Thursday, April 18, 2013
Walder: Rex Ryan rants against Baltimore Orioles over season opener
(www.nydailynews.com)
posted on April 18, 2013 at 09:12 PM by Greg Franklin to football, nfl, orioles, schedule
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40 comment(s)
Rex, brothers!
Read More...The Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens can’t open the season at home because the Orioles play a game on September 5, when the season opener is scheduled to be played, and the two teams share a parking lot. While there was talk of the Orioles potentially moving their game to another time, Ryan proposed something more ridiculous—moving its location—during a rant against the Baltimore baseball team.
“Well who really cares, you’ve got 81 at home, maybe you could have done ...
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1 2 3 4 5 >Oh please. They'll make some changes that will delude enough people into thinking they've fixed the problem (baseball's drug testing program is a road map) and they will never miss cashing a check.
Super Bowl ads are, near universally, terrible. It's the most misogynistic collection of 60 second spots of the year.
FTFY.
If you had a 9th grade son, would you let him play high school football?
I have this feeling, alas, that the only thing that will cause football to truly change for the safety of the players will be a death on the field. And not just a death, it'll have to be a death in the NFL or a big-time NCAA game.
That will change when coaches and programs quit treating it like the sports equivalency of war.
I've also played it in 4 different countries, which you definitely can't do with football.
I'm not sure I agree with this. In the age of social media and 24/7/365 coverage, I think what it will really take is a ~50 year old ex-NFL player chronicling the struggles of his daily life post-football via Twitter or Facebook or whatever comes next for people to really have the impact of CTE/Concussions/NFL brutality hit home. Once there are personal and humanized faces, voices, and narratives on the quality of life these guys have even 10 years after retiring, it's going to make it hard for parents to bury their heads in the sand while signing whatever ridiculous release forms will be required to play even high school football.
Darryl Stingley came pretty darned close.
I hope football goes away, because right now it is a guilty pleasure, in the truest sense of the phrase. I feel great joy in watching the games, followed by deep recrimination and doubt about whether I should enjoy it. Been troubling me since Andre Waters's suicide.
(Sigh)
And spirals!
*Though I did get knocked out for a few secs in high school during lunch hour by a forearm. And even THEN the high schools were savvy enough to tell us to knock off the 'tackle stuff'. Forcing us to try and hide the games behind the stadium in some sort of illegal, underground tackle football.
As for..."An actual death required to effect change" What are we talking about here? Outlawing kick-offs altogether? How bout only allowing 10 passes per game? Go to flag football? I did at one point propose a weight limit on players though.
I'm married to a pediatrician, and she says that many of her patients who play football and get concussions are pushed by their parents to go back on the field as soon as possible, something the coaches are also encouraging. Scary stuff.
As far as I'm concerned, the sooner this barbaric sport becomes marginalized (a la boxing, etc), the better.
You guys let this one pass? Obviously the 1994 work stoppage hurt attendance, the sillyball era was an era of tremendous growth for baseball which has maintained through the roid scandals.
the collective shock of our discovery that the endpoint of this gladiatorial combat is actual death.
C'mon. Potential concussion-related deaths aside, if you weren't aware of the debilitating effects of football, you weren't paying attention. From Wiki's entry on Jim Otto:
Otto punished his body greatly during his NFL career, resulting in nearly 40 surgeries, including 28 knee operations (nine of them during his playing career alone) and multiple joint replacements. His joints are riddled with arthritis, and he has debilitating back and neck problems.
One time, Otto nearly died on the operating table. He also fought off three life-threatening bouts of infections due to his artificial joints, and during one six-month stretch, was without a proper right knee joint because he had to wait for the infection to clear up before another artificial one could be implanted. Today, Otto is handicapped, but he says he wouldn't change a thing if given the opportunity to do it over again. It's detailed, proudly, in his book, "The Pain of Glory" published in 2000.
Jim Otto had his right leg amputated on August 1, 2007.
Dick Butkus:
Butkus filed a lawsuit against the Bears in 1975, claiming the Bears knowingly kept him on the field when he should have had surgery on his knees. The Bears denied Butkus and their other players the right to seek second opinions with doctors other than the Bears team doctor. The team would also distribute painkillers so that Butkus, a major gate attraction, would be active.
Chuck Hughes, the NFL's on-field death (heart attack, not football-related).
But, yes, that sickening feeling in the stomach pops up every time a batter gets hit in the head or a pitcher takes one there just as surely as a Darryl Stingley or Napoleon McCallum type hit does.
I think it's the other way around. MMA has grown into the combat sport void created by the marginalization of boxing.
This comment is gay.
The death of Chapman was one of the reasons that the spitball was banned, and it sparked some early investigation into batting helmets (although they wouldn't start really popping up for a few decades).
No it's retarded, lame and indicative of a midget brain.
While the general trend seems toward increasing safety in sports, there's clearly a smaller opposite trend in the "extreme" direction and almost every small-time sport has its extreme wing. (I'm not sure what "extreme" baseball would look like.) Possibly this all started with the Ironman -- certainly the first well-known event I can think of. One of the century rides I do in cycling now offers the option to do it twice, four times or eight times (800 miles of cycling in 2.5-3 days) and even let a guy do I think 10 laps one year. On open roads no less.
If you do the 8-lapper you qualify for the Race Across America which is about 3000 miles. Last year's winner did it in a bit over 8 days. They have folks in their 50s and 60s doing this to themselves.
These athletes are always looking for the greater high, whether it be difficulty or endurance. MMA (presumably) draws a better TV audience than the Race Across America though.
While I understand where you are coming from, I'm not so sure. I remember when driving after drinking was considered a cool, macho thing to do. Not anymore. I think the immediate danger for football is the looming lawsuits. Some of them are going to be successful and it remains to be seen if the game can withstand that onslaught and still remain a game that we all recognize.
That, and all the corruption.
100% agree, but I chose to put it in language that Joey can understand.
This. The thing is though that boxing was marginalized because of corruption, lack of credible structure and titles, and the fact that major championship fights (especially at the heavyweight level) were both too infrequent and never shown on anything except pay-per-view. If boxing had been marginalized because people found it too unsafe and violent, it wouldn't have been replaced by MMA which seems to me to be even more violent and unsafe.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you put on old fashioned Roman-style gladiatorial fights to the death, millions would pay to watch... millions would also be outside protesting, but millions would watch.
I think the idea is to encase the brain in an impermeable shell, but it seems all that does after a hit is to cause the brain to rattle around inside the skull like a ping pong ball.
You missed the point. Let me put it more bluntly:
If you only came to realize how debilitating football is due to the recently discovered issues of concussion-related death then you have had your head in the sand for your entire football-watching life. Did you read the bit on Jim Otto? Did you seriously think I was promoting that as a good outcome?
And did you bother to read the bit I was commenting on? Here it is again: the collective shock of our discovery that the endpoint of this gladiatorial combat is actual death. Yep, as long as it was just disability, lifelong pain, crippling arthritis at 40, amputation we were fine with the "endpoint of this gladiatorial combat." The author of the piece apparently never gave a thought to what happens to these guys after they limp off the field for the last time until now.
It's been a barbarous sport for my entire lifetime. Some of us didn't require actual deaths to recognize that.
Didn't your daughter get hit by a foul ball when she was an infant?
Stuff like 'The Jack Tatum Hit of the Week' kinda gets to the football mentality. No, I wouldn't want my kid to play football.
There's actually been quite a lot of thought put into this. One problem is that softer materials mean more friction. When a modern football helmet hits another player or the ground, it tends to slide; if it didn't, every play involving the head would twist the neck of the wearer – well, even more than current helmets do.
If you can invent a soft but slick helmet, you'll find a market.
RE: the concussion/CTE problem, the latest research indicates that the problem isn't necessarily big, violent "helmet to helmet" collisions (though clearly those are bad news) but equally the smaller, repetitive hits and jars to the head (especially on the lines.) A game full of swats to the head by "swim move" d-linemen is worse statistically than one crushing hit from Ed Reed. In that same line, there's a growing pool of data against headers in soccer.
I did have one hit where I wasn't exactly seeing straight for a minute or two afterwards. I didn't think about it at the time, mostly because thinking in the long term isn't in the job description for a 14 year old, but in retrospect I'm glad I just did the one year. I stopped mostly because the coaches did a lot more yelling than I care to hear in peace time.
EDIT: Apparently someone named Clifton Dawson has played for a few NFL teams and was also on one of the teams in our conference that year. I don't recall him personally, but the team he played for destroyed us pretty handily. So that's something I didn't know before today. In all likelihood I was run over by a future NFL running back!
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