The fact that anyone even has the right to sue is exactly what is wrong with this country and why it is going down the tubes -- No one ever forced anybody to button up a chinstrap.
Right, but in order to get to that state of affairs the people providing the chinstraps would have to give a full explanation of the benefits and maledictions involved and so far they have not done that. If the NFL issued a standard rider in every player's contract telling the players that 65% of all ex-players have significant concussive damage as a result of their time playing football and that offensive linemen, defensive linemen and linebackers tend to lose close to 20 years of life expectancy after a 5+ year career as a starter the odds are enormous that most players at that level would waive the NFL's liability and play anyway. However if the NFL were to do that then virtually every high school in the country would drop football like a hot potato and the NFL's entertainment value and talent supply would both be in sharp decline. People would still watch football, because spectacles always draw a crowd, however a significant portion of the audience would evaporate because lots of people watch football primarily because they played football at one point and have an affinity for it as a result of that experience. Other people would decline to watch because their personal preferences don't include watching gory spectacles and once the cat is out of the bag on the health issues, well football becomes a decidedly gory spectacle. Now we get to the meat and potatoes because if the NFL did that then all the big TV contracts from solid national networks would begin to go away. Those networks are part of corporations with very deep pockets and corporate lawyers are very good at steering their corporations away from the fully exposed liability that a true accounting of the costs and benefits of football would create. BTW, the answer is probably to begin a substantial re-engineering of the game from the ground up, and not just the safety rules slowly being put into place. They need to re-think the physics of the game. Linemen should be held to a certain BMI and not allowed to just expand into round mounds of destruction. All players that will see significant contact on a play should start the play in contact with the person they are opposite. No players should be allowed to create a double team in the trenches unless they begin the play in contact with the player they will be double teaming. No player should be allowed to tackle somebody with a running start of more than 3 steps. Tackles on the move, with more than 3 steps, should be required to be side by side and above the knees and below the shoulders. Maybe above the waist and below the shoulders. They already have rules against launching into a tackle, they need to solidify those to prevent heavy head on collisions precipitated by the defensive player. Holding rules need to be loosened some and defensive use of hands to remove holds should also be loosened. Taking a locked opponent to the ground should be covered by strict rules in the trenches. They do most of this stuff with wrestling already, which is why wrestling is in no danger of extinction as a high school sport. Football should study what works in wrestling and why it works to keep people safe from serious injury. Those same precepts could be used to make line play in the trenches much safer and without removing most of the action involved. The NFL won't do most of this yet, because the golden goose isn't on the chopping block yet. It would really pay to start exploring where to go though, because once it gets on the chopping block it'll be hard to rescue.
I think that remains to be seen. As more and more flags are thrown on the field and the big hits that have always been a big selling point of the NFL become fewer and fewer for player safety and as long as the NFL tries to counter by making the offense ever more dynamic at the expensive of a defense then it becomes less and less the NFL and more the Indoor football league it becomes like...and it will lose it's appeal....I'm so sick of all the flags where if a defensive player even breathes on an offensive player there's a flag (okay slight exaggeration, for now), but it's only going to get worse.
