20 level which led to kind of low point of his present up to that point although now it's the good old days where the president felt like he'd been wrestling with come in the mud with big eminem afford what happened everybody gets dirty. and i think it was the promise and pledge, the goal of president clinton, president bush and president obama all essential to the first campaign in the widest to change that and to elevate themselves and our politics, and all three of them failed. this president, again not all his fault by any means but this president has in some ways been the biggest their by most metrics political science is used to measure partisanship. is really a puzzle. and while i said a lot of partisans are concerned about this there are a lot of people who are not particularly parts and/or engaged but look at the mess in washington and just kind of spread out their disdain for everybody. so it's a challenge, given the dynamics in our politics today

to fighting the other side which partisans urge everyone to do this as one of the previous questions did, and still elevate yourself with a wider electorate. because once you yield to those to do with your base, very difficult in terms of policy and rhetoric to elevate. it's a real puzzle and i think everybody in the country who cares about that not just any partially but because we want our country to have a functioning government should be encouraging politicians of both parties, which would change the dynamic, i think we spent enough years bemoaning the dynamic and how horrible that is in terms of our national image as well as getting things done. i think it's time to try to fix it. >> my question is, i was fascinated by the romney campaign surprise on election night, despite what a lot of analytics, and metrics were saying coming and. why do you think he was so blindsided by the results that night, especially when they started coming in by the

quickly? how much do you think a role groupthink played in that, you know, him of being surprised and his campaign being surprised? >> there are two big reasons. yes, the fact that governor romney and congressman ryan along with many of the people around him thought they were going to win right up until election day. part of it was one of the heirs that politicians sometimes succumb to an some reporters succumb to, which is the illusion of crowds to their presidential candidate, you're out on the road, the main thing you see everyday, all you do is you go from event to event. in passed in 2008 john mccain in the last days of the election would have very small crowds, a couple thousand people while president obama was getting 30,000 people at his events. governor romney was in a different place. he was getting crowds as big as president obama. he would go to colorado and see 35,000 people. cincinnati, ohio, a couple

nights out of election night, again 30,000 people. they did one event in pennsylvania tonight before election. there were 40,000 people there. so we thought of the crowds and energy indicated to him, in his gut instinct you would win. republican pollsters across the republican party were all measuring the wrong electric had convinced himself elected in 2012 would look more like electric in 2010 with an electorate in 2008. president obama's team was determined and spent a ton of money to make sure the electorate would look like 2012 more like it in 2008 with a rising coalition that was dominant again in 2012 and they succeeded the republicans turned out to be totally wrong. >> thank you so much. let's give our authors a round of applause. [applause]

>> and they will be autographing on the other side of the elevators on the same floor. thank you. >> ladies and gentlemen,, i

will try it one more time. ladies and gentlemen. you don't have to stop beating. -- each team will come to the final offers night academia at 2013 the conservative university lecturer series brought to us by a generous grant from the fresco foundation. redo these to give you a chance to see and hear speakers and offers you may not be exposed to on campuses you are from or over on the hill the committees that you work for.

of big thing that accuracy with academia and media is that we continuously find what keeps us going from day to day just about everything we have heard from the news broadcast in the newspaper is from. you can choose is little experiment on your own to see how well and holds up. we do it day in and day out. how lot of talk focus is on current events in history a and it may seem odd but it fits just about everything you hear about the dangers of a football turn out to be wrong. i was astounded to learn

cheerleaders are a greater risk of physical danger is a and football players. but said gentleman that we brought in tonight to speak on this topic is my predecessor who accomplished author. why the left hates america america, conservative history of the left, blue-collar intellectuals and how am i doing? "the war on football" saving america's game. who tries to watch at least one game on the weekend? that is what i thought. it is fairly absorbing

unless you are a redskins fan. [laughter] but this is the exception to the rule. it is a compelling reid we have a compelling speaker in the man who wrote the book ladies and gentleman daniel flynn. [applause] >> the cure for coming in washington d.c. we could mix a little bit of america's game with a local sports of politics. football for whatever reason is a big sport among politicians. people say the horse races this sport of skiing and if so it is a sport of presidents from theodore

roosevelt to gerald ford at the university of michigan a lot of presidents have had a real interest in the sports of football and if you ask the people in this building to is your favorite football playing president dave would say ronald reagan. to play football at eureka college later was a play-by-play man up for the hawkeyes on who radio of the biggest them from his role in who brought the all-american? that is where reagan got his nickname and i think voter dame and college football brought to a lot more from ronald reagan. . .

>> it's a right way of living that none of us will ever forget. they were professional athletes posing as amateurs. they were paid in other sports, and, also, they were heavy gamblers, and he hung out in pool halls at night, hustled people for money, both bet on notre dame, and we know george as, you know, probably the greatest player that played at notre, and the guy reagan played in the movie, he averaged 6.3 yards a carry. his grade point average was like 0.0. the first two and a half years in notre dame, there's no

record. it's called a transathlete, he plays, and it's just to suggest the power of the mass media. the power of hollywood to shape perception. we have a perception of gorge and of george, and because of hollywood, and opposed to the reality, and hollywood has the power, to allow from time to time, and has the power to make the two self-sinners into saints on the silver screen. this is a lot like the controversy over football today. my book is about perception versus reality.

we have a perception about football based on the football that the gauge is more dangerous, and if they play it for a long time, if there's an epidemic of suicide in the nfl, and what i do in the war on football is i get the science, and the story behind the game, and the reality is that the perception that has been created by the mass media with football over the last two years is almost in every instance wrong, and in some cases, you know, 180 degrees wrong. i got into the genesis of writing the "war in football" was a study that was put together by the national institutes for occupational and health, federal sciences, putt

together last year -- they looked at every nfl player who played in the league between 1959 and 1988, so guys like lawrence taylor and chuck and joe and walter peyton and dick butkis, all these guys, 3500 plays playing in the league those 30 or so years. the reason they looked at the players because there's a wide suspicion in the public that nfl players die young, that they die in their 50s, the game takes such a toll on their bodies, that their health outcomes are horrible. this is something that has been, you know, spread in the mainstream press. george wills is probably the most widely read columnist in america. last year, he wrote life expect ten sigh it's less than 50.

the average life expect tan sigh is 50 or less years. espn.com says it's about 75. the average life of a retired player is 53-59 years old. the federal sienszs looked at the nfl players association and what they found shocked a lot of people, and nfl players don't die young. they out live their peers in society. they have a longer life expectancy. this study was expecting to find an 18% death rate amongst nfl players. they found a 10% rate, almost half of what was expected in the prevailing rates in society. they looked at 17 different disease category, and in 14 of those 17 categories, the nfl had better health outcomes than the

average joe, comparable guy in society. things like heard disease, cancer, respiratory illness, diabetes, even suicide was much lower amongst the nfl players than it was amongst men in society. there's a duh quality to this; right? i mean, if you run up and down a practice field for two hours every day, and you have intense diet and training, if you have access to the best medical care in the world like the nfl players do, and if you have restraint, not every nfl player is restrined, but if you are not smoking cigarettes and doing crazy drugs and that sort of thing, you'll have better health outcomes, and it's shocking to me that people were shocked by the survey. this is an example of the public's perception being shaped

not by the facts on the ground, but by misinformation with regard to columnists and writers and primed to believe that, you know, the nfl takes decades off your life, when, in fact, the sciences, the nfl players outlive their peers. they have better health outcomes. another one of these perception against reality, the clash between the two, involves the idea that bigger, faster, stronger means deadlier. that the nfl players are bigger than they used to be, and the game is much more dangerous, that players at the high school level, the college level, at every level, it's faster game, a bigger game, so it's a deadlier game. well, not really. the nfl -- sorry, not the nfl, but football in general used to be a pretty deadly game. people would die on the field, and the height of the game, all

levels of competition, killed by football hits. i'm a fan of football, but for me, that's hard to justify for what amounts to be a kids' game, the idea you have people dying on the field because of the game. society didn't notice much in 1968 because in 1968, there were assassinations, riots in the streets, casualties in vietnam, and it was not the outrage in football that there is now, but football people noticed and made changes to the game, and that's a big point of the book. football is not just a game of violence and ruckus, but change, always evolving and progressing, not like baseball and soccer that are status game, but evolving game, and after that 58 season, within a few years, there were rules and they --

they were penalized for that. equipment changed. there usedded to be something called a web suspension helmet, a hard shelled helmet with a piece of fabric essentially keeping your head from hitting the hard shell when there was a collision. that technology was invented for right before world war ii by a guy named john ridell, and the military liked it so much, they conscripted the helmet for military use. in fact, i was a marine for years, and i wore that webbed suspension helmet into the 21st century. football got rid of that technology in the 1970s. as twisted as it sounds, we equip the football players in the country than we do our soldiers and marines. coaching got better. heads up tackling. coaches not, you know, no longer saying put your head between the numbers and that sort of thing.

all of these things combined to bring football from a point where they had 36 deaths from collisions in 19 # 68 to last season with two deaths from collisions. the game got dramatically safer. at the time we gave football a pat on the back, it's a kick below the belt. you know, to put it in perspective, more kids died last year getting struck by lightning playing football last season than getting struck by other players. when you, you know, the perception you glean from the news is that the game is more dangerous than ever. it's safer than ever. i think one of the ways you grasp that the game is safer than ever, it's how the conversation shifted. no one talks about players killed on the field anymore. they talk about players getting concussions, and i don't want to

down play the risk of concussion or danger of concussions, but i think it's safe to say that a concussion is a much less permanent outcome than a death from a football hit. the symptoms regimely disappear, and, obviously, with death, they do not disappear. the fact we talk about concussions and not players getting killed, that's a sign that the football critics that the game is safer. now, when football's critics talk about concussions, they generally do in conjunction with the idea of cce, chronic traumatic end lop thy. there's a number of nfl players, sau and matthews, great players with a lot of trouble causivitily in the last years. when scientists looked at their

brains after they were dead, they had cte, brain disease. now, if you were to have -- if you watched "league of denial," a pbs documentary that's been airing, the impressions by "league of denial" is that football causes cte, and the nfl has known about it for years, but tried to cover it up. that's the animating ideas behind the documentary you hear agreement, and you're bound to think this is what scientist believe. that's not what sciencetists believe. they believe the opposite. the best scientists in sports got together last year in the international conference on concussion and sports, and they

crafted a congress census statement. in that statement, they had some words about ctd, and this is what they said. they said a cause and effect relationship that has not yet been demonstrated between cte and concussions or exposure to contact sports. now, why would they say this, and the reason they have not don a ron domized study. there have been -- we have antedotes. we have autopsy. we essentially have junk science. people say, well, it's settled science that football causes cte. it's not. it's junk science. what i mean, by junk science is that science that doesn't have any applications beyond, you know, the immediate subject studies, that you can't make sweeping generalizations made on it. if you look at an individual players' brain, if you are not doing a randomized study, tell us about the individual's brain, but you can't tell us about

other players or the incident rate of cte amongst people in society or people in the nfl. this is the study done with cigarettes in 18956, the districtish doctor study, to show that there's a link between cigarettes and cancer. that kind of a study has not been attempted with cte. what we have is autopsies done with admittedly a selection bias. in other words, science is going after brains they believe to have been brain damaged in their lives, and finding low and behold after an autopsy, that they have brain damage. shocking! one the big concerns scientists have, and there's article after article, and i mean, if you look in academic publications, criticizing the boston university group and others that are doing some of the cte research, just, you know, this

is just the stuff in the last, you know, few months, a looking at the -- one of the criticisms that they have is that two main gripes studying cte have different definitions of what ccts. they don't generally have different answers, but it's so new that you have groups debating what exactly it is, and the boston university group that was featured so prominently in league of denial, one of the crift schisms levied is the definition of cte is so elastic as to almost guarantee they are going to find what they are looking for. there's a condition that naturally occurs in human beings that 97% of old people get in their brains, and that condition is being used to determine whether someone has cte or not, has nothing to do with trauma, so why is it being used as a determinant of whether they have

cte? that's a criticism of the bu group. to me, one of the great things about science is that, you know, even if you're not the person doing the initial study, if it's science that the findings can be replicated elsewhere, and no one has been able to replicate this amazing percentage of football players found with cte, that this bu group has done. they find it in almost every case, and yet there's other groups, all with selection bias, all going after brains they think are brain damaged, and other groups not finding it to that level, and i think that's something that really set off a red flag, and it has set off a red flag in the scientific community. the reason why -- one of the main reasons why there's such a huge interest in concussions in cte has to do with the players' lawsuit against the nfl that was recently settled for $765

million, so for a lot of money. i think it was shocking to a lot of people to know that about 10 ct of the players -- 10% of the players suing the nfl never actually played a down in an nfl game. these are guys who were cut in the preseason, guys who may have made a taxi squad, but they never actually got into the nfl game. if you look at the players who actually made an nfl team and got on the field, that went on to sue the nfl, you is kickers who played in five games, you have backup quarterbacks who barely played at all, and replacement players who played in the replacement games in 1987, and, you know, you don't have to be a particularly cynical person to look at this and say, well, gee, these guys played in pop warner, played in high school, college, and may have played in other pro leagues, but they got the brain damage from the cup of coffee

they had in the nfl? you know, i really find that hard to believe, so i think for a lot of these guys, and i said the bulk of the guys suing the nfl, it was a giant money grab. i'm not doubting that there's guys that were suing the league that had damage, that walked away from the game with a lot of damage, and we know there's guys that's true of, but i think for the 4500 guys suing the nfl, a lot of them thought they hit the litigation lottery, and they were right. now, what bothers me about this is that the propaganda surrounding the professional game has been projected upon high school and pop warner. the -- you know, there are players who played football and came away damaged as i said, and at the nfl level, they find this confines itself to alzheimer's and als generally with skill

position players, have really elevated rates. to project findings upon high school players, to me, is beyond wreckless. they've done the siefns on this. the mayo clinic last year release a study that the incoming hypothesis was they would find elevated rates of neurodegenerative diseases among high school football players who played high school football mid century. they compared these guys with members of the glee club, with the choir, with the band. they were shocked to find out that not only were there no real differences between the glee club members, choir, and football player members, but the guys with the musical interest had a little bit higher levels of parkinsons, of lieu gehrig's disease.

what's happening to a subset of players in the elite level, there's no evidence it's happening in the high school level. there's a couple thousand guys who play in the nfl. according to the study, of the 3500 guys they looked at, 12 of them died of neurodegenerative diseases. in other words, less than one-half of 1% of all the guys they are looking at. twelve guys. now, that's the rate that was higher than anticipated, but we're still talking, you know, a very tiny, tiny fraction of players. is there something there? if you play in a certain position, linebacker or defensiveback at the nfl level for years and years? yeah, there might be something there, but doesn't mean every kid playing is going to be condemned to a brain existence. it's wreckless to put that forward. i think that's what the lawsuit did. the irony was lawsuit was the players hurt every league they were not suing, but they didn't

hurt the one league they were suing one bit. the nfl is approaching $10 billion in revenue. you know, they are they spell game day for 50 bucks, don't worry about -- they'll survive. they are doing fine, but a league that sells candy bars door-to-door to pay for pads, those are the leagues that have to worry. recently, there was a polling conducted by hbo real sports asking people, would you, you know, knowing what you know about football and brain injuries, would you allow your kids to play? 33% had reservations about allowing their kid to play. we are already seeing this in action. most recent shows high school football was down, the numbers were down for the first time in about 20 years.

youth football lost 6% of the player population last year. if you think of football as a spectator sport, football's doing fine. if you think about it as a sport that kids play in, football is struggling for its life. there's an existential crisis going on with football, and it's not something that's coming ten to 120 years down the road, but it's happening right now. i think this is a terrible thing for american boys. there's a culture clash going on. our culture is passive aggressive. it's an indoor culture, antiseptic, and football and young boys, you know, it's muddy, very outdoor oriented, aggressive, rough, and if football didn't exist, some 10-year-old boy would invent it. football clashes with culture, but it meshes with boys, and i

think boys really need football. think about the crisis of boys in america today, you go into any classroom in america, and there's a boy jumping off the walls with a lot of energy, and instead of giving him a basketball or a football, we give him rid lin and drug them up or the medical condition known as boilers. think about obesity. forty years ago, one out of every 20 teens was obese. now it's one out of every five. we have an obesity problem in the country. to me, football, you know, traditionally, has been the way to get the class fatso off the couch into cleats. the advantage that the game gives to bronze and bigness, other sports makes those a disadvantage. football makes it an advantage.

you bulk up in the college and pro level, but moat play football at the youth level where there's generally weight limits. football can be a tool against -- to fight against obesity, and they with the biggest concern for people in the country today. there are people that think the biggest concern haved too with our brains. it does not. it's our bellies. we are increasingly becoming an obese, fat nation. in sports, we should be encouraging sports, not encouraging slobs. the biggest crisis with boys right now is the lack of male role models they have. forty percent of boys grow up without a dad in the home. i'm not suggesting sports or football can replace a dad. it can't. if you're a kid, you need discipline, you can find that on a football field. if you need focus, male comrade,

a male authority fig, you can find that on a football field. a lot of what ails american boys maybe not can be cured, but can be helped in great degree by sports, and especially by the sport of football. this war op football is not just that for boys. it's bad for america. football is america's game. if you think about the things that unite us as americans, you can probably count them on a four-fingered hand. there's not too many things we come together on in this country, and we're divided by politics, divided by religion, divided by what cable news network we watch, but on sunday, about two-thirds of america comes together to watch football. they do this on super bowl sunday. most of america sits in front of the tv set. you may dislike it or like it, but it's a fact.

when you look up in the stands at a football game, you see america. when you look on the field, you see people from all geographic locations, people from all class extensions, people from all racial groups. it is america down on the field. that's something we should be encouraging. we shouldn't stamp that out. think about what happened in new orleans a few years ago after hurricane katrina. the city looked down and out, and it almost looked like their football team. remember the new orleans saints? they were such a pathetic football team, they fans wore bags over their heads. all the sudden, after hurricane katrina, there's all these politicians trying to bring back new orleans. they all failed. they can't get the city united. they can't bring it back. what brought back new orleans? what sent america unnoticed that new orleans was back was the super bowl run. that animated the city.

it brought it to life. it showed us that new orleans was -- the reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, and i know there's people who think, well, that's silly that we unite behind a football team. why can't a city unite behind something higher and more noble than that? i don't know. that's the fact that they decided to unite behind. isn't that a good thing? shouldn't we appreciate that and encourage that, and we look in texas, and what that does to the community, and some of the college towns turn into metropolises on saturday. what football can do to galvanize the community. there's few things that have the kind of a power, that have the power of football. it's america's game. we started talking about some of the presidents and their obsession with football for whatever reason. i think it'll be a good place to close, and we can take some questions. the president most closely

associated with football is roosevelt, and roosevelt's interest in football was highlighted in 1905 because they had such a brutal season. more players killed on saturday in 190 # 5 from football hits than all last season. roosevelt had a white house summit, not far from here, on football where he wanted to have the big schools pledge for cleaner games, to follow the rules. after that 1905 season, it was -- it was a microcosm of football, the game evolved. that's the message in the book and war on football. however bad the situation seems in football now and people are upset about safety, football evolves, adopts, and overcomes. after that 1905 season, we got the neutral zone, they banned

the idea of forward motion. used to have offensive players get a head start before the defense before the snap. you see that a little more in a rein that leagues still. there were major changes in football. i think if football can survive the introduction of the forward pass, it can certainly survive, you know, the fact that we're going to flag runningbacks for lowering their head into defensive players now in the nfl. that's a minor tweak compared to the major changes that football is endured over the years. change is a component. it's an integral part of the game of football. the tradition of football is almost to have a tradition of change. roosevelt, despite all the brutality he witnessed and read about that season on the feet, years earlier, he made the remarks he'd rather have his kids play football than any other sport, and, in fact, that

year, his son played football. he got bloodied and beat up at harvard, and if you know anything about his son, that was sort of foreshadowing of his life in europe at d day. the oldest man at dday, the only father-son team to be at dday. a bloody nose at harvard, i don't know if that was what he experienced later in life, but there's some benefits to the game of football. the president that i'm more interested in the interest of football is woodrow wilson, the guy that roosevelt ran against later and lost, and before he was president, people don't know, he was a football coach. he helped coach the team at westerly and princeton, and this controversy over football today, the war on football, it didn't start the day before yesterday. in the 19th century, wilson

debated the subject to big audiences. should we encourage the game of football? he took the affirmative position. his reason was that he said he thought football develops more moral qualities than any other game of athletics pointing to presence of mind, endurance, and a lot of sports encourage those qualities, but there are two qualities that are unique to football that you don't find so much in other sports. those were cooperation and self-subordination. if you think about it, i mean, in baseball, we just witnessed the boston red sox win a world series based on, you know, there was a good team, but they rode one guy, one position player, and he had an amazing world series, and the rest of the team

was okay. in hockey, if there's a goalie, your players can be playing mediocre, your towards and defenseman, but you can have a goalie, not just have one great player and expect to win. if you think about it, they are called lineman, and they are not allowed to touch the ball really. at least on a design play, let alone score a touchdown. any other sport, you are allowed to score -- you get a chance to score points, but in football, there's a position of the lineman. the guy who fights in the trenches, who never hears the crowd chapter his name, but yet he's more integral to the success of the team than the guys who hear their names chaptered. that's like life. we don't always get a gold star for our efforts. we don't always get a pat on the back. there are not always people there chanting our names. that's a great life lesson that football teaches. i think for the big take away,

for anyone's who has played the game, and i heard this said, and you can hear it said by random 9-year-olds who steps on the gridiron for the first time this past fall, just about every play in football, someone gets knocked on their ass. someone gets knocked in the dirt, knocked down in the mud, and what does football teach them? teaches them to get up, to fight, to don't stay down in the dirt, that when you get knocked down, you get back up. walk a few blocks from there to the heritage foundation, and you see all sorts of people who have been knocked down and never got up. the common denominator of everyone in the room and watching at home is we've been knocked on our butt at some point in life. everyone has been knocked down. the great thing about football is that it teaches us enduring

lessons. get up after you were knocked down. that's a good hat to have in life. football is a great life lesson, it is a metaphor for life in a lot of ways, and i think that's basic less son that's a great guide to live by. when you get knocked down, get up. there's people out there who are saying you should be ashamed to watch football on saturday, on sunday, that it's a gladuater sport, that you know better than the romans, guys dying in the coliseum, despite the fact that 94 years in the nfl, there's not a single player who died # from a football hit. two guys building 49ers new home died built it. construction, that's a dangerous profession. police officers is a dangerous profession. football is a rough profession, but in the nfl, it's not a deadly profession. we shouldn't be ashamed to watch

human greatness. we see athletic greatness, shouldn't be ashamed of it. my message in my book, the message i want to leave you with today is that it's okay to watch. it's better to cheer, and best of all to play. thank you so much, and i look forward to your questions. [applause] not everyone at once. [laughter] sure. >> [inaudible] >> i wanted to ask a question about your thoughts on the science of dr. robert kemp and the impact company.

>> well, answers are not behind the guy with impact, but there's a company known as impact, and if you're playing football, there's something nowadays called a -- these neurocognitive tests, baseline tests you take before the season, and then if you get a cop cushion or if there's a suspected concussion, you take the baseline test again to see if you are up to speed. if you are not up to speed, it's a tool to keep you out of play. in the book, i talk at great lengths about the company impact because there's a lot of scholarship done on impact, particularly by a guy named robert -- mark levell, and a lot of the scholarships, you know, touts him back and suggests impact's effective, and in many of the articles, you don't learn that robert, the guy touting impact, is also the president of the company, the ceo, the guy

who is making millions of dollars off the deal. nfl uses this, formula 1 uses it, wwe uses it. it's a big business. i have a chapter called "concussions, inc." they are a big business. the internet is not that much different from the 19th century smap. you can buy a sports drink that promises to help you cure your concussion. you can get pills, things called brain pad, and, you know, mouthpieces that agent as though they are going to help you with a concussion. head bands, as if a head band is going to do something. there's a lot of money to be made on concussions, and a lot of what we see out there in health food stores, sporting good stores on the internet, it's just salesmen capitalizing

on hysteria. doctors -- the traditional role of the scientists and the doctor is to throw a bucket of water on the fires of hysteria, and that's one of the reasons i was attracted to speak before an an academic add yuns because the work on this is done by academics. the media sensationalized the concussion issue, and the academics say, look, this is sensationalism, alarmism. it's gone too far. you know, a lot of times in the circles academics get back, they are actually doing a great job, and one of the things they are doing a great job of is pointing out, look, all the concussion elixirs, the mouthpieces, the head bands are not goinged too anything for you to prevent a concussion or anything if you have a concussion. everyone, calm down, don't pay $150 for a mouthpiece. they will do something for the

teeth. it will not do anything for your brain. >> sure thing. >> [inaudible] >> oh, yeah, sure. i was not sure who had their hand up first. >> my question was, they wear heavy pads and helmet. hockey is a fast game played # by big guys, lighter padding, less protective helmets, played on ice, and boards that don't give at all. do you think the nfl and physical in general should look at outfitting the players in a lighter pad and helmet to encourage less head to head hits? >> well, i think if you look at what's going on, there's a natural progression that it's not going to stop with the nfl. it moves on to hockey, which has a concussion incident that's

less than football, but not that much left. it's moving to other sports until there's marbles left, and that's sort of, you know, people say, well, let's ban head first slides in baseball. ban checking in hockey. it's not just going to stop with football. i think, you know, there has been talk about, well, maybe the hell melt is giving too much confidence to players, and that's dwr they get the injuries. now, problem with the argument that i see is that helmets are designed to protect the skull, to protect, you know, against these sort of catastrophic -- you know, the reason why players died is because of fractured skull, brain bleeds, that kind of thing. that does not happen anymore, if at all, because the helmets are so effective, but no hell meant is effective in preventing a concussion. you have to have a helmet in the

skull to protect your brain from rattling around if that were to happen. helmets, better helmets, no concussions. that's not going to happen. the help you get is marginal. there is an argument that, you know, all this equipment is gives guys a false sense of security, and that's why they play with the heads down. a lot of interest in brandon merriweather around here, a guy who plays all out old-school football, and he dips the head down. that's dangerous. there is a sense in football that we got to protect the offensive players from the evil defensive guys, these guys, but the reality is if you look at the history of football, the guys who were suffering death and catastrophic injuries tend to be defensive playerses, more than offensive players, and really what the rules do is protect guys is protect guys as much as protect the offensive

players. i think we have a very -- we have, you know, some of the conceptions we have about the game of football are wrong. in fact, in 1905, the conception was that all these injuries happened because of the bunchedded up game. you didn't have a forward pass, but runs, the defenses were like seven men on the line, threelinebackers and a safety. there was a bunch of cramped up games. open it up. they were wrong. open up the game. the injuries occur. people go at each other at full speed, the kickoff is an example of that. nowadays, the misconception is we have to protect the bambi offensive players from the mean ogre players, when, in fact, the guys hurt in the big injuries, you know, catastrophic injuries, deaths, historically, they tend more to be defensive players than offensive players. roger? >> congratulations on the book. >> thank you.

>> this week there's a new controversy going on in the nfl, which has to do with psychological damage. is this a hidden epidemic in sports we have not seen before when a 300-pound guy bullies another 300-pound guy. >> talking about the bullying of the first year player and second year player. you know, looking at this, there's no way to defend this guy, incognito. you know, sounds like they are shaking people down for money, sounds like some of the dolphins' players are abusive towards the younger guys. the only way to make sense of it, you know, as i said earlier, i was in the military for a number of years, a lot of things, if i said, hey, this is what we do, you don't look at me like what the heck you talking about? there's a military culture, and i stress the word "cult" in

that, that you are indoctrinated into, and anyone from the outside will say, you know, what do you mean you walked around naked with your rifle and gear on? that's crazy. that's a funny thing we did, or, you know, that's the kind of culture when you have small unit mentalities, and i wonder if that is the thing going on in the nfl, where anyone in the nfl makes sense to them, but nip else says this is absolutely crazy. how could the guy leave this insane voice mail message on the guy's answering machine and torment him in this way. obviously, he'll have a day, can defend himself, and maybe we'll find out he was not as villainous as we think. right now, i just don't know how you can really defend that. there's actually, you know, there's -- the only people defending him, really, are guys in the nfl making me believe there's this culture going on that seems normal to the people within the cult, but the people

outside of it are drinking the kool-aid. this is absolutely crazy, so i don't really know where the story's going, and my sense is that some heads roll in miami, and i wonder -- you know, incognito was a great player, but how can he be a great teammate after what you saw? how will anyone bring him on when he, you know, is that kind of a teammate. football's a team sport, and so i think he could maybe worry about his job process. [laughter] next question. >> hi. you mentioned numerous times that football is regarded as evolutionary sport. i mean, we see this even down to the wall of choice,