Injuries in NFL Players

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Injuries in Sports

Al Toon, father of Saints receiver Nick Toon, was forced to leave professional football after sustaining nine concussions in eight years of professional football. Football is one of the most dangerous games. As the years go on, more and more rules are being written to prevent the danger, but danger is the nature of the game. Most of these rules are for the protection of the players, but there are times when injuries can be a good thing. The Philadelphia Eagles were 3-5 to start the year, but Michael Vick was injured and the backup quarterback led the team to be 10-6, win the division, and almost beat the New Orleans Saints in the playoffs. "About 1.7 million Americans suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) every year, about three-quarters of them mild TBIs, or concussions" (Clemmitt). Traumatic Brain Injuries are used as the main form of evidence in Richard Cohen's claim that the end of the NFL is near, and quite frankly, his argument is pretty solid.

Looking at the severity of injuries in the NFL in this day and age, and then looking at what the NFL does to protect players, the NFL is a business. Everything is politics. It has turned into who has the best stadium rather than who has the best players. The NFL is all about who has the best fans, not who has the best coach. The better fans you have, the more money you make, but the better coach you get, the more money you have to pay him. Growing up as a fan of the NFL, it saddens me to see the decline of the sport I love so much, but it is nearly inevitable. Soon enough, everyone in the NFL will be injured, and football will be over. The way things are going, players are dropping faster than we are gaining them. We only draft new players into the league once a...

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...onclusion, injuries can change the way a game is played. The team's efforts can be stopped or jumpstarted based on the situation in which the injury occurred. The morale of a team is marginally affected by injuries in garbage time, which is the last 4 minutes of a game, where the team is just trying to prevent the opponent from doing anything. Most injuries cause issues later on in life. Concussion victims often have permanent brain damage, which affects their life after retirement. Injuries not only devastate a player, it devastates everything around them.

Works Cited

Clemmitt, Marcia. "Traumatic Brain Injury." CQ Researcher 1 June 2012: 477-500. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.

Adekoya, Nelson, and Ranjit Majumder. "Fatal Traumatic Brain Injury, West Virginia, 1989–1998." Public Health Reports 119.5 (2004): 486-92. Print.

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