I've recently written a couple posts about why I no longer follow football--click here for one. Many football players are hobbled or even crippled at an early age. In a recent piece in Slate, former NFL player Michael Oriard explores the subject and lays out the magnitude of the problem.

Oriard writes:

[N]either the league nor the players association is eager for the public to know the extent of the long-term damage to former players. The NFL conducts studies of concussions in order to downplay their seriousness; the NFLPA has commissioned reports by university researchers for internal use but with little publicity. What the public knows about football and injuries has come from investigative journalists. In 1988, the Los Angeles Times surveyed 440 former players, 78 percent of whom reported disabilities.

In 1997, Newsday commissioned researchers at Ball State University to survey 1,425 former players for an award-winning report on "Life After Football," finding that 63 percent reported permanent injuries. Special reports in the Los Angeles Times in 2000 and in the Arizona Republic in 2003 and a 2001 piece in Sports Illustrated on the NFL's "wrecking yard" confirmed these figures and put faces on them.

While the individual stories are often gruesome...the aggregate numbers should be more disturbing. A pre-Super Bowl segment on CBS in 2001 reported that 13 percent of players are injured each season and claimed that every player leaves the game with spinal compression and arthritis. Although just a backup offensive lineman and special-teams player for four years in the early 1970s, I can confirm I've suffered those maladies myself.

Read Oriard's full article here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Baseball/Sports. You can trackback from your own site.