Brains and football
Dylan Grigsby
I believe football and mental health are linked. People who play in the NFL have a much lower life expectancy than the average person. Do you know why? NFL players take about 360 to 450 hits in a season depending on if they make the playoffs, not including practices and scrimmages. A NFL player's average career length is 3.3 to 3.5 years. If they take the average number of hits and they have a 3 year long career they will take 1080 hits, that's a lot. What does that mean for the future of the NFL? Are injuries going to completely overshadow the game itself and most importantly is the NFL really linked to mental health?
I play football, I unfortunately have experienced a concussion. My dream is to go to the NFL. A lot of people have the same dream as me. In the NFL players get concussions all the time. One time I was playing football with my friends, my teammate and friend went for a routine tackle but overextended causing his head to go right into the ball carrier’s knee causing him to fall down awkwardly on his head. At first nobody thought anything of it until we checked on him. My friend helped him up and took him inside to make sure he was not seriously hurt. Eventually we heard he had a concussion, the point being that on just a routine tackle without the proper protection he got seriously hurt.
In the NFL, high school and college football there is a lot of contact which means a lot of injuries. Not so long ago Bills safety Damar Hamlin, just like my teammate went for a routine tackle, brought down the ball carrier. But seconds after he got up everything seemed fine he collapsed, his heart stopped on the field he luckily survived he was eventually resuscitated and eventually recovered and went back to playing professional football. Anyways the sole thing keeping football players from irreversible brain damage is the helmet.
Football has evolved over the years with new hits, formations, defences and offences but injuries evolved faster season ending injuries are now becoming more and more frequent.
I believe football should have contact and should have injuries but I also know what the NFL has done to try to make it safer like adding guardian caps (which look really stupid) and trying to add position specific helmets but throughout my time playing football I have always had this belief.
I believe football is not just linked to mental health helmets are the one thing protecting you from your head getting absolutely killed. So, will the NFL put more effort into safer helmets to protect their players mental health as well as the future of the NFL?
Writer's Statement
I wrote about football and mental health.My belief started with the football game in my friends backyard and he got a concussion as a smaller kid. I was scared that would happen to me. I wanted to quit football. I was paranoid that I would die. That belief really became more relevant when on live TV Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field. That was really scary for me. Questions like would that happen to me if I continued playing football? And was football even worth playing if I were to die?
I chose to list some number examples in the beginning of my essay so the reader would better understand just how many hits a NFL player takes in his career and just how dangerous the NFL is such as “A NFL player's average career length is 3.3 to 3.5 years. If they take the average number of hits and they have a 3 year long career they will take 1080 hits, that's a lot.”
The NFL is very complicated, it’s hard for a lot of people to understand. My essay is definitely on the more complicated side of essays but I would hope readers will take away all the dangers of the NFL I hope they can relate with my belief.