NFL Football is Violent Competition: Sport Violence

What's the difference between the violent collision smashing big-horn rams undergo with each other and the violent collision of helmeted men crashing heads into each other in the NFL? The resultant concussive jarring of the brain in men. Big-horn rams have double-layered skulls to absorb the shock of battering horns. Men don't. Make no mistake about it: NFL football is violent competition.
Violent NFL football competition this year is not unlike any previous year of, so called, professional football. Though, the addition and evolution of pads and helmets for protection of the eyes, face and head, limbs, ribs and internal organs, ironically serves more than ever to make men into animal-like battering rams. This year, out of the nearly 2600 men who go through the NFL system each year, over 350 went on injured reserve.

Defensive players often are trying to hit the ball carrier with enough force to not only knock him to the ground, but to actually knock him out of the game by injuring him. Offensive players are often doing the same thing: If a running back or offensive lineman can run over or level a defensive player to the ground, they sure as seeing stars will when they see the opportunity. Misplaced pride and rivalry of men in the NFL elicits violent behavior from them.

Concussions

The NFL has long known part of the draw to the sport is the violence in it, particularly when a participant is hit unconscious. In recent years though, more and more past and even present participants in the NFL, as well as concerned outsiders, have uttered how concussions from hits are causing serious, life-long health problems-even death. Belatedly and begrudgingly, the NFL has recently admitted the serious detriment to a man's health repeated violent blows to his head causes, much less what one concussion does. The NFL purports the game is safer than ever although concussions are up 21% from last year.

Injuries

Injured Reserve is how the NFL describes men that are too injured to continue contending in violent competition, yet are willing to stay in the NFL to get injured again once the current injury heals. Some men may reach a deal and not return to the NFL, but most do return for more violent competition.

Scanning the injured reserve list for the New Orleans Saints, for example, Pierre Thomas was just placed on injured reserve, having re-injured his left ankle. Earlier in the year, he seriously injured his left ankle, taking 10 weeks to heal enough for him to run fast enough again to compete in the NFL.

Only a day earlier, the NFL New Orleans Saints place another running back, Chris Ivory, on injured reserve. That brings the total running backs on injured reserve to four, since at the beginning of the NFL football season, a mere four months ago, Lynell Hamilton tore a ligament in his knee, and P.J Hill tore his triceps muscle.

The reported injuries for this one NFL team also includes, but is not limited to, the broken fibula bone in the right leg of Reggie Bush; the knee injuries to Marques Colston, Malcom Jenkins, David Thomas and Anthony Hargrove; the ankle injury to Jimmy Graham; the shoulder injury to Alex Brown; the groin injury to Jeremy Shockey and the hamstring injury to Danny Clark.

Injuries abound due to the violent competition that is the NFL. I would venture to say--and it's not that far of a venture--that nary a single man contesting in the NFL doesn't have some sort of injury that was the direct result of the violence that is NFL competition.

Game Over for NFL Football Violent Competition

When men walk away from violent NFL football competition, almost to the last man they've become the walking wounded, if they walk away at all. More than a few men have been carried off of the field, never to walk again. Men's heads aren't meant for battering, like rams. I would venture to say that even the design of the ram's horns serves to reverberate away the force of the violent collision.

For men to use their god-given physical force against one another the way they do in the violent competition that is NFL football, is for men to lower themselves into making destructive use of their might. We simply weren't created to run with great physical force into each other, or from the sidelines sneakily trip men running full speed. The Creator has to be scratching his head, wondering how men let themselves get so stupid.

Sources:

Howard Fendrich, AP Pro Football Writer, Players say 18 game proposal is major hitch, Yahoo Sports, http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nfllabor-18games

Linda Robertson, NFL's Stance on Concussions Long Overdue, Miami Herald, http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/21/1883740/nfls-stance-on-concussions-long.html

Bradley Handwerger, Peirre Thomas out for playoffs after Saints place him on IR, WWL TV, http://www.wwltv.com/sports/black-and-gold/Saints-sign-RB-Joique-Bell-112954389.html

Big Ram Rumble, National Geographic, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj8istSAMoY