The End of Football

[I.J. Reilly]

I wish I still lived in Michigan, just to say "I told you so" to all the UM fans I knew that liked the Hoke hire.

I know a lot of Michigan fans and they all liked the Hoke hire. Sure, they would have preferred Harbaugh or Les Miles, but they were satisfied with Hoke. At this point, they all seem to still like Hoke as a person but are not very happy with the state of the football program.

[woot]

Sigh. This has been a real charlie foxtrot. The AD really needs to be fired for various reasons, and I hope that happens before they fire Hoke so that the new AD can handle the search. So that might be one reason it's taking a while to fire Hoke. Another reason might be that there's no good interim HC candidate. Hoke and the DC are best friends, so if you fire Hoke you might not even have a DC, let alone one willing to fill in as HC. The new OC is responsible for a tire fire of an offense, so giving him a promotion might not be a good idea either.

The AD hung Hoke out to dry on this one, letting him stand up and answer questions without having been told the relevant information, essentially being made into Baghdad Bob. The reason for this seems to have been that the AD was working on convincing the UM physicians that the medical statement didn't need to use the word "concussion". The docs won, but the fight took so long that the medical statement didn't get released until 12:52 this morning, more than 12 hours after the press conference at which the statement was supposed to be available. And the statement ended up coming from the AD rather than the medical staff.

I do agree that Hoke needs to be fired. His refusal to wear a headset on the field, which has long been harped on but which never seemed that important to me, contributed to his inability to understand what was going on in time to do anything about it. I get that coaches have other things going on and might have missed it when it happened, but there's gotta be somebody in Hoke's ear yelling at him to get Shane out, and it didn't happen.

I think Hoke cares a great deal about his players, and that this incident isn't about his character. This incident is about his competence, and that of the whole AD. The lack of player development has already told us that, and the fan base had already turned on him before this incident occurred. I do hope the wheels are turning and that we'll see action taken this week. The regents are supposedly meeting this morning.

[Paperback Writer]

Sigh. This has been a real charlie foxtrot. The AD really needs to be fired for various reasons, and I hope that happens before they fire Hoke so that the new AD can handle the search. So that might be one reason it's taking a while to fire Hoke. Another reason might be that there's no good interim HC candidate. Hoke and the DC are best friends, so if you fire Hoke you might not even have a DC, let alone one willing to fill in as HC. The new OC is responsible for a tire fire of an offense, so giving him a promotion might not be a good idea either.

The AD hung Hoke out to dry on this one, letting him stand up and answer questions without having been told the relevant information, essentially being made into Baghdad Bob. The reason for this seems to have been that the AD was working on convincing the UM physicians that the medical statement didn't need to use the word "concussion". The docs won, but the fight took so long that the medical statement didn't get released until 12:52 this morning, more than 12 hours after the press conference at which the statement was supposed to be available. And the statement ended up coming from the AD rather than the medical staff.

I do agree that Hoke needs to be fired. His refusal to wear a headset on the field, which has long been harped on but which never seemed that important to me, contributed to his inability to understand what was going on in time to do anything about it. I get that coaches have other things going on and might have missed it when it happened, but there's gotta be somebody in Hoke's ear yelling at him to get Shane out, and it didn't happen.

I think Hoke cares a great deal about his players, and that this incident isn't about his character. This incident is about his competence, and that of the whole AD. The lack of player development has already told us that, and the fan base had already turned on him before this incident occurred. I do hope the wheels are turning and that we'll see action taken this week. The regents are supposedly meeting this morning.

The blueprint typically followed is to fire the AD during the season and get the new AD in place or at least an interim who can help make a decision on a new HC with a committee. Then the HC is gone at the end of the regular season with hopefully a new HC quickly in place to help with recruiting so that highly rated recruits who are verbally committed to Michigan and Hoke can be kept in the fold with the new HC. My guess is that Michigan is working on acquiring their next AD or at least someone to act as an interim AD. They're probably also searching for Hoke's replacement but that's difficult to finalize without an AD since the university has to hold someone accountable if the next HC follows in the footsteps of RichRod and Hoke.

Hopefully, Michigan rebounds with their next HC. The B1G needs a formidable Michigan to be regarded as a strong conference. If its any consolation, Nebraska went through similar challenges with its next two HC hires after Tom Osborne retired.

[Joe Public]

I wish I still lived in Michigan

[BigPiney]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...brain-disease/

...the nation’s largest brain bank focused on traumatic brain injury has found evidence of a degenerative brain disease in 76 of the 79 former players it’s examined.

the NFL expects nearly a third of all retired players to develop a long-term cognitive problem, such as Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, as a result of football.

[falafel]

I stumbled on this Jimmy Mac video after watching the HOF speech from last night. Crazy to see how they joke around about a concussion and how Ditka was ready to put him back in for the second half. Kind of a chilling video.

[SCcoug]

I stumbled on this Jimmy Mac video after watching the HOF speech from last night. Crazy to see how they joke around about a concussion and how Ditka was ready to put him back in for the second half. Kind of a chilling video.

Man that is old. Oakland was wining in the playoffs.

[beefytee]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/video/sport...ned/vi-BB8vQy7

[dabrockster]

I wish I still lived in Michigan, just to say "I told you so" to all the UM fans I knew that liked the Hoke hire.

I like the Hoke hire..

[MarkGrace]

The Conservative Case for Football. Starts with some BYU action:

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here today in the spirit of open-minded inquiry. To get answers to urgent questions. I’ll begin. Congressman, do you recall your game-winning kick in the 1988 Freedom Bowl?

“I can still vividly see it,” said Jason Chaffetz, a Republican Congressional representative from Utah.
http://grantland.com/features/the-co...at-concussion/
You were a kicker for BYU. Did you hold any sort of partisan grudge against your opponent, the Colorado Buffaloes?

“The sweet part for me was, I graduated high school in Colorado,” Chaffetz said. “But CU would not recruit me. They would not look at my tapes, nothing. It was a little payback time for them.”

Thank you. Tell us, were any sports clichés going through your mind as you approached the ball?

“‘Slow and steady,’” Chaffetz said. “The hardest part for a place-kicker is you don’t do anything for an hour and a half. And then you get one swing of the leg. This whole idea of icing … that is the biggest help a kicker could ever get. Think about it. If you were playing basketball, if you sat on the bench for an hour and a half and they called you in for one free throw — do you want to dribble it or do you want to just walk up to the line and shoot?”

Congressman, as you’re no doubt aware, the ball you kicked against Colorado traveled through the uprights. BYU won by three points. Please, describe for the committee how you celebrated.

[Inaudible.]

Let the record show that the gentleman from Utah has formed dorky-looking pistols with his hands and is pumping them in the air.

Jason Chaffetz still keeps his BYU helmet in his office on Capitol Hill. Compared to today’s barbutes, the helmet feels as fragile as an eggshell, and has the telltale double bar of the late-’80s kicker — the mark of Rich Karlis.

Chaffetz’s former teammate, Ty Detmer, once inscribed an autograph, “Jason, Get a new face mask …” Which isn’t to say that Chaffetz didn’t take his share of licks. One Saturday against Wyoming, his kickoff fell short of the end zone and a Cowboys blocker laid him out during the return. “I’m sure he got a sticker on his helmet,” Chaffetz said. Another time, when Chaffetz was playing for BYU’s JV squad, a guy on the return team fooled him by not retreating after the kickoff but running straight toward him. Chaffetz remembers his hand being crushed between the guy’s helmet and his own pads. Somehow, it wasn’t broken.

So the Subcommittee on Football’s Never-Ending Existential Crisis would stipulate that Chaffetz knows something of the game. Although he’s not Steve Young, Chaffetz has been knocked around. Congressman, would you call federal hearings on head injuries?

“I’d rather not,” Chaffetz said. “We have enough to do in this world. If you don’t want to get a concussion, don’t play football.

“You take the basic principles of what government should and should not be doing,” he continued. “This is a classic example.”

Chaffetz was making what we might call the conservative case for football. Arguments once restricted to Roger Goodell can now be found nesting in book-length tracts and Politico op-eds. It’s not just that football has been politicized — everything in the known universe has been politicized. It’s that football has been placed in a familiar political frame. The conservative frame is thus: A cherished American institution is being dogpiled by nanny-staters, media elites, P.C. dogmatists, trial lawyers, union organizers, and — for conservatives, this covers most of the former — those who would make us a softer, wussier people.

“We don’t need flag football,” Chaffetz said. “We’re turning into a society of wimps. Politically correct wimps.” As football’s critics close in, Chaffetz and other conservatives are standing athwart the goal line, yelling, “Stop!

http://grantland.com/features/the-co...at-concussion/

[beefytee]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/ma...l-forever.html

Boxing, once hugely popular, has been pushed to the margins of American culture. Many commentators have asked whether that could happen to football...

But what if the template for football’s future is not the fate of boxing but rather that of the tobacco industry? The parallels, of course, are not perfect. But tobacco, like football, was once deeply embedded in the American economy, culture and mythology.

[Blueintheface]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/ma...l-forever.html

A nation of pussy lawyers.

[MarkGrace]

A nation of pussy lawyers.

The Conservative Case for Football.

[Topper]

Football is fun for fans but dumb for players. Can you imagine Jamal on thr pitch or basketball court?

[Katy Lied]

"From Superbowl Champion to Homeless Retiree." Terry Tautolo's fight against CTE. Minus the beard and the meth abuse, He reminds me of my father.

http://thescene.com/watch/gq/casualt...meless-retiree

The whole series (2 seasons) of Casualties of the Gridiron is pretty good.