"Heads get in the way"

John Kass writes at the Chicago Tribune,

To witness the death of the multi-billion dollar National Football League, you really don't need to see sportswriters wringing their hands over the moral dilemma of covering America's Roman circus of brain trauma.

And you don't need to watch multi-millionaire football stars, pampered for most of their lives, ostentatiously disrespecting the American national anthem, kneeling, their raised fists in the air.

You don't need to see the desperation in the NFL's television commercials: actresses in team gear, holding snack trays to feed their (virtual) extended team-gear-wearing families, as the NFL begs middle-class women to mother their game before it dies.

You don't have to do any of that to see how football is dying.

All you have to do is go out to a youth football field, as I did on Sunday morning, and talk to parents and coaches.

...what makes football different from the others is the design of the game — sending bodies crashing in high speed, high impact collisions. It is what makes it awesome and dangerous and fun to play.

Heads get in the way. And football provides not only concussions, but by design, multiple hits to the head. There is no getting around this.

Read more here.

A journey to New Mexico

My son Jon has been working very hard to develop his skills as a linebacker for the Santa Fe Junior Varsity football team this year. The team has struggled, to put it mildly, but nevertheless, Jon requested my presence at his final jayvee game yesterday in Taos, New Mexico. I told him to contact his older brother Erik, and that if Erik could get time off from his job, I would also request time off. Erik came through, and drove me down to Taos and back to Colorado after the game and a family dinner.

We left early yesterday, and, while waiting for the rest of the family to join us for lunch, even had time to do some fishing on the Red River in northern New Mexico. Alpha male Erik never goes anywhere without fishing gear. He baited my hook and loaned me a fishing pole.



Expert fisherman Erik then proceeded to catch three beautiful brook trout. He encouraged me to drop my line in a pool just beyond a big rock. This was the result a few minutes later!



I'll end this post with this: after the game Jon's coach told him that although his jayvee season had come to an end, he still needed Jon to extend his football season a few more days, so Jon could be promoted to the varsity team for Friday night's season-ending varsity game!

I am so proud of Jon and all the kids Colleen and I have raised, and are currently raising. Each one of them has so many admirable character traits.

Virtual Reality may revolutionize football training

Bruce Feldman writes at Fox Sports about how virtual reality is on the verge of transforming how quarterbacks prepare in college and the NFL. Stanford Cardinal Coach David Shaw sees the massive potential of virtual reality training for QBs and predicts it will soon be widespread.

Shaw spent almost a decade coaching in the NFL and can recall at least four instances where his team's third-string QB was forced into action, and this technology would've been a huge asset. "That (third-stringer) is not getting any reps. Not any practice time. If that third QB can spend 10 to 15 (minutes) a week on this, and then he's thrown into active duty in the middle of the fourth quarter because he's felt those blitzes come at him and he's seen how we're gonna pick this blitz up and this is where the route is going to come open, he's mentally and emotionally and visually been there. As we've learned from virtual reality, your body doesn't know the difference.

Read more here.