GaryPinC

No they would most likely not, chicken little. They really don't know, and is the prevalence of CTE in ex-college football players the same as the NFL? No chicken little, they do not seem to agree on this at this time, most researchers would probably tell you they don't know for sure what causes it, current thinking and standard of care leans toward "repetitive injury superimposed on unresolved injury" ie, not allowing an injured brain to fully recover. Most experts would probably agree that enough significant hits to the head in a short time would cause some mild form of post-concussion syndrome even if classic concussion behavioral/cognitive effects were not observed That's debatable. There are protocols based on sound science, questionnaires and tasks that expose cognitive deficits post-injury and measurable time limits when those deficits have returned back to normal. Keep in mind a couple distinctions that you do not seem to be recognizing: CTE: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma. Brain trauma can cause a build-up of an abnormal type of a protein called tau, which slowly kills brain cells. Once started, these changes in the brain appear to continue to progress even after exposure to brain trauma has ended. Post-concussion syndrome, also known as postconcussive syndrome or PCS, is a set of symptoms that may continue for weeks, months, or a year or more after a concussion – a minor form of traumatic brain injury (TBI). There is a big difference between CTE and Post-concussion syndrome that you do not appear to be appreciating. There is no diagnostic for CTE so most of the studies are using accelerometers to study PCS. Keep in mind a couple things: enough subconcussive hits do affect the brain and some areas of cognition. What that means wrt to CTE is unknown. Check out this website and 5:13 slide in the video of Dr. Alice McKee from BU. http://concussionfoundation.org/learning-center/what-is-cte Also interesting is that 250 brains have been donated for study by NFL and military personnel, 150 have tested positive for CTE. This is a highly biased sampling of brains, I actually would have expected the number of positives to be higher. Research is currently mostly studying post-concussion syndrome and repetitive (subconcussive) brain trauma. There is still a huge leap to be made to CTE. Considering CTE's lack of symptomatic prevalence in the athlete's population as a whole (ie high school and college ex-atheletes), there is a ton of work left to be done.

Thanks for the perspective Augie. Sounds like your boys were pretty passionate about their sports, so congrats on that. I definitely don't take it too seriously but I do emphasize the importance of team commitment and trying to develop their passion in at least one sport. It's great practice for adult life. I coach soccer so I got that one covered! Only bad thing about soccer is when I switched to football in high school (TE/DE), I'd do squats with the linemen and bench press with the receivers! I'm with ya, just have to fight that urge to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Current concussion research has at least helped my parenting decisions, and I think it'll ultimately make football a safer sport.

Hey thanks for the excellent reframing of the discussion! Nice! Thanks for sharing that, I will definitely enjoy my time! My original point was to boyst for wanting to dismiss what research had been done. Being in science, I understand and at times agree with his perspective but I feel there's enough solid evidence in this instance to warrant caution. Just don't get me started on global warming! My son is 10 and just loves football. I signed him up for tackle football at age 7 cause he wouldn't have been happy otherwise, the kid's a bruiser. All his coaches put him on the offensive and defensive lines because of it. Thing is, he's got hands, a good arm and the moves to make people miss. Never had a concussion, but this fall he's playing touch football. He wants to handle/make plays with the ball and isn't that fond of the punishment his body takes, so let him have a couple years to develop his ball skills, minimize concussion risk, and he can get back to it in middle school.

I don't argue with that and in fact agree, but the issue is if the players are receiving appropriate medical treatment for their injury? In the past they largely have not. On a personal note, expanded knowledge about the long term issues with concussions have absolutely changed my approach with my kids and sports. And I already knew sports were inherently dangerous!

The issue at the crux of this is not that sports are dangerous and involve risk. The crux is that repeated brain injuries may be far more damaging than suspected in the past and what do we do about it? If you suffer a broken bone, torn muscle, sprained ankle there are protocols of treatment. In the past almost nothing was done for brain injuries and now our scope of knowledge is changing rapidly. Probably only in the last 10 years or so do players now begin to realize they may become mentally dysfunctional after they leave the sport to the point of suicide.

No. Scientific evidence has been building for years across multiple sports that sustained concussions with subsequent repeated blows to the head may result in long term damage including CTE. Despite WEO's chicken little scenarios, evidence and current standard of care is that the brain is vulnerable to long term damage if subsequent blows to the head occur before the brain has had a chance to recover from the initial concussive injury. Do we yet know susceptability, damage thresholds, etc? No but that will take 10 to 20 years of study. I agree that incomplete science can be problematic but you don't just ignore it, especially when enough solid evidence has been compiled to indicate a real problem. Concussion protocols include carefully crafted questions to assess different cognitive processes looking for deficits. The science on that is pretty solid. My 12 year old daughter had a mild concussion last year falling on the concrete in the cul-de-sac but it took her 2 1/2 months to fully recover back to normal. One of my biggest issues as a coach is parents who want to ignore concussions because that's how it was done when they were kids. Why is it such a sin when research is incomplete to take a pro-active cautious approach?

When you're not running a good ball movement offense that's what happens!

That's how they look so far in this series but that's not how they got to the finals. Coach Lue has decided to attack the basket every time down the floor with Lebron or Kyrie. There's no off the ball movement and no emphasis put on the 3 pointer. Cavs have the long distance sharpshooters but the supporting cast is not stepping up and maybe not being asked to step up? Very infuriating but their style on offense has changed back to dysfunctional with this series. No flow or teamwork. They need to get that fixed for Wednesday and without Kevin Love to help.

+1 I would have put the SB loss #1 and I do think it affected the players psyche in the next 3 but you make a really great point about the music city game. Losing the 4 super bowls (and not just XXV) was the largest blow to the image of the franchise but that music city game was much more devastating to the franchise itself.

Perhaps mom feels terrible for the death of the gorilla and holds herself accountable for losing track of her son just long enough to climb in. Too bad few on here can applaud the fact that people are trying to be accountable for their mistakes in the situation. We'll see what happens...

I can't say for sure whether it was horrible parenting or not, based on one simple fact. I am a parent myself. My son was about 18 months and we introduced him to his first pool. Had him in there, played nice, set him on the deck with my ex while I then played with my daughter in the water. The little bugger silently stood there, took a few slow steps then started shriek laughing and sprinting to the far end of the pool and just leaped straight in to the 5 foot depth. My ex was in hot pursuit but a second or so behind once the realization and shock wore off. He was under 2-3 seconds but came up smiling and obviously held his breath. Oy. I suppose if he would have needed medical care there would be people thinking of us as horrible parents. Kids can change a situation dramatically within seconds for any parent. Some kids do, some kids don't. I had one of each. At least I knew which to target. :-)

There's a difference between horrible parenting and distracted parenting accident which can happen when you're responsible for more than one supercharged kid heading in different directions. Normally not as dire a situation, and I don't know the story here but I can easily argue that it might not be horrible parents or parenting.

I expect Clinton's campaign to go after the fact that Colon Powell set up his own laptop with a private line in his office. The big difference in reality is that he informed the proper people exactly what he was doing, the government's server was only good for internal communications at the time and the report acknowledges the security system was a mess and still being developed during his tenure. Despite the government's incompetence, it's obvious in the report Hillary was hiding her emails. Got my popcorn ready!

Hmmm. I hate to say it, but it seems like we could fix a lot of our problems if we arranged an "accident" for Bill Belichek before he became DC of the Giants.

Fantastic. When in a significant way? Cleveland Browns fans are curious too.

Not at this time, but the future timing of it is difficult to predict.

Well, he came in and tweaked that shoulder putting a swim move on a tackling dummy. He's obviously worked around it his college career and given his MCL sprain didn't stop him from playing against Alabama, the dude will play through pain. Don't get me wrong, I like the pick from a talent standpoint, but how do your medical staff and coaching staff fail to test this shoulder sufficiently if that was all it took to tweak it? I look at the big picture: Our top two draft picks have health concerns, Ragland's being more concerning. Do we trust our medical staff opinions that Ragland will be fine? His career is probably one of the worst choices for someone with an enlarged aorta. I don't know that anyone can predict how quickly it might or might not expand, I know if it were me I'd want it echoed more than once a year. http://www.umcvc.org/conditions-treatments/aortic-disease-faqs http://www.healthcentral.com/heart-disease/c/1435/118832/neglected/ The thing is we're trying to make the playoffs and we need to do 2 or 3 games better than last year. and are forced to rely on rookies. One may be down till November and the other one's health is quite frankly an unknown moving forward. I don't fault the talent selection, just question the medical opinions.

I don't disagree with you, but us fans have some reason to be pissed off. Lawson was sold by the FO as a day one starter that needed to replace Mario Williams, everyone acknowledged the injury but he had been cleared by medical and was expected to get the surgery during the following offseason unless he was essentially unlucky and injured it during the regular season. Lawson himself said in an interview it hadn't bothered him in a couple years. Then he has an "occurrence" during a non-contact rookie mini-camp? Either our medical staff sucks at evaluating players or our FO lied to us about his chances of playing the season. Given the playoff drought and FO promises, it seems likely the "occurrence" was a significant change of his condition. I hope Pegula understood that Lawson might be injured this quickly, otherwise I'd be pissed.

It wasn't diagnosed until around February 2016. He's a sixth round pick, so obviously we didn't stick our neck out too much but it is encouraging our scouts are willing to put extra effort in on a guy like this as opposed to just writing him off or going with a guy with the best stats for the pick. I think he was just too stubborn to admit it was a problem, let alone a problem on the field.

http://www.buffalobills.com/news/article-1/A-much-clearer-outlook-for-CB-Kevon-Seymour/2662fabb-f625-4894-bb5d-9e1bcd9f1f37 What a great story about how our scouts look beyond the measurables for NFL talent. Can't believe USC never figured this out. Definitely builds my confidence in our due diligence. Especially if it works out like they are hoping! Despite the revelation of his poor eyesight, NFL teams still saw a senior corner who could not get back into the starting lineup and had just one interception and no pass breakups in his final season. The Bills however, saw encouraging potential and minimal risk in making the USC product a sixth-round pick. Blessed with the physical measurables and movement skills of an NFL cornerback, as long as Seymour can capably adjust with fully corrected vision, those plays that went for pass breakups could turn into takeaways.

I'm with you, have to wonder about Lee because that cheat step provides a little extra leverage and weight focus to help you explode backwards. You look at runners coming out of their blocks and in soccer we always coach some degree of staggered stance when defending. Just easier to make a quick move. Maybe the cheat isn't that critical for a qb?

Not just OSU fans! : http://www.rolltide.com/sports/m-footbl/recaps/010215aaj.html COACH SABAN: ....The one thing that the new quarterback does is he has a tremendous arm. And they have some very talented receivers. And the two things that were very apparent is those things became very apparent in the last two games because of the quarterback. Now, they were a little different and the quarterback was a great runner, when 16 was playing, and he was a good passer. But it wasn't so obvious when you watched the film all season long that they had these great skill players that could really make plays down the field."

Well, here's how Glenn Parker looks at it, maybe that will help your understanding: http://bills.buffalo...rice-was-right/ “That’s the dirty secret that fans hate,” Parker said. “They love one side, but they hate the other. If you sign a contract, it’s the value at the time of the contract. If I play less than the value of the contract, I get cut. If I exceeded the value of the contract, I should be able to hold out and get more money. It’s Economics 101.” We're not going to renegotiate rookie contracts like Watkins and Darby because the economic model is that once you prove yourself in the NFL, your big payday is that second contract. Veterans would realize renegotiating rookie contracts shrinks the cash pool available to them. TT is not on a rookie contract, if he has far exceeded the value of his contract then there's a legit argument to renegotiate.

I don't know, his love of ugly-ass sport coats may scare potential teams off. Maybe TT will help him pick some more!

It's a great point and the last labor agreement finally got it right. How many millions were thrown away on Jamarcus Russels, Mike Williamses, etc? Even if a player doesn't perform for his 2nd contract it's on the FO for not figuring that out instead of a rookie crapshoot. If we had given Byrd his money we would have lost A. Williams or not been able to afford McCoy, etc. Dominoes working against the future.