[quote]PB Andy wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]krebcycle wrote:
[quote]PB Andy wrote:
[quote]krebcycle wrote:
[quote]PB Andy wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Bambi wrote:
I don’t play or watch football (swim and play rugby when I’m not too injured). But it is a tough sport - saying it’s not is like me saying that American Football is easier than rugby because you’re all wearing sissy padding :P[/quote]
You don’t play or watch soccer, yet you feel that you’re qualified to assess how tough a sport it is? What a fucking dumbass. I swear to God, there seems to have been a huge influx of braindead nonentities on this site in the last six months.[/quote]
he may not be qualified, but he’s right, anyhow. soccer is a tough fucking sport. change of speed all the time, change of direction, reflexes, lots of collisions w/ body parts, etc. it has the highest injury rate of all sports for a reason. and it just wears you the fuck out, you are walking and sprinting for 90+ fucking minutes.[/quote]
You’re right. It is tough, but not in the sense that NFL or rugby etc are tough. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the average NFL career is about 4 seasons. Careers of 15+ years are not uncommon in football.[/quote]
I thought that NFL careers were short not because of injury, but because it is so competitive that new guys are always coming in from the draft and just taking spots.[/quote]
Perhaps you are right. I always took the short career to mean it was due to injury etc. [/quote]
It IS due to injury. The reason young players can come in and take so many jobs is because the amount of injuries players accumulate over the course of even one season can very quickly deteriorate someone’s skills and abilities. Young players are just fresh meat for the grinder.[/quote]
Not from what I’m reading…
http://nfllabor.com/2011/04/18/what-is-average-nfl-player’s-career-length-longer-than-you-might-think-commissioner-goodell-says/
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/151701.php[/quote]
The Roger Goodell article is irrelevant, just like him. He clarifies that the average career length is 6 years, which is still very, very short by professional sports’ standards. I was never arguing about the actual length of the average career. And it says nothing about why the average career is this short from a credible source.
The other article cites ONE study, a study that essentially proves my point. The position a player plays is the biggest determining factor in the length of a career. Why? Because some positions carry with them a far more explicit chance of injury than others. In essence, it IS injuries that are responsible for the short careers of many players.
Also, the NFL is like anything else. I’m sure the league has commissioned many, many studies that show, with sometimes dubious information, that injuries are not as responsible for ending careers as many think they are. Why? They’re in a fucking lockout and the NFL’s owners are not going to want to pay more of their revenue into retired players’ pensions. Any way they can show, regardless of the veracity of the claim, that injuries are not the big career-ender many make them out to makes it easier for them to have a leg to stand on when it comes to negotiating a new CBA.
It’s called lobbying. It happens everywhere. The oil industry produces reams of studies (ExxonMobil alone produces something like 200 studies a year) that downplay or outright deny global warming, for instance.