Malcom Gladwell on Penn Football - "Students Should Boycott"

It's bad for football. I question any parent who lets their young child play football.

The decision to go on to college football is often an economic one.

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

wondering wrote:

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

A 4:30 miler.

Yeah, their 100,000+ attendance at games and top 10 ranking clearly prove that football isn't an important part of the culture.

wondering wrote:

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

LRC, home of the functionally illiterate.

More like 4:11.

Once wrote:

wondering wrote:

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

A 4:30 miler.

The students at Penn State are probably the last people to boycott their football games.

However, what happens over time will be interesting, however. The pipeline from youth football is starting to dry up over concussion concerns.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-football-youth-decline-met-20170904-story.html

Competing things like the Internet and video games probably aren't helping. Kids with options may be moving to other sports or not getting into sports at all.

At some point, especially with the second tier schools, there may be a real problem filling out teams with "student-athletes" if a lot of the talent pool evaporates.

wondering wrote:

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

I see him in the West Village all the time (my neighborhood in NYC.) He goes to my gym. Very wiry looking.

Penn and Penn State are different universities...

I have seen the decline of football in my well off suburban neighborhood. The local youth league used to field 13 teams in the most frequent weight class, now it has been pared down to four or five teams. Boys who like contact sports tend to turn to lacrosse.

One local coach thinks the challenge is steep. It is hard to obtain truly good coaches (in response to the concussion problem, there is lots instruction on tackling, some of it conflicting, including something calls Heads Up football, which seems to me to be just as much of a problem as it encourages a bigger player to engage in rag doll type tackling with heads bouncing on the field).

I appreciate this guy's comments because even with instruction, there is little chance I could be a competent youth football coach (basketball I played in high school, and I find it much easier to coach at the youth level - ditto for track and cross country, where all you really want is low pressure participation for the young kids).

There, too, is a push to make weight classes narrower in range for pee wee football to minimize injury, making it harder to field as many teams. And suburban parents are far more cautious than they used to be. My daughter's high school - state champions in XC and football 12 years ago, is still very competitive in XC, but is having trouble fielding enough numbers to make for a meaningfully competitive team. If youth leagues suffer (football is not easy to learn to play well), the sport will suffer at the more senior levels.

I don't think the fall-off is as steep in less well off environments. But one wonders whether football will go the way of boxing, although college football is today very popular in the south.

I am a football fan, largely because my grandfather was a pro football player and watching football makes me feel a connection to him. It took years off his life, however. He would have enjoyed watching my brother and me compete in NCAA Division 1, being a sprinter himself, and his somewhat abbreviated life from pro football prevented him from doing so. Notwithstanding, I am nowhere near as avid as a fan as I used to be, and would not spend the time or money to go to a NFL game now.

Gladwell was talking about Penn--the University of Pennsylvania--not Penn State. He's suggesting that academically-focused schools that have relatively less of their institutional identity derived through participation in major sports be the first to step away. I'm not really sure of the reasoning here. If Stanford, Vanderbilt, and the Ivies stop playing football, would that really mean Michigan and Ohio State decide eventually to retire the sport? BTW, doesn't he say "two years ago" referring to the Penn captain's 2010 suicide? Is this video clip five years old?

Drought predicted wrote:

The students at Penn State are probably the last people to boycott their football games.

What does he think about Teller Football?

Other than an annual Harvard-Yale touch football game for no one over 180 pounds, the Ivy League shouldn't have football. Okay, Dartmouth can play Princeton in frisbee football.

I don't think the followers of the sport are going to be following Sam Roberts here.

For one thing, he keeps talking about this nineteenth century sport.

Today's game is nothing like the game it was when it started.

It was safer back then. In fact, they should go back to leather helmets. It's players feeling safe and leading with their hard helmets that is the main issue now.

All of the research is on designing the helmets to take a harder blow when they should be designing them to not give such a hard blow.

I don't see the fans boycotting because a very small percentage of players have issues.

The school administrators aren't going to give up the money and exposure.

And as long as the players want to play, there will be the sport.

It would be easier to enact a total gun ban in the US because of the health risks then to get rid football for this.

If students at Penn, or really any of the Ivies, did boycott their schools' football games, how different would that look from the way it is now, aside from the Harvard-Yale game?

derp wrote:

wondering wrote:

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

LRC, home of the functionally illiterate.

You are a prime example since you apparently completely missed the point.

Once wrote:

wondering wrote:

Who is Malcom Gladwell?

A 4:30 miler.

THE430miler

runn wrote:

It's bad for football. I question any parent who lets their young child play football.

The decision to go on to college football is often an economic one.

It's bad for football, but Gladwell is correct.

CTE should really be the end of football as we know it. Perhaps the States should adopt something safer. Like rugby.

Who cares? If people know the risks and still want to bash their heads against each other, let them.