Sports Question??

Seems like over the past couple years the subject of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has been a constant topic in both the NFL and NCAA (as well as at the HS level...and just football in general). Now there are former NFL players coming out of the woodwork claiming damages as a result of TBI.

Last night I was watching the WBC Light Weight Title fight between Ryan Garcia (US) and Francisco Fonseca (Costa Rica), and Ryan KO's this guy with a blistering left hook at 1:20 in the 1st round...and I mean KTFO too! I got to thinking...NFL players rarely ever get knocked completely out, but boxers do all the time, yet we don't see former boxers coming out of the woodwork claiming TBI.

Why? What's the difference? Seems like boxing is a lot more dangerous than football (at least to the brain anyway). So what gives? Same thing for UFC, and Judo, and Taekwondo and so many others.

Are these NFL guys just whining, or is there something else going on?

I'll just leave this here, found after one Google search...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

To quote their abstract:

"Boxing and other combat sports may serve as a human model to study the effects of repetitive head trauma on brain structure and function. "

I think repetitive brain injury is an issue in boxing too.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Boxers train all year, but maybe do a few real fights, and out of those fights, one might result in a knock out.

The NFL's issue is heightened because these guys are constantly being bashed around in practice and for a full season with little to no real recovery time.

All contact sports have participants dealing with the effects of traumatic brain injuries, the NFL has just been "exposed" as you might say.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Football is years of head injuries.
Games and practice both.

Dozens of concussions back to back.

Boxers don't really get hit in training or at least not to the extent of an actual fight.

I don't think anyone is faking

a reply to: hombero

I would think so.

I wonder why we don't hear about it...especially considering (from your link) it sounds like they're using boxing as the example and the control?

There is much speculation that the years of getting hit contributed to Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s disease.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Boxers might wear head gear while training, but they definitely get hit, and repeatedly.

An NFL player, if he doesn't miss a play, might run 70 plays in a game, and the average season is 16 games. So, if he didn't miss a single play all season, that's 1,120 hits. So let's assume he's a lineman; probably 75% of those plays will result in helmet to helmet contact. So that's about 820 hits annually.

A boxer on the other hand might take 200 hits to the head in a single fight. And, while a prize fighter might only fight a couple fights a year, an rising professional fighter might fight once every 2-3 weeks, so that's anywhere from 17-26 fights a year. So lets use 21 as an average. At 200 hits per fight that's 4,200 hits to the head annually...or a lot more than the NFL.

a reply to: RazorV66

True. And historically there has long been the term "punchy" circulating.

I guess the question is, why isn't there the same uproar about boxing as there is football?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

The scans of dead players brains tell a different story.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
Seems like over the past couple years the subject of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has been a constant topic in both the NFL and NCAA (as well as at the HS level...and just football in general). Now there are former NFL players coming out of the woodwork claiming damages as a result of TBI.

Last night I was watching the WBC Light Weight Title fight between Ryan Garcia (US) and Francisco Fonseca (Costa Rica), and Ryan KO's this guy with a blistering left hook at 1:20 in the 1st round...and I mean KTFO too! I got to thinking...NFL players rarely ever get knocked completely out, but boxers do all the time, yet we don't see former boxers coming out of the woodwork claiming TBI.

Why? What's the difference? Seems like boxing is a lot more dangerous than football (at least to the brain anyway). So what gives? Same thing for UFC, and Judo, and Taekwondo and so many others.

Are these NFL guys just whining, or is there something else going on?

Many boxers show the effects as they start aging. Slurring speech, shakes, etc. Seems pretty common when looking at the condition of older boxers. There is no way anyone can take those kinds of head knocks over the a sports career and not have some negative effects.

All sports will have some negative effects as you start aging. Knees, backs, shoulders, etc. I raced bicycle motocross competitively as a teen and my body is a wreck now. I had one really bad high speed wreck in which I got KTFO. I was laid up for two days with my brain bounding around in my head.

A lot of the friends I raced with all seem to have some sort of joint problems and aches / pains from prior injuries. Dave Mirra was a BMX jumper/freestyler super star (Xgames, video games, etc) who killed himself several years ago. His autoposy showed he suffered from CTE from too many concussions.

a reply to: Bluntone22

What about brain scans of boxers?

BTW...I'm not suggesting NFL players don't have CTE/TBI. I'm more wondering about why we don't hear about it from other sports.

I played football in HS and a couple years in college. I never got a concussion, but some guys did. But I thought getting knocked out was almost the definition of a concussion. So my question is why we don't hear about it more from other sports. I'm not debating your point.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Maybe it is the involvement of so many young people in football where the typical boxer is older?

Consider how a peson gets to the NFL in the first place. Pee wee, Middle school, college, and THEN pro. They start at eight ffs. Plus with nutrition(aka roids) and such..peeps have gotten bigger and faster. And how many peeps box vs a 54 man football roster.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Probably two reasons.

One.. Football is king.
We only hear about the top dog like Wal-Mart and not k mart doing the same thing.

Two.. Sheer numbers. Every high school and college has football so the number of players must be huge compared to boxing.

On a side note, soccer and cheerleaders get a lot of concussions too but it must not be as severe.

We have the same issue with real football, ie soccer to you guys

Brain injury expert calls for ban on heading in football

Football headers 'linked to brain damage'

Researchers from University College London and Cardiff University examined the brains of five people who had been professional footballers and one who had been a committed amateur throughout his life. They had played football for an average of 26 years and all six went on to develop dementia in their 60s.

Dave Watson: Ex-England skipper may have same disease as Jeff Astle had

Following Astle's death, his family pushed for research into a possible link between heading footballs and dementia. In 2014, a coroner ruled that the former England forward was killed by CTE - a progressive degeneration of the the brain caused by repeated head trauma - and that it had been caused by heading footballs.

Jeff Astle: West Brom legend 'killed by boxing brain condition'

Boxers and Brain Injuries – A Scary Study

nearly 90-percent of boxers suffer a brain injury of some extent during their career, according to the Association of Neurological Surgeons. The repeated hits to the head on a daily basis are terrible on boxers, and causes them to be prone to Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease later in their lives.

With boxing headgaurds make little difference as the brain still gets shook about inside the skull

TL : DR any repeated pattern of the brain shaking within the skull is more than likely to cause damage to the soft tissue of the brain.

Big problem with concussions in Hockey as well.
Many pros had their careers cut-short, or have missed lot's of time due to the effects of being concussed.

NHL: Sid-The-Kid; Eric Lindros; Pat Lafontaine; Bob Probert; Paul Kariya; etc ...

It seems like as soon as kids start playing contact: there is usually one on the team not playing due to concussion-like symptoms.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I think I read somewhere that they're discovering that some people have different physiology and structure. Some are actually more prone to head injury than others. They still don't know why that is, but there are actually some who go through lengthy careers without any serious brain injury while others barely get touched and seem to sprout a concussion.

Also, it's not just football. Soccer has a history of head trauma too, but it's not talked about much and kids start in on it a lot younger.

a reply to: UpIsNowDown

Yeah, your bell can get rung pretty good even with head gear. Kiddo doesn't box, but he's at the full contact level of sparring in tae kwon do now. It's not supposed to be a show of force, more a show of skill and control, but they have two targets in regular sparring - head and chest, and you get more points for a kick to the head. I think we've seen at least one kid layed out in the ring at every tourney we've been to so far. Now, that was only once because someone actually landed a hard head shot (the other two were missed kicks to the chest that went low, one way, way low).

But the kid who took the head shot and got laid out didn't quite know where he was when he got up, and they wear full gear.

a reply to: ketsuko

Well, this thread was a non-starter. I didn't present my opening OP argument properly I guess, and so it pretty much fizzled. Or, maybe what I was trying to get at just isn't a topic of interest.

My whole point, which seems to have been overlooked, is that there are a lot of other sports out there where TBI / CTE seems to be an equal or greater risk than the sport of (American) football. But we're only hearing it come from the professional football (NFL) community in any numbers. And, I was questioning why that is. Doesn't matter at this point, the thread has lost it's way.


@upisnowdown....I would disagree, if we want to talk about "real" "football", I would argue Rugby, not Soccer, is "real" football. FWIW.


In any case...sorry for the distraction, all.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I think someone answered your question: football is king. It's uniquely American and uniquely popular. Like other things that are part of American culture, real American culture, they have to find reasons to destroy it. Brain trauma is as good an excuse as anything. If they make it so kids can't tackled anymore, then the sport overall becomes badly played and less of what made it something Americans loved.

As an old athlete myself, yeah, no matter what you do, you're putting high levels of wear and tear on your body. It's going to take a toll on you as you age. My left knee reminds me in some unkind ways that I ran it into every hurdle between Iowa and Texas with a few in Florida and some way out in Washington state added in.