Football is a game that has been incorporated into American sports for nearly two centuries and has grown in popularity and recognition every year that it has existed. Since the early 1920s, the National Football League was founded and has provided entertainment every Sunday to millions of Americans across the country. Of course, to play professionally you must play collegiately, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association soon created a football division in 1978. Of course, over the years this type of sports entertainment has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars and has established itself as one of most successful businesses. As you would expect, these large companies tend to publicize all the positive aspects of their business and tend to sweep everything negative under the carpet. Head injuries, also known as concussions, are exactly the type of negative attention that has plagued collegiate and professional football for years and that can no longer be hidden. From former NFL players like Junior Seau and Frank Gifford to college football players like Tyler Hilinski, head injuries have caused or contributed to the deaths of many of these football players over the years. With the emergence of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) found in retired NFL players over the years, a nationwide debate has raged about what the NFL and NCAA can do to help prevent and reduce the chances of These fatal head injuries occur so often. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay For my extended essay, I will try to delve deeper into how collegiate and professional football contributed to these concussions and what they caused attempted to do to prevent these types of head injuries. I will talk about the origins of football and the risks it entails. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the game of football was created on November 6, 1869 with William "Pudge" Heffelfinger being the first professional football player (Birth of Professional Football). In 1892, these athletes received a “game performance bonus” that amounted to just $500. Football comes from a combination of soccer and rugby that has enjoyed worldwide success in countries around the world. When football was in its infancy, safety was the last thing on the minds of people who played. In fact, rugby, the game from which football originated, is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. It is played absolutely without a helmet and still consists of the same hard hitting that the NFL consists of today. It was not until the 1920s that any type of protection was widely used in football in the form of a leather helmet. These leather helmets were of little to no use as they provided virtually no protection except soft leather padding. These "helmets" also did not include any face masks that would protect players from any rapid hits to the neck and head area. . To make matters worse, these helmets were optional and were not even mandatory for these players to wear. Fortunately, the leaders of professional football saw the mistakes made and decided that it was necessary to improve the safety of these players. To do this, John T. Riddell introduced the first plastic helmet in 1939. This change was thought to be only temporary as plastic became rarer during World War II and when plastic blends began to fail, these helmets began to crack during the games and they broke. in pieces. Forthis reason these helmets were banned for a year but were reinstated a year later with the improvement of the padded plastic helmet. Even though these small improvements were made, there was still one important component of the helmet that wasn't added: the facemask. Without these helmet masks, these players were dealing with multiple injuries such as swollen lips, bloody noses and black eyes. This single-bar mask was considered a success, and in 1942 all professional players were required to wear these masks during games. As time went on, the game also adapted, and the single-bar mask would not be enough in the ever-changing violent environment. football game. Fast forward to today, the helmets use top-notch technology to protect these football players to the best of their ability. These helmets became more than just protection, but became an engineered piece of equipment. The technology inside the helmet has been improved by adding foam padding and plastic capsules invented to absorb the shock of impacts and help the helmet fit better. The exterior of the helmet has also seen great improvements with the outer shell made from polycarbonate over an aluminum slate covering a thin layer of leather. Contrary to popular belief, the development of helmets has not completely eliminated all concerns about head injuries, in fact quite the opposite has happened. Head injuries are a growing concern in the game of football, and the NCAA and NFL are partly responsible for some of these problems. As reported in the article “The Evolution of the Football Helmet,” a lawsuit was filed against the NFL by 2,000 former players in the summer of 2011, alleging that the league had not done enough to educate players about neurological risks that come from playing. football (2012 stamp). Some of these mental problems range from dementia, depression, and even early-onset Alzheimer's. The problem with the NFL is that it creates all these great rules about how to tackle another player without malicious intent or even where you're allowed to hit these players, but it has almost no rules about the helmets themselves. In fact, according to the National Operating Committee on Standards of Athletic Opinion (NOCSAE), there are no guidelines that determine what type of helmets these athletes should wear. This leads to all sorts of different players wearing the type of helmet they want to suit their personal needs. The NFL is also no better off as its only rules dealing with these helmets focus exclusively on the facemask and chin strap. Due to these different types of helmets worn by different athletes in professional football, some may be better equipped to withstand these concussion-inflicting hits than others. The NFL has begun to take small steps toward improving safety for the modern football player. The two manufacturers now producing helmets for professional football, Riddell and Schutt, were created to prevent concussions that research has shown tend to come from ground blows. on the sides of the head or jaw. They have also implemented a new system whereby, after suffering severe blows to the head, they must undergo a brief pitchside examination. While all this new technology was created to prevent these head injuries, the same question still remains: How can the NCAA and NFL continue to prevent these types of head injuries? To fully understand how dangerous head injuries really are, you need to know thereal life scenarios that happened to some of these football players that changed their lives forever. You need look no further than the case of Mike Webster, also known as Iron Mike, who was a Hall of Fame center who played for the Pittsburgh Steelers. In his prime, he was arguably one of the best players to ever play the game and was virtually unstoppable. When he retired in 1990, the one thing that could not be stopped was his constant mental and physical deterioration which led to his death, at the age of 50, on September 24, 2002. In an article written by the Atlantic, it mentions how Webster suffered throughout his post-career life which led him to take part in absurd things like living out of his van, tasering himself to relieve his chronic pain and even trying to fix his rotten teeth with super glue (Laskas 2015). Webster's story is so compelling that Jeanne Marie Laskas published a novel later made into a film called "Concussion" that explained Webster's fall and how these head injuries shortened his life. Dr. Omalu, a foreign doctor from Nigeria, was the person who discovered that football causes these types of fatal injuries and shed light on the fact that football was not as safe as the league would like to tell you. Over 60 years later, the NFL is still dealing with the same issues and continues to downplay the negative effects head injuries have on the game of football. As stated in a research paper conducted by Boston University, CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a progressive degenerative brain disease found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma (often athletes), including symptomatic concussions and asymptomatic subconcussive blows . to the head that do not cause symptoms (Moran 2017). There are numerous symptoms associated with CTE which include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, and many more, just to name a few. Boston University's CTE Research Center is quick to point out that it's often wrong to think that if you suffer a concussion you have CTE, but that's not always the case. CTE is acquired from multiple or repetitive brain trauma. While the exact number of blows to the head needed to suffer from CTE is unknown, it is unlikely that one blow to the head will cause you to suffer from this disease. The unfortunate part of contracting and suffering from this disease is that there is currently no cure and it can only be diagnosed after death with a procedure called post-mortem neuropathological analysis, according to research conducted on the Neuropathology of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (Pathol 2015). Using this process, CTE has been found in the brains of many of these former professional football players such as Junior Seau, Dwight Clark, Bill Bryant, and others. Thanks to research, we have a deeper understanding of what this disease really is and how it has affected the brains of athletes over the years. Science has been shown to prove that these hits to the head and neck area are indeed the cause of CTE in these players, but only one group seems to vehemently deny it: the NFL. The NFL is one of America's top 4 sports and earns hundreds of millions of dollars every year from revenue and entertainment provided by players. According to the "Top 10 Most Watched Sports Events on US Television" ranking, the Super Bowl still remains the most watched event each year, and the popularity of the game seems to grow more and more each year. Naturally, the league would like to publicize all the positive aspects and turn a blind eye to the more negative attention. That's why it's no surprise that when the media asked Roger Goodell, the.