as a psa, a public service announcement. i put a camera on a working guy who said he and his family, his wife and kids talk about politics all the time. .. 300 some thousand members, young

elected officials. there are now something over 1000 young elected officials who are holding offices as mayors and three of them are in the congress of the united states now. it's doing very well. >> and next steve almond author of "against football" and gregg easterbrook the author of "the king of sports"'s. >> thanks for coming out. it's a beautiful day. we can all agree together we

would rather be outside. thank you for being inside for a little bit. i'm going to read just a little bit from the preface of this book which is called i wasn't out cold but i was out and it has two setup of the book is about. it begins with the fact that i have a clipping on my wall for many years which is a game story that's about a game between the new england patriots in the miami dolphins and there's a player named kevin faulk gets tackled and after the game is asked about the tackle because he is motionless on the ground for quite sometime. quote i wasn't out cold but i was out said faulk. asked if he remembered going on the ground he said no i don't so i must have been out. i knew that something was wrong with me. i knew that like it wasn't normal. i didn't have that same normal feeling when i got up. i thought it was funny that would be the simplest way to explain why it brought the story home and cut out the section in question and take it to my wall. i thought it said something elemental about athletic

delusion in a pitiful way players hide from the truth of their vocation that they earn ungodly sums of money in a claim for demolishing each other. i assumed in other words the posture of ironic dissidents which is what americans do to avoid the corruption of our spiritual arrangement. ironic distance allows us to separate ourselves from big complicated moral systems around us political, religious, familial to sit in judgment of others rather than ourselves. is the reason with as resume and the twilight years of our imperial reign that reality tv has become a designated guilty pleasure. but here's the thing, you can run from your own subtext for only so long. those spray can let it takes we revile are nearly turned out versions of our private selves, the horrors we hide from public view. what i mean is that there is a deeper reason i cut out those paragraphs a dozen years ago and carry that little square of newsprint with me through three

different moves each time of fixing it to a spot right over my desperate i told myself it was just a macabre window into the dissident psyches of famous barbarians and then a few months ago around the time my own mother suffered an acute and terrifying insult to her brain, the truth landed. the passage wasn't about faulk and his brethren. it was about me. it was about 40 years i had spent as an ardent football fan about my refusal to face the complicity of my own joy in seeing men like kevin faulk can trust. i knew that something was wrong with me. this little book is a manifesto. its job is to be full of obnoxious opinions. for example i happen to believe football legitimizes and even fosters within us and intolerance for greed and racism and. i recognized voicing his opinions will cause many fans to write off whatever else i might have to say on the subject.

shoveled by someone who's probably wearing a french sailor suit and whistling the soviet national anthem. before you do so let me reiterate. i am one of you. so please before you set this book down or quietly remitted to the poor soul in your life who you thought it might make an interesting gift, please consider one final obnoxious opinion. i happen to believe that football and its exalted moments are not just a sport but a lovely and intricate form of art. mostly this book is a personal attempt to connect the two disparate the fire in my brain when i hear the word football the one that calls out who's playing, what channel and the one of murmurs, shame on you. my hope is to honor the complexities and the allure of the game. i'm trying to see football for what it truly is. what does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in america in 2014 features giant muscled men

mostly african-american come engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? what does it mean that our society has transmitted the intuitive physical joys of childhood run, leap, throw, tackle until corporatized form of simulated combat. that a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning and the undisputed champ of our colossal athletic industrial complex, i knew that like it wasn't normal. so what was it? that sort of the perspective of the book. >> thank you steve. i am gregg easterbrook and i will balance off that very high level of literary erudition by telling a joke. this joke requires you to use the hour word that there's no other way to tell the joke. there's a man and woman, a couple who are passionate redskins fans. they go to every game and they

been to every game for 30 years, good and bad in wednesday the new england patriots a hot team are in town and the guy shows up without his wife. he sits down and stares glumly into space. the guy who sat next to him for 30 years shows up and sits down and says hey where's your why? the man says i regret to say that my wife has passed away. there was a long moment of silence and the guy looks at the empty seat and he says this is a big game. wasn't there anybody in your family or your neighbors or friends who wanted that ticket? >> says they all went to her funeral. [laughter] my book is also about football reform. steve says impressionistic and literary in mind is packed with facts. and it involves football at professional college and high school level. i suppose my most important contention is that the lower down the chain you go the more important issues become. nobody wants an nfl player to get injured of course not but there are only 2000 of them and

they are adults who assumed a risk and are paid well and returned for the rest that they assume. you can step down to the conference level. there are 60,000 players there in the big shame of college football to me is not the players are not paid. i don't think that's the ideal solution. a big shame of college football is the division i level only 55% of the players graduate. you would never have 100% graduation but most of them got bachelors degrees and that would be fair recompense for their labors on the field so there's far too much emphasis on victory and not on education. if you stepped onto the high school level high school and youth football there you have three to 3.5 million almost all boys, handful of girls but there's at least 3 million mav 3.5 million. you can certainly learn things from high school football. i played in high school while my sons went on to play in college. boys learn self-discipline, teamwork. they can learn important lessons from playing football if they

take the neurological risk and that in almost all cases in return for nothing at all. if you look at any high school, group of high school varsity players won in 1000 will eventually play in the nfl. less than 150 will get any kind of recruiting goes to college whether it's a scholarship or commission. if you look at youth and high school football whatever reward he will get from a sport has to come when when you were in youth and high school football because chances are you want one. as i say for many boys and a handful of girls it's a really great experience but to balance a great experience with a risk of head injury in a society that's evermore based on education the idea of having millions of young people smashing each other in a head on a regular basis just can't be a good idea. i will stop at that and say this book and, the final chapter is a very complicated reform program, maybe too complicated. i go through a lot of possible things that can be done financially and in education and

to reduce those that change the structure of education, change the way the game itself is play to make it less risky. risk will never be limited that manic things could be done to make it less risky. it's just as exciting and popular but no longer notorious. i think it's possible and given the public attention to football made and we are in the early stages of that happening. that summarizes what i have to say. so we are done. >> we are most interested in taking questions but we are going to talk a little bit and then hopefully if you have questions otherwise we are just going to sit in stunned silence. it's what i do at home. one study, so i didn't know a lot about football. i was just a big fan and i had done some sports reporting but i just did not know a lot about it. what i did when i decided i was going to write this book gregg's book and read a bunch of other books all that i try to

acknowledge and thank people so people would find their way to gregg's book was incredibly helpful for me to try to have a factual basis for understanding how the game functions. what's happening in football right now is medical science is catching up with it. there are a lot of things happening that are causing notoriety but medical science the main thing is we understand exactly what's happening inside those helmets which we didn't for many years. and players to were very prideful were reluctant to talk about their brain injuries, their cognitive functions. one of the most terrifying studies that has been done was done at purdue university. they wanted to find out what's the effect of football and high school students. after all high school students skeletal and neurological systems aren't fully developed and the game has got more and more violent over the years for simple physics reasons. mass, time acceleration. the players are bigger and faster so they are collisions

are more violent. the average high school player now in a bit program probably weighs more than a pro-20 years ago so they are much bigger. they trained year-round. they are faster. they are essentially more effective missiles. and so these researchers put -- inside the helmets of two dozen players and they wanted to find out what was the effect on concussion. what is the effect of a concussion on these high school players? they put sensors in about a control group of kids that had not gotten concussion to monitor their brain activity. here's where it gets very dark. what they found as the kids who had concussions who are clearly showing diminished brain function and the kids in the control group were showing diminished brain function at alarming rates, such that by the end of the year, these kids had no function in one of their frontal lobes. we need to take a step back right at this moment and remind

ourselves that these are high school students at a public high school, taxpayer-funded public high school and try to imagine what would happen in another context if there was for instance a gas leak in the cafeteria that was shown to be causing diminished brain function and high school students. how quickly without school be shut down? with the media lawyers, parents and school officials may be federal officials defend to shut it down? because this was in the context of football, we sell popcorn, their cheerleaders, it's heroic and did many ways a cohesive event for the community to organize around but the same thing is happening inside those helmets. that's what i mean about the medical science catching up with football. when i say that football doesn't have a concussion problem, i think it has a violence problem and it has the physics and physiology problem. the physics are going to remain the same. the physiology is very simple.

the brain is a soft organ encased in a hard shell. when it's jostled around there is damage. they are small car accident that happened because football is inherently a collision sport and i'm interested in hearing gregg's take a mabus because i feel basically i owe a great debt to the work is done but i'm even more radical in my outlook i guess because i feel like i'm made and apostasy or something. the fact of the matter is that it's not just big catastrophic kids that cause cognitive damage like traumatic encephalopathy which is the mentor they are finding and former players. if sub concussive kits that -- hits that you never seen it's writing for players because after all you have to realize they are invisible. you can never be diagnosed with a concussion and receive 1500 hits a year better like small car accident having an appreciable effect on your brain and you never know about it. even if we get up to speed and teams get up to speed pathing

medical personnel that are good at diagnosing concussions and so forth. that's what makes the news from the nfl that came out a few weeks ago, their admission in federal court after years about our how wright denying and covering up the link between football and brain-damaged are terrified. they're saying essentially 30% we anticipate, 30% of our players will wind up with brain-damaged terry cognitive problems which you can call brain-damaged at a significantly younger age than the rest of the population. i know of no other workplace in america, even the military where we would find that acceptable but even more than that, that's a legal financial question that i'm not sure how the league is going to deal with. their previous efforts were just to try to deny it, try to make a huge payment in court that would make the issue go away and it would allow fans to continue to consume the game without stealing -- feeling ethically responsible. we consume the beilinson that is why there are parabolic mics on the sidelines and we play to the

most violent sequences. part of the point of my book is where essentially the engine of a football industrial complex. it's hard for fans to think of that but without us there is no roger goodell or ray rice or adrian peterson or anything. we built it so if it's going to change is going to be because individual fans look at what the game is in toto, both how amazing and entertaining and pleasurable it is which is the real thing i know because i have 40 years as an ardent fan but also the moral hazards of it. the business model for the nfl and ncaa has been to provide a spectacle that so thrilling that we don't look at the dark side. >> let me make a couple of comments on what steve just said. he's right about the size of the data is in "the king of sports" but if you look at the first ringers from last year the best high school players in the

washington baltimore area if you look at the offensive line, all of the offensive lineman were bigger than any offensive lineman for the miami dolphins in 1972 perfect season team. you say that's 40 years ago. so bring it a little closer. all of the offensive linemen were eager than any offensive lineman who started the super bowl x years ago. so that's how fast the arms race of sizes and going on and we live and we live in a country where the childhood obesity epidemic having the national sports celebrate weight gain cannot be the world's greatest idea. besides the head injury problem we are all aware of and steve has summarized very well in the fact that there's emerging science on this i think a lot of people when you talk about concussions in football they will say, both concussions have accumulated neurological damage far greater in the long run they say yes of course that risk has always been there but you are just noticing it now. it's not getting worse.

we are just noticing the risk now. there many reasons to think it's getting worse. steve said and all the commentaries have missed the style of play of football has changed. as recently as a generation ago especially in high school where most football is played, never forget that the majority of football is played not by well-paid adults but people who legally our children. so in high school as recently as a generation ago almost every high school, typical offense was running the ball 50 times a game passing a 10 times a game. most russians were between the tackles. the result was the running back never got to full speed. the person who tackled and never got to full speed and they were attacked -- tackling into each other. certainly you can get bruce that way and you can break things by stumbling into people but the guys in most cases were not going full speed. what is developed in the last 10 years is this new style of

spread offense wide receivers on the field snap, snap, snap. there are more plays in the ga game. what's really important is in the shotgun spread offense that almost everybody is using now most of the receivers are running a full speed. you have four guys, sometimes five at maximum sprint being opposed by defensive backs at maximum strength and usually they are crossing over the middle and they're both going full speed when they hit each other. that's where the increase concussion incidences are coming from. it's pretty real. nobody sat down and said let's change the sport of football in a way that makes it more violent. this was not planned this way and shotgun spread offenses are a lot of fun to watch and very exciting. so they are great for the crowd but the fact is more head injuries and most of those head injuries are happening to high school kids. >> we have a first walkout.

oh you have a question, okay. i was feeling very good about myself. >> are there studies on colleg colleges. i assume for the big schools that ticket sales far exceed the cost of the programs and building stadiums whatever they do, but are there smaller colleges that still have a football program that is a drain on the university finances? >> well, the economics of college football is changing faster than the economics of professional football. there's a huge increase in the amount of money flowing into football over the last 20 years. it continues to accelerate in a very impressive way. but the schools that are the football factories and taken recently to calling themselves the power five schools. there are 50 of them clearing a hefty product.

the championship cleared $60 million in football last year after paying all of its cost after elaborate exorbitant contracts to coaches and everything else in all the scholarships. in fact if the football program had paid every athletic scholarship at the entire university they would have cleared $50 million in football last year. there are several other big mainly public universities although a few private ones, notre dame, stanford, duke. the big public universities they are clearing money on this and as far as that goes i'm fine with that. i think universities have a money-making venture what is wrong with that? what's wrong is some almost all the cases money doesn't go back to the core of the school to the university of florida title winner of six years ago, its athletic department which is organized as a separate business

essentially is leasing the tax deductions at the university of florida pays nothing back to the core academic mission of the school. all the income from the football and men's basketball program stays inside the athletic department. a big public universities are organized like this. now it's possible to do college football at a human scale level. the division iii schools williams, amherst, bowden, no bird they'll play football. nobody puts a gun to their head and make them play. they do it because having a football team as part of the life of a college and if that's all it is i think it's tremendous and if you look at expansion of public education in the early post-war era public university construction in football popularity went together and they built on each other. football teams made boys want to go to college and we want boys to want to go to college. so there are some good involved in it. it's just gotten out of hand and the football factory level

there's no crosscheck cross-check on money. coaches and athletic directors sold thing they are reported for his victory. there is no concern for graduation. 55% graduation rate is among division i football players. nobody is penalized for that. nobody's careers harmed by that. when you think about it college football players to graduate at football players a graduate of the higher rates than students in the whole of the university because they get five years and five years and set up for an scholarships go five years in most cases and most importantly they don't have to pay for tuition. running out of money is the main reason people fail to complete their college degrees who is completely out of control at the big college level. there's no institutional fact that will ever address this. there has to be public pressure on congress. >> i would add to that more radically i just don't think, i think it's a great educational mission. it has the beginning of college football and the university of chicago back in the 19th century had realized that

football was a great way to promote their school and generate contributions from their alumni and the president at that school set out, he hired a famous football coach who had been at yale to come be his coach and start to put together winning football team. he recognized there was golden those tackles. before they had doorknobs on the buildings on campus, gas, it is a really tremendous economic engine because the game is thrilling. please explain to me what that has to do with the intellectual and academic and moral mission of colleges? i have absolutely no idea and the liberal arts schools it's antithetical to what those schools mission is. the arrangement by which kids are recruited for college, i don't believe for one second that they have a real deep and abiding concern for those kids academic and intellectual development. i think gregg could disabuse me

of this notion but i think the number one priority is that they are eligible on game day. that is inherently exploitative. they don't have concern about the content of those kits characters or their mind. they want them to be entertainers and i did not know why there is a huge entertainment industry attached to her higher education system. i'm not saying i don't love football. i love watching it but i don't understand that. >> congratulations to both of you. you probably get a lot of due diligence and research in putting these together and it's a great accomplishment. two points or two questions. the first is, i believe the ivy league still has, they have collegiate programs but they also have the program for its weight based. i don't know if you are aware of that. i think there is merit in modeling that around the country.

i think 155 in terms of weight may be the maximum. there's a limit. the second comment or point, although it wasn't covered in the pbs show last week, i believe some odd years ago teddy roosevelt was involved at that time, i don't know for was pro-football, semipro-football. >> college football. >> college football, thank you. the violence and the death and you both know the story. i'm not suggesting that that's something that should happen at 1600 pennsylvania avenue. >> why not? >> there seems to be kind of a unanimity of what some of the problems are and i will get off stage on this last point. it's a little different but ralph nader recognized 50 years ago that cars were unsafe. what do we begin to do? safer seatbelts etc. get the

players don't seem through the players association interested in correcting the helmet but sooner rather than later. thanks for listening. >> let me take a few of those. on the issue of the weight limits one of the things i did after trying to send out a broad range of concerns about footba football, the first two chapters about the experience of being a fan of how beautiful the game is, how it became that way, this american incremental innovation were in fact the violence of the game led to the legalization of the forward pass and much more ornate and graceful what we identify as football but then i go over what i think are the essential areas of concern, economics, the health issues and so forth and at the end i try to make recommendations that things that are just good incentives. the problem is money problem is monies that are sensitive and in fact the only incentive at this point. one thing that would immediately

incentivize coaches at every level is to stop getting players to bulk up is to put in a wet limit. young men are playing at an artificially inflated way. if you read the memoirs of any football player, nate jackson has this amazing memoir and this guy basically had to gain with every single year. he naturally weighs about 175 or 180 so you could immediately tomorrow make the players play at their normal weight rather than bulking them up in the game would be appreciably safer and probably more graceful. maybe less violent. the other thing you could do, other incentives that i think would immediately change the nature of the game, have the helmet that records how many g. forces somebody's head is absorbing and at a certain limit the coach has to put a guy on the bench. the coach is never going to do that out of the goodness of his heart because the incentive for him is to win, to move up the chain of coaches and eventually become a pro coach and earned

more money than god. that's the incentive. it's america on steroids. it's all about having a winning record and being a national champion. as greg has put a very eloquently football is just a mirror of american culture but if you kill 10 a sensor, coaches would have to say for practical reasons your head is getting jostled around too much. even if you haven't had a concussion i have to put you on the bench. we have to take out a play or we will have to take you out of the game for a while. it would simple to save young men of high school i don't think the game should be in high school at all. and privately for template they want but it shouldn't be with her public high school, publicly funded high schools. but if they're going to kid seven 3.0 and don't let the classes because. force the coaches to say and this is the same as gregg's suggestion rate -- graduate rate. quit messing around with this.

create real incentives because the coaches to have to say to these young men it's important you develop your mind. the average nfl player that even makes the nfl and its one out of 500 high school seniors who played is going to stay in the nfl for three and a half to four years and his money is going to be gone within a few years after that and then where is he going to be? of the real issue is are they really going to get an education? if we are going to make them risk their lives and we are not going to pay them anything, we are going to basically make them indentured servants we might as well honor the mission of not just pretending to care about their intellectual and academic development but actually care about it by putting in a real incentives. >> that's a great point steve. the question about fdr, this is a little more than 100 years ago. fdr would have done away with football. teddy was a manly man and he

liked manly sports so it was different but he didn't like the fact the football was 100 years ago like it is today at the point of falling apart. 100 years ago before the forward pass broken limbs were common in games. one game in 10 lead to someone dying. there was very little football played them but football deaths were, compared to the small number of games played. there was widespread call for the abolition of the sport and teddy brought out the football powers together for a job owning session at the white house and the football powers for princeton, yale harvard and swarthmore which doesn't play football anymore. swarthmore was a football power and he got them to agree to a deal that was very forward-thinking and progressive by the standards of the times. so why don't we have the same thing going on today? when the sport -- when the book came out a year ago in paperback i tried to twist arms to get the president involved to the extent

an author can twist arms. i did a piece in "the new york times." a piece of "the new york times" describing the sorts of reforms that obama could abdicate and what would be practical and of course nothing became of that. from a politician standpoint we are in a polarized society where we are for something or against me. any politician that tries to perform football you would think would be a populist cause and why it's not populist cause still is a big question mark hanging over the financing. if obama had said i'm going to convene a high-level meeting of high school and college coaches to reform the sport talk radio would say the president is against football. >> the nanny state. >> obama wants to take away her football. that's the response you would get. i still think that the visionary president could do this but i guess is not going to happen in obama second term.

espn now exist the idea that steve and i have talked about factoring in graduation rates in the college football rankings, i have been twisting arms at espn for five years and in this case a little success starting over the summer. go to espn.com and type in the words espn grade. it takes you to a college football ranking adjusted for graduation rates. i am not trying to get the world to notice that because of coaches have in their contracts that there had espn great has something to do with their bonuses they may get a little better perform. >> thank you for writing these books. they are very important and very timely and i hope they are widely read especially by roger goodell and the nfl brass. >> his lawyers will certainly read my book. >> here in washington d.c. we have a professional football team that has been resistant to

change probably since they moved here and became the team of the south sider. he refused to integrate the team playing an african-american player in this 15 years until they integrated. only did it because it was forced by the federal government because arce stadium is on federal land, the department of the interior including the american nazi party who picketed outside of d.c. stadium to keep the redskins white. so now we have a new controversy with the football team. dan snyder refuses to change the racial slur of the washington football team. apparently it has a lot of support in the town which is very disturbing. i've done my own research as a redskins facts web site.

>> and we ask you what your question is please? >> yeah my question is what -- i notice both of you. [inaudible] so i was wondering why he decided to use the hour word and what will it take to change the dictionary to change the racial slur of the washington football team? >> part of the point of my book is you are a fan of the washington team? >> i can no longer route through the team until they change the name. i made that decision a few years ago. >> good, and that's what you need to do. the nfl is a 10 billion-dollar corporation. they have for normal human beings have a conscience, they have the cash register. whether or not you are conflicted or guilty or you recognize the game but you love it anyways, they don't care if you show up sitting on your couch. you are part of the $5 billion

keeping that passive consumption. you are part of the five billion-dollar broadcast package that they make every year. i think fans have a tendency that immediately reinforces this in a hideous way to see themselves as victims. you are consumer and if you don't like the way he runs a team and they don't like roger goodell and a gender roles and football which are essentially the gender roles of the 15 50's, women are sexual ornaments and men are by nature aggressive and that is how they are affected in the world. if you don't like that stop watching because you pay their salaries. the reason that kids get paid at age 20 or 21, they are offered $60 million for five years i'm guaranteed is because we pay that salary. the reason they make so much money is because he has a bunch of fans, consumers who consume the product. >> steve let me phrase that is a

question to you. should people stop watching football and television? >> here's what my book says. but we should do is all i'm interested in is not making a people's minds for them but let's see football for all that it is, everything that it is, not just for 100 years until we see this football is a thrilling spectacle and in the last few years as does the last few weeks people have started to judge football as moral entertainment which is what it is. it's one of the biggest businesses in the united states. yes or no should we watch? >> my book is saying and this is of you are either for or against it greg. what my book is saying is i think football for me somebody who loves the game is completely untenable morally. out of whack with my volume -- value system and is bad for educational system and bad for the national conscience but that's my decision. the aim of my book is not to say you should do this, you should do that but let's face what football is in to issue on

conscience recommend. don't delude yourself into thinking that you are somehow a fan just watching in the bar and upon so i'm not consuming anything in that not buying the gear. face that you are all complicit in the media is a great way of trying to find convenient scapegoats like cable news frankly that makes the fans feel like they are the victims. but you are the sponsors and i was for 40 years. even if i had my overnight conversion. >> let's ask here, how many people watch football on television? don't be shy now. >> it didn't really answer my question. >> i actually was trying to. i think there will be enough people who are consumer saying enough. it's unacceptable, i'm out. that all -- that's all the sponsors are going to listen to because they are corporation. don't think you can have dialogue with them. they are corporation.

>> i work for the store and because of c-span live i have a call in question. nancy 64 in indiana. >> we both know her. >> she is asking a question addressing the nature of violence in the act of tackling and just looking out i guess to rephrase which is asking, basically if of parent was to tackle a child who would be considered abuse whereas putting children on children is considered a sport so maybe you can address tackling as a violent action and tackling as part of this game. >> lots of things that happened in a high school football practice that if they happen in a classroom would be considered child abuse and would leave the teacher to be arrested. there are islam the relationships but norms of behavior in certain things that fall to the bottom line of that.

some of the accepted behavior and football courts have passed on and in other words say it's okay to instruct the children to slam into each other violently that we wouldn't allow him the classroom periods courts are starting to get very suspicious about things that have to do with concussions, not finding those things okay in the legal sense. i think at some point some high school football coach is going to go to jail and i will be the catalyst event that changes the culture. i can tell you there has been some modest progress in the last five years. 2007 i became an assistant football coach at winston churchill high school, a great high school, big public high school. in order to get my position there had to prove to the fbi background check that i was not a registered sex offender.

the odds that i would be in maryland were won in 2000. i didn't have to pass any sport first aid courses or demonstrate that i knew heatstroke symptoms and not only did nobody in maryland had to do that no one in the country did. now him almost all require head coaches and assistant coaches to have passed courses in concussion and heatstroke awareness. so there is modest progress there. the second modest progress is the two reforms of this book advocates have actually happened in the last year. one of them is the espn great and the second one is the high school sanctioning bodies for public sports starting to cut back on contact hours in practice. texas is a leader in this. texas is at the center of football culture of the most important state in football culture. as of this year are most unlimited contact. texas high schools are limited to three or so contact a year.

before the season in half an hour contact before the season. that's progressive reform. far more concussions happen in practice than in games. there is more still needed. you can change the structure the game itself and i think that's coming. the most concussion prone play as the kickoff. you don't need kickoffs. 20 years ago there used to be jump and basketball and they were lemonade. kickoffs need to be eliminated from football and no one will remember it. the three-point stance can be eliminated. look at two football teams opposing each other at the start of the play. nine to 10 linemen have their hands on the ground at facing each other's heads when the ball is snapped in their heads collide. if the three-point stance was banned and they place to do with the players with their their hands on her knees to head injuries would go way down. i think changes like that are coming. the picture is not as bad as it was a decade ago but still there's a lot of reform needed. >> i always enjoy gregg the

"washington monthly." >> thanks for their minder. >> what is your take on high school, should be settled? my niece has a kid who loves to hit people. it sounded like the manufacture would not seldom the helmet and tell there were something attached to it. how do you think i should be settled? >> there is a long-standing and i think ron legal interpretations of the liability of people who sponsor football teams and the simplest one to understand is the nfl level. the nfl statistically, no helmet eliminates the risk of concussion but some helmets reduce risk compared to others. virginia tech a study this and identify them to reduce the risk of concussion and pack. you would think nobody would be well -- wearing these helmets. the nfl doesn't mandate the helmets that are shown to be

safer or less dangerous the best way to say because they believe if a player is injured in the helmet they become liable for the injury and if the player player chooses the, then the player is liable for the injury. i wish there was a good test case that would prove this but the high school county referred to as an important test case they wanted things we can do is exactly what steve proposed, put them in a cell or-o-meter and a football helmet. they aren't that expensive. they have accelerometers in some high schools. if you show a hit against the force of gravity, that's the risk factor number for neurological harm. if it records and eight g hit it lights up the doctors pager with the player's number and take that players identify with him. you can cut concussion injuries

with simple technology. colleges high schools they will become liable for the injury if it does occur. in lowden county in bethesda not far around the corner that doctor came up with a simpler version. the back of the helmet has a red light is over it records and 80g hit the red light starts to flash. the coaches are the officials see the flashing red light until the boy you've got to come out to be evaluated. lowden county would lead one of high schools put those things on helmets because they thought well if you have a safety device you would become liable for any injury and if we don't do anything at all we are not liable. that's the primitive stage where this thinking is still at. >> i would add there are two ways you can look at if you are conflicted football fan. you can decide is gregg has decided with a lot of integrity to figure how to reform the game

and if there are things that can be done in lobbying and taking action in being part of that movement or you can decide and this is what i personally decide against football that looking at the totality of the game is just inherently corrupt and i want to take a step back. i think it is a corrupt system that the fans, what is happening as we look at any of the stuff just remind people over and over again that it's a violent game where watching. we want to be able to consume the violence and to feel the dash that is what the broadcasters are all about. they don't say hey back i suffered a grade brain trauma. they say wow the great hit. there's a system in place to keep us insulated from seeing the profound violence on the field but it's even more insidious than that for me. it has to do with those aggressive impulses by the way the players are trained to harness are hard to regulate. that is what we are seeing with the recent news about this

player or that player. aggression is on the field of violence that were worked on the field suddenly is taking place off the field and we are all up in arms trade at of 22-year-old kid who has been told of his life to play hard and is suddenly going to become a role model the minute he steps over chalk line. it's magical thinking and i think the most insidious of these deaths or false dreams that football sells has to do with economic opportunity and here's where i really have a bone to pick with obama who has said something like i don't have a son but if i had a son i would not let them play football. what he is really saying is let some other american mother and father have a son who plays for my entertainment that might suffer brain trauma. it's against his dignity or what i believe to be as dignity

against a human being. if you would let your kid playing sports think about what other kids parents -- parents kids are playing. but obama especially coming from his background what he could say us for too long football has been held out to economic salvation for certain kids by which we mean in coded language that we speak in the united states, kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods and kids of color. that is a degrading and absurd arrangement because only one out of 500 of those kids is going to make it and we don't care about the other 499. what they really need to have equality of opportunity is good schools, good support for working families, communities that function and that's a larger bore problems and football reflects. what happens is the taxpayer gets stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars into new orleans billions of dollars in tax revenue, public revenue that goes towards building cities

rather than towards it that we all agree is a higher pretty. are we creating an equality of opportunity especially economically vulnerable communities? i know this because i spent a lot of time in liberty city and it was a community where that community said he has football is the ticket out and it was great emphasis placed on that. is this false dream that we are part of. we sell the same message and that's because they're not the more humane in equal ticket out for people not being born in circumstances where they don't have a lot of economic opportunity. >> yeah eye of the chapter in "the king of sports" called used up and thrown away which is not about guise of an rustic dreams of playing football, guys who are great athletes who ended up getting the up getting the thing a lot of football except brain injuries and criminal charges. and you mentioned obama. as a new yorker obama gave a

lengthy interview to david gramlich be editor of "the new yorker." gramlich has his own comfort because he's a big fan of prize fighting which is worse than football the prize fighting involves so few people that the sociological significance is small. they talk about football and what obama said was well funny think about it those guys are adults. they know the risk they are assuming and they are well paid to this is the big issue. for the 2000 nfl players is surely true. we don't want them getting hurt. they are adults and they know the risk they are semi-but they are not the issue. high school college and youth players are the issue. when even the present of united states who is a huge sports fan a sophisticated man doesn't get that the nfl is not the issue. high school is the issue than then that's a problem. >> and one other thing which is that what obama said because i read that story with great interest as well is maybe they'll come up with a sports reforms that will allow fans to

watch the game with a little bit safer conscience or what user conscience a little bit. the goal of making football safer ultimately is to make the fans feel qualified morally as opposed to protecting the players. it's astonishing cynicism. >> what about other sports. >> there are number of them. >> are other sports is dangerous as football and we have data? ice hockey seems to be just as violent if not more. >> there is data. ice hockey, soccer where you are not wearing head protection and diving have roughly the same concussion rate per hour of practice in participation as football. the difference is football involves far more people and far more hits because unlike those sports in every other sport other than boxing and the mad

max version of boxing, collisions are incidental. you have to understand a football player gets 1500 little car accident in his helmet every year. it's not just a game but it's also the practices. that is not true of any other sport and i share this a lot. there's a whole suitcase full of rationalizations that are carried around an unfamiliar with a suitcase because i've carried around for many years. one is what about other sports? what about the? football is five times more profitable and popular than the next board and probably more than that if you factor in high school. it's far more significant as a social entity than any of the other sports and is also intrinsically the only collision sport that is a major sport. hockey does have fights and collisions at high-speed but those are incidental to the game. every single time up all-caps-on football field a bunch of big strong guys get their brains knocked around, period.

>> soccer has the same concussion rate per hour practice. >> it doesn't. >> i have no knowledge about this. >> is not just about getting concussions. what the medical evidence suggests is that it is the sub concussive hits that are dangerous. it has a violence problem and by the way that violent problem doesn't reside in the game. it resides in american culture, okay? look at our prison system. look at our gun ownership. look at our popular culture. football is a part of something bigger. it's not just their favorite game out of some coincidence. it is the game that is made us feel okay about the consumption of violence. if sanctioned violence within the gridiron. >> i don't watch football but i'm worried that the biggest growing sport in the country is soccer and that's what all the kids are playing today and not football.

>> sub concussive hits and accumulation of neurological harm is clearly higher in football. if you just look at diagnose concussions the rate is about the same in football and soccer. but that is why soccer is starting to look at helmets because you get your head hit more than you would guess playing soccer. >> i should add that people often ask what if your son wanted to play football and the response would be if he wants to play pickup football even if you want to play tackle football at a younger age, i did that. i got a concussion i have my shoulder dislocated a couple of times a day would stop them from doing that. i don't think you can put kids in giant michelin man outfits. they have to incur some risk and that's part of growing up is managing risk and kids can't be protected from that. but it's a huge industry, this