Hello, person from America. I’ve been reading about you and one of your favorite things. Well, really more about the latter, because I couldn’t find many books about you personally, and because you’re kind of boring in that I’m 95% sure that there’s no widely accepted and publicly funded wrongdoing that you are currently perpetrating on a scheduled basis. Sadly, the same cannot be said for football, one of your favorite sports.
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| Mr. Jadeveon Clowney |
A 2011 Harris Poll shows that there is roughly a 64% chance that you follow the NFL (to say nothing about college football). If you don’t, do you follow college football? High school football? Have you gone to college? Will you go to college? Have you paid or will you pay taxes? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you either support football or you will be supporting it in the future (probably both).
¿Que significa? Well, what this all means is that, like it or not, any problem with football is your problem too. And as your luck would have it, there are some pretty big problems with football.
Although my focus this semester will be to investigate some of these problems, my ELI isn’t a muck-raking project. Several weighty problems (and some “problems” of questionable importance - see: swearing when we can read your lips) with NFL, NCAA, and even high school football seem to be in constant discussion. You could probably name at least five football-related controversies off the top of your head right now, for example: concussions, academic dishonesty, amateurism, child abuse, and rape. My interest lies in a thorough analysis of a few of these issues so that I can make some informed personal decisions about football.
Right now I’m looking at concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is essentially a degenerative brain condition that causes dementia and results from repeated head trauma. Depending on how in-depth I go on that, I might research other common football injuries or football’s place at academic institutions. (Or both!) Whatever my research focus turns out to be, I want to answer this question by the end of the semester:
Can I, in good conscience, continue to follow and support football in its current state?
So I’ll be plenty busy, and hopefully I’ll have the full scoop on CTE the next time I write a post.
Peace.
~Jared
Once you get the full scoop on CTE, you will never be able to watch football again. It now makes me physically sick to see a hit. Sad, because I loved football. But I didn't know, then......
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