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A comment on ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field. Parent comment

Re:ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trau... by brm on Thursday August 31, 2017 @04:43PM (#15143761)
The thing for me is, I never watched it for the contact. Its always been a rooting interest type of sport and if I wanted contact I'd go watch boxing or MMA.

The thing they don't seem to get(The NFL) is that most people don't care about the hits and they could eliminate them. I'd watch highly skilled athletes from my university or city play FLAG FOOTBALL at the highest levels of skill and athleticism as often or more often than I watch them now.

We need to think a bit about why people watch team sport as a society and realize that if flag football was the highest level we'd ever known we probably wouldn't lose a viewer.

Skills are skills and team rivalries and rooting interests remain regardless of whether its hockey or football or whatever.

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Re:ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trau... by goatlover on Thursday August 31, 2017 @04:45PM (#15143771)
Plenty of people like the hitting in football, both people who play and and those who watch. Lots of people have complan about how quarterbacks are protected nowadays. In fact, I've never heard a football fan say they would like to get rid of the hitting. Not once.
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Re:ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trau... by freehunter on Thursday August 31, 2017 @05:18PM (#15144019)
It's similar in hockey, take away the contact and people complain. They still watch, though. People complain about a lot of stuff they don't actually care about.
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Re:ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trau... by duderific on Thursday August 31, 2017 @07:10PM (#15144788)
I enjoy the skill aspect of football, and I love a great, hard hitting tackle, where a player gets low, sets their hips and stops a runner dead in their tracks by wrapping them up.

Where it ends for me is the helmet to helmet contact, when defensive players leverage or launch themselves head first into another player's head, because they want to injure that player or get into a highlight reel. I don't see how anyone can enjoy seeing someone laid out on the field unconscious.

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Re:ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trau... by _dark_matter_ on Thursday August 31, 2017 @04:47PM (#15143787)
We have plenty of alternative sports that don't offer the hits, they just haven't gotten as popular. I would argue that goes against your point.
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Re:ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trau... by olau on Thursday August 31, 2017 @06:13PM (#15144405)
According to this list, you're wrong about popularity, once you look outside the US:

http://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans.h...

Soccer is really huge in many parts of the world.

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