, a Temple, a Navy, a Northern Illinois play for the title?

Bodybag games...New Mexico State is getting about a million dollars towards balancing its athletic budget ($4.4 M over, last year) to go to the University of Mississippi and be a forty-three point underdog to a top-notch SEC team. Basically, they're being paid to be the Washington Generals. Remember the Generals? The Globetrotters' perpetual opponents? Name anything about them besides that. Thought so... Ole Miss wants a week off from the gauntlet of the SEC, wants to fill their stadium, give their fans a "guaranteed win" (as LSU will tell you about Jacksonville St, "no such thing"!), and is giving about a one-seventh share of the profits to the opponent for the privilege of being beaten badly. Some teams are notorious for needing these games to stay afloat - Following Football's favorite team, the MEAC's punching bag Savannah State, played Oklahoma St and Florida St in consecutive weeks two years ago, lost the first one 88-0, and would've lost the second to the national champs by worse if they hadn't gone to a running clock in the second half to finish early and avoid a storm coming in. Up here in the Northwest, I always pity the Idaho Vandals, who moved to the big-time because Boise St did, but in little Moscow, Idaho, they don't have the fan base or the resources to afford the lifestyle of an FBS football program. So instead of being the top-notch FCS program they were for decades, rivals with the Montanas of the realm, they're stuck as a bottom-feeder in the lowly Sun Belt conference, taking two payday games a year (this year at USC and Auburn) to financially survive another one-win season. Where's the shame in moving to FCS before your entire program disbands (see UAB)? Why don't schools like NMSU, Idaho, and several others improve both their bottom line AND their competitive results and return to the FCS where their school setting suggests they should be anyway? Your thoughts?

Mourning one of the greats today...

Kenny Stabler, "The Snake", died yesterday from complications from colon cancer. The other article linked here from ESPN includes what little has been made public (completely appropriate, in our opinion: those details are none of our business), but also does a good job encapsulating the affect Stabler and those 1970's Raiders had on football fans of that era, like us here at Following Football. 

The Raiders of the '70s were the Bad Boys of football - actually, they shaped the franchise for the next forty years in that image - like the Detroit Pistons of the early '90s, the Miami Heat of a few years ago, the Miami Hurricanes of the 80s. We need those "bad guys", the counter culture going against the grain of the corporate NFL or NCAA or NBA or whomever. You want the image of 32 franchises, working independently, or you want a corporation that doles out 32 subdivisions of itself to artificially compete? You need to have someone who doesn't toe the line - whatever you think of the Belechick Patriots, we need them in the league. Or someone like them, since the Raiders aren't really relevant at the moment. 

That's another key - they've got to be good. And the Stabler Raiders were good, alright. They went to several playoffs in a row during his tenure there, including a Super Bowl victory at the end of the 1976 season over the Vikings. His teammates were and are fiercely loyal to their old field general, as the two articles linked show.

On a side note, this little tidbit was tucked away at the end of an article: 

Stabler's brain and spinal cord were donated to Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center to support research into degenerative brain disease among athletes, according to the family.

Boston U's Encephalopathy Center has the brains of several dozen football players (all deceased, duh!) and has developed a great wealth of data on the damage football players take playing the game - we never want to tell people what to do with their lives, but we want players to know up front what they're getting into.
 

A couple of interesting retirements in Australian Rules...

Brent Reilly, longtime Adelaide Crow who recently passed his 200th game, is retiring amidst his recovery from a horrible skull fracture in a training accident back in February. His doctor has advised him never to play contact sports again with the danger of recurrence to his skull, and for obvious reasons he's agreed. One of the great aspects of Aussie Rules is the "manliness" of playing without helmet or padding - but sometimes casualties occur. Interestingly, more injuries seem to happen with American style football, because of the protective gear - you don't see Aussie players leading with their heads, for example, or hitting each other as hard as the linemen do in the NFL. Rarely have any retired footy players had trouble with concussion or head injury issues for those reasons. Still, it's hard to see someone like Brent Reilly have to retire early because of something like this.

On the other hand, here's a different reason for an early retirement that I've almost never heard of in the NFL - only the legendary Pat Tillman comes to mind...

Kane Cornes, fast approaching his 300th game at Port Adelaide (a huge milestone!), has decided to retire immediately following that game on May 23rd. The reason? He's been offered a position as a firefighter for the city of Adelaide.

Picture Shaquille O'Neal actually following through on his thought to become a Miami undercover cop, and you've got an idea what this means in Australia. 

Cornes is about to be the only player in Port Adelaide's history to play 300 AFL games, a testament to his durability and ability...and yet, he's ready to step aside now, just because it's a convenient time to start his firefighter training. (He also doesn't want to risk any more injuries in advance of his retirement, although he's been remarkably durable over his 3oo games.)

Amazing.

It's not concussions, but head injuries are still potentially lethal...

We've talked a lot about the potential for repeated head injuries to cause one of two fatal downfalls to football as played in North America: (1) the long-term brain poundings football players get lead to dementia and its related issues for the players down the road, which we can already see leading current players away from the sport, and (2) the financial cost for leagues and institutions hosting football teams when lawsuits are brought to court and won against them for physical and mental damage to the players.

Here's a new case out of Iowa, where a high school athlete was "allowed" to continue practicing and playing after what seems to have been a severe head trauma that bled. In this case, it was the head coach and the school nurse who were held particularly culpable.

If you're the administration or school board of that school, and you just got hit with a million dollar bill because of your football program...what do you do?

Where is football heading? Bad news, NFL.

And this, from ESPN's Kevin Seifert, on the most obvious ramification of the growing concussion fear among actual players at the NFL (and to a lesser extent college) level - who is it who will continue to play football even when your long term viability as a human being comes into question when you play it?

The same people who still go into boxing. The young men with nothing to lose.

Malcolm Barnwell calls it the coming "ghettoization of football". If you're from middle or upper class stock, and you have other ways of making a good living available to you? HELL, no, you don't go into boxing, and HELL NO, you won't go into football pretty soon. But if you're from the ghetto? And you know the only way to money is either drug dealing or football? Where do I sign up?

And, football as an industry needs to take a hard look at what's happened to boxing in the last thirty years or so (and it took much less to get to this point). When I was a kid, forty years ago, Muhammed Ali was the baddest dude on the planet. Name the current heavyweight champ. You can't, can you? Only a select few give a crap, and only a very few fights bring anything even slightly resembling the attention that major fights used to. (Will Mayweather/Paciao? I don't know. But I can't name the last one.)

That's what football has to look forward to. Not death, but something worse. 

Insignificance.

More on Chris Borland - and the surprising lack of shock in his early retirement

The most poignant thing in this article, a follow-up to the piece we linked this morning noting the retirement of 49ers linebacker Chris Borland at the tender age of twenty-four, after just one season, is the last section, from former Jets star Wesley Walker. Truthfully, his words bring tears:

Wesley Walker, 59, who played 13 years with the Jets, said he's had surgeries on his neck, back, shoulders, knees and Achilles that he attributed to his football career. He said that he suffers from spinal stenosis and nerve damage, that he feels pain in his arms and fingers, and that he's had 14 screws and a plate inserted into his neck and 10 screws and two rods inserted into his back.

"I admire [Borland] for what he did. I admire him for being man enough and smart enough to know what's more important in life," Walker told ESPN.com's Ian O'Connor. "If I had to do it over again, and I knew I'd end up in the amount of pain I'm always in, there's no way in hell I'd play football again. With all of my injuries, including my neck, I took a chance of breaking my neck and ending up in a wheelchair. I look back and ask, 'What was I thinking?' "

"Every individual has to make his own decision, and there's so much money to be made these days. But is money more important, or is your life more important? I could never see myself hurting myself, but there have been times when I've thought, 'God, I wish you'd just end this right now.' I don't sleep, I'm in constant pain, I haven't felt my feet in 20 years. I feel like there are times when my whole body shuts down. Sometimes I feel like I'm 90 years old.

"[Commissioner] Roger Goodell is a good friend of mine. But I want the NFL to tell truth about what's happening with players, and I think they sugarcoat everything."

The thought of retirement came many months ago for Borland, who played through concussion during training camp and realized that was facing him the rest of his career if he wanted to be good at his choice of vocation. 

Borland told "Outside The Lines" that he had been thinking about leaving football as the 2014 season went along, and wrote a letter to his parents late in the year. After the season, he consulted with prominent concussion researchers and former players to affirm his decision.

"I've thought about what I could accomplish in football, but for me, personally, when you read about Mike Webster and Dave Duerson and Ray Easterling, you read all these stories, and to be the type of player I want to be in football, I think I'd have to take on some risks that, as a person, I don't want to take on."

Borland was referring to former NFL greats who were diagnosed with the devastating brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, after their deaths. Duerson and Easterling committed suicide.

Borland said he began to have misgivings during training camp. He said he suffered what he believed to be a concussion stuffing a running play but played through it, in part because he was trying to make the team.

"I just thought to myself, 'What am I doing? Is this how I'm going to live my adult life, banging my head, especially with what I've learned and know about the dangers?'"

The saddest reaction, for me, came from Green Bay Packers director of player personnel Eliot Wolf, who tweeted the following (as if it contradicted Borland's actions):

"Anyone worried about the future of football should see the amount of calls & emails we get from kids literally begging to get into pro days."

It's not the future of football I'm worried about, Mr. Wolf, but the future of those kids begging to get into pro days.

49ers' Chris Borland retires...at 24...in good health...because...

Read this article. 

The outstanding rookie linebacker Chris Borland, formerly of the Wisconsin Badgers and stand-out fill-in for the injured Patrick Willis last season, is retiring after his rookie season, and he says there's just one reason for it.

"I just honestly want to do what's best for my health," Borland told "Outside the Lines." "From what I've researched and what I've experienced, I don't think it's worth the risk."
"I feel largely the same, as sharp as I've ever been. For me, it's wanting to be proactive," Borland said. "I'm concerned that if you wait 'til you have symptoms, it's too late. ... There are a lot of unknowns. I can't claim that X will happen. I just want to live a long, healthy life, and I don't want to have any neurological diseases or die younger than I would otherwise." 

This is the highest-profile player to decide that his quality of life was more important than the job he had spent his life building up to. Concussions are becoming a very serious thing, folks, and football as an entity needs to figure that out FAST!

More on the concussion front...

You may or may not remember Jesse Freitas, who was an NFL QB in the 1970's. His post-football life mirrored that of many of the former players whose deaths have revealed the kind of head trauma found in patients with SEVERE head trauma over the course of YEARS. 

Our hope is that the family of Mr. Freitas, who was found dead "in a parked car" yesterday, will allow the examination of his brain to see if someone of an older generation, as well as someone who did not play a line position, would have the same kind of damage - and frankly, his behavior following his football career warrants that attention.

What do Australians think of the Super Bowl today? This is interesting...

Sports Fan magazine is online for free and anyone can check it out at www.sportsfan.com.au if they're interested - they have some of the best commentary on Aussie footy (and rugby and cricket and many other Australian sports) around. 

But this take by senior writer Adam Jones about why he WON'T watch the Super Bowl (while many of his fellow Aussies will) is particularly interesting, coming from an outside-America sports fanatic as it is. 

We American football folks have a problem.

Mike Ditka: I wouldn't want my kid playing football.

This short article is part of Peter King's regular Monday Morning QuarterBack column, the Taj Mahal of NFL weekly writing, on SI.com. If you don't read it weekly during the season, you can't really call yourself an NFL fan. 

We've touched on the dangers of concussions quite a lot here at Following Football, but this HBO feature includes some items on the famous 1985 Chicago Bears team that are downright frightening...

The Ditka stuff on HBO might surprise you.

On Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern Time, HBO’s “Real Sports” with Bryant Gumbel will air a segment on the 1985 Chicago Bears, and in particular how several of the players from that team have suffered (and are suffering) from cognitive problems after their starry football careers. Quarterback Jim McMahon, whose head-trauma problems have been well-documented, gives this harrowing account about his current life with his live-in girlfriend: “The forgetfulness … I’d leave the bedroom, tell her I was going to the store, get a dip or something, and she’d come in there a half hour later, and I’m still standing there, wondering what I was going to do. And she said, ‘You were going to go to the store.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’  So I’ll go to the store, and then I’ll have to call her and say, ‘I don’t know how to get back home.’”

Ditka (Brian D. Kersey/Getty Images)

The Bears lost a safety from that era, Dave Duerson, to a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2011, and an autopsy showed “moderately advanced” CTE, the brain malady that scores of deceased football players have been found to have. The coach of that team, Mike Ditka, has been outspoken that the league should be doing more—even more than the recent $765 million settlement with former players over brain trauma—and continued that with Gumbel. “What I would say to the commissioner, to the owners … You got an obligation and responsibility to those guys because you wouldn’t have a damn job right now if it wasn’t for those guys.”

When Gumbel asks Ditka, in effect, if this could end up being the ruination of the sport, Ditka says: “Let me ask you a question better than that. If you had an eight-year-old kid now, would you tell him you want him to play football?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Gumbel. “Would you?”

“No,” Ditka said. “That’s sad. I wouldn’t. And my whole life was football. I think the risk is worse than the reward. I really do.”

That’s Iron Mike Ditka, folks. Should be a piece well worth watching Tuesday night.

Remember yesterday, when I said that Character Counts?

So, yeah, I forgot I was talking about the National Football League. 

This is the league that sent Ben Roethlisberger back into the fourth quarter of a playoff game last Sunday after being hit and getting (to a 98% degree of probability) a concussion which under the league's own newly-enacted concussion rules should have kept him out of the rest of the game - if not from the concussion itself, then from the examination protocol which by definition would have taken longer than they had left in the game.

Except...no, wait! There's Big Ben coming back into the game, three flipping plays later, dropping back to throw...perhaps the WORST pass of his professional life, right into the arms of the waiting Ravens and ending the Steelers' season. Explain again how that was helpful to anyone involved?

This is the league that calls penalties, walks them off...and then reneges on them. If someone can offer a better explanation, be my guest. I pray that this one was incompetence. The "mixed all-star crew" makes that more plausible, although why a professional referee marks off a penalty and THEN gets all the relevant points of view is beyond explanation. 

Because if it's NOT incompetence, then that means they realized a Detroit first down with five minutes to go and a 20-17 lead past midfield probably made the game Detroit's to lose, a dangerous proposition if the league's flagship team, playing in its flagship stadium, were to lose to a no-public-perception team when the chance for an Ice Bowl rematch looms, Romo v Rodgers, and all that entails. Better to make it fourth down and pray that the corpse they installed as Lions coach actually punted on 4th and 1 at midfield. Which he did,  and it went ten yards, and Romo had a man's drive, and Garrett made a man's call to go for it on 4th and 6, and from THAT standpoint the Cowboys absolutely deserved to win... But outcome does not justify poor choices, or idiocy; the end never justifies the means.

And now, this is the league which paid for its own "independent" investigation to investigate ITSELF with regards to what it knew about the Ray Rice elevator video when it issued the insanely inadequate two game punishment for a criminal act heinous enough that no one will even HIRE Rice again.

The Mueller Report, paid for by two league owners, found that (surprise!) the League office ISN'T comprised of liars: just incompetents! (Hooray!) Of course, since all of their original explanations involved them lying about being incompetent, you can draw your own conclusions. Certainly, since they claimed in September that they asked EVERYONE for a copy of the elevator video back in February that the Mueller Report says the proof shows they didn't know existed...well, either the NFL blatantly lied about that in order to - to what, make themselves look inept? - or the report itself is completely farcical, in which case they've succeeded in making us forget about the Warren Commission Report. 

(If your history is as faulty as Roger Goodell's memory, the Warren Report proved that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. The problem is, no one at the time believed a word of it, although time has proven that that was indeed the most likely scenario.)

The credibility of bureaucrats is often dicey to begin with, but when your best case scenario was that you were an idiot? Are you sure that's who you want in charge of your favorite sport?

Bill Barnwell on THAT CALL yesterday...

Grantland's Bill Barnwell covers the ridiculously reversed PI call that turned the Dallas/Detroit game around in the fourth quarter yesterday, as well as the poor concussion protocol of the Pittsburgh coaching staff and the sad situations in Cincinnati and Arizona resulting from the injuries to their receivers and quarterbacks, respectively. His opinions are basically the same as mine, and he articulates them better...

How endangered is our sport of choice?

This survey indicates what many others have as well - concussions are a significant to the potential livelihood of every young man wanting to grow up to play gridiron football when they grow up. Forty percent of parents would move to prevent their sons from playing football because of the health threat it poses, primarily through brain injuries caused by concussions and other head trauma. 

Concussions may be the death knell of American Football.

In a sobering harbinger of possible things to come, a former Illinois high school quarterback is filing a class action lawsuit against the Illinois HS Association, saying they did not and are still not doing enough to prevent their athletes from getting life-altering brain injuries playing high school football.

It is not going to be a fall in popularity that kills off football in America.
It is not going to be the scandal-after-scandal atmosphere of the NFL and schools like Florida State.
It is not, in fact, going to be anything directly related to the behavior or performance of the NFL at all.

           It will be the refusal of the high school and non-scholastic "Pop Warner"-style youth leagues to open themselves up to litigation for the concussion-like symptoms that are inherent in modern American football.

We at "Following Football" make this declaration now: within twenty years, at least one third of high schools who currently sponsor football will no longer do so.

And that will be a tragedy.

The dangers of concussions, part zillion

The worst fears have been realized for Ohio St faithful.

Defensive lineman Kosta Karageorge was found dead of an apparent suicide last night, after having disappeared with a suicidal text to his mother on Wednesday. The apparent source of Karageorge's distress was the confusion, pain, and many other issues caused by the many concussions he suffered playing football and wrestling.

Many of the usual expressions of disbelief followed, and he was due to be recognized at senior day before the OSU/Michigan game yesterday.

What are the ramifications of concussions? Nobody knows, completely. But only someone with their head in the sand can possibly believe that the frequency of concussions in the NFL, and college football, and high school football, won't have ANY effect on the future of "American football". 

Will the sport still be popular...heck, will it even exist in twenty years? Consider: if high schools are fearful of lawsuits because of possible concussions - and they can't claim they don't have any evidence that it might happen, or what it might do to the victim - why would they keep promoting the sport? For that matter, why would parents allow their sons to play the sport that could destroy their brains?

And if high schools don't keep sending players to the college programs... and if the colleges stop supplying the NFL with victims players, the sport will die. Like other very dangerous sports, it'll disappear. 

Or be marginalized. Think boxing.