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GEORGE WILLfully ignorant
There is an assault on football afoot, and George Will is a willing participant. Not only are his facts wrong, so is his hair.
“Football’s in trouble for two reasons,” George Will explained in the wake of Seau’s suicide on ABC’s This Week. “First of all, the human body is not built for the violence that is inherent in football at the highest level. Second, people are going to watch football differently from now on, because they’re going to feel a little bit like the spectators in the Coliseum in Rome, watching people sacrificed for their entertainment, with a kind of violence that is unseemly — third suicide in 15 months.”
It may surprise the bow-tied baseball buff to learn that total suicides among Major League Baseball players greatly outnumber suicides among National Football League athletes. Should a numbskull baseball-hater have made a connection between Hideki Irabu’s recent self-inflicted death and, say, his 98 mph fastball, surely George Will would recognize the logical fallacy at work.
“For all players who play five or more years,” George Will reported in his column earlier this month, “life expectancy is less than 60; for linemen it is much less.” This isn’t true.
The study commissioned by the NFL Players Association and conducted by federal researchers found that athletes who lasted five or more years in the league between 1959 and 1993 lived longer than the average American male. As USA Today reported in May, “A records-based study of retired players conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) concludes that they have a much lower death rate than men in the general population, contrasting the notion that football players don’t live as long.”
Some people have a cultural aversion to football. Robert Maynard Hutchins, who jettisoned the original “Monsters of the Midway,” was one such man. Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, Hutchins famously quipped, I lie down until the feeling goes away. One grasps why the gridiron held no charms for such a man. The University of Chicago president found football a non sequitur for an academic institution, so in 1939 he killed off a program that once had been national champion. The Great Books devotee remarked, “Football has the same relation to education that bullfighting has to agriculture.” Perhaps so, but the analogy works for men’s gymnastics, too, which Hutchins spared from elimination.
serfer62
August 25th, 2012
There are several people, supposidly conservatives, that I just ignore completely…he’s one of them
Tim
August 25th, 2012
Back in the late 80s Football was the #1 money-maker at the University of Maryland while Physics was #2.
I doubt it’s changed.
George has been snorting glue again.
Nutjob
August 25th, 2012
What about whiffle ball or air guitar competitors?
Or people with mental or psychological disorders who play football and commit suicide?
Absolute muddjuice
August 25th, 2012
Hogwash. Perhaps the reason for suicides in sports is the change in money, fame and available drugs.
Babe Ruth drank alcohol but most likely didn’t use body and mind changing drugs/steroids.
Gordie Howe didn’t make 14.8 gazillion dollars a year.
The football men of the 1950′s had second jobs and weren’t known nationwide, much less worldwide.
The sport isn’t to blame. The worship and idolization and money and power and drugs in the sport are the problem….
mizdoolally
August 25th, 2012
His hair? You must mean his toupee! It is so obvious. Why do men do that? Can’t his wife help him pick it out?
Well, he’s over the hill anyway. I can remember back in the 60s, 70s how I hung on his every word. Now…he knows not what he says!!
Six White Cadillacs
August 25th, 2012
What the hell does a guy like that do for fun, dress up like a woman and dance with men — like Gary Busey?
FatGuyInMaine
August 25th, 2012
Once you realize Will is a baseball fanatic, and absolutely hates the fact that football long ago replaced baseball as Americans favorite sport, you understand the mindset that leads to his leaps of logic into the muddy pond of stupidity.
In truth, the only things I believe this bow tie wearing fool hates more than football are NASCAR and the Tea Party.
Stranded in Sonoma
August 25th, 2012
A while ago, the University of Michigan (I think it was UoM) was being innundated by anti-football students, alums, and the like, to do away with the football program. It cost too much, women don’t play so it’s not fair, all the usual taurusfimus. Then the university released a document showing how much money the football program brought in and which departments benefited from that money other than the football team.
Since practically every home game is a sellout, they make zillions for each home game, just in attendance!
That money goes to pay for all kinds of programs. Things like women’s sports, because they just don’t have the draw that men’s sports do. Football also pays for science grants, libraries, buildings, offices, rape crisis centers, community awareness, all of the typical liberal claptrap.
When the report was made public, all of the complainers just STFU and walked away. They had seen their gravy train and realized they almost derailed it. The football program has never been in question since.
Callmelennie
August 25th, 2012
Lot of this is being fueled by Junior Seau’s suicide, which OBTW had nothing to do with concussion, as his autopsy revealed no discernable brain trauma
Tony R
August 25th, 2012
And his tie looks stupid too.
daral harb
August 26th, 2012
seems like with will, every fourth or fifth column
{wait for it], teh response should be :
Shut Up, we explain!
Jerry Manderin
August 26th, 2012
Have Romanowski wild on roids inflict an illegal hit to George’s head.
GW Bear
August 26th, 2012
I seriously doubt if Will has ever even played touch football let alone strapped on the pads. He looks like the kid who was always picked last then told to go stand in right field or sat on the bench in gym class.