Tua Tagovailoa’s injury is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is a weekly media glorification of the National Football League’s TV ratings and the TV show that the NFL produces does bring a massive amount of eyeballs to the video screen no matter the platform. But there is not a media glorification of the brutality of football. That changed somewhat after the Miami Dolphins player Tua Tagovailoa suffered his third known concussion while being tackled in a game seen by millions on a streaming platform. There were discussions by the TV talking heads and the radio gabbers and columns such as this in the Washington Post. The dread of watching Tua Tagovailoa play football. The gabbers are telling the Miami player to retire. But there has not been too much attention placed on what is going on with the NFL’s feeder system. Since the beginning of the summer, 11 young players have died while participating in grade school and college football related activities, some from heat stroke, some from head injuries. The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research reported 16 total football-related deaths in 2023. Nine of those 16 victims were in middle or high school.
The Panama City News Herald ran a headline, Teams mourn, celebrate fallen high school football player. Around 110 years ago, newspapers ran stories and editorials about the brutality of the game and there were calls to ban the game. Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban football unless rules were implemented to make the game safer after a reported 40 players died from injuries suffered on the field over a two-year period in 1904 and 1905. President Roosevelt brought the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Princeton into the Oval Office and told them to fix the game or else. Rules were implemented to make the game safer but more than a century later football remains a brutal game.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
Tua Tagovailoa
