Boldin also said that some of the league’s safety measures are about “covering their butt,” and he said that he generally doesn’t think the owners care as much about players’ health as they’d like the public to believe.
“The league can say they’re doing things to protect guys, but I’m not one of the guys buying it,” Boldin said.
Worker abuse? What about workplace safety? Might be a project for a labor lawyer.
From the first link posted above:
According to Matthew Futterman and Shalini Ramachandran of the Wall Street Journal, the NFL is considering adding more Thursday night games to its current slate of 13 televised by NFL Network.
Per the report, the league could stage some Thursday night doubleheaders, with games being televised on networks other than the league-owned broadcast operation.
The NFL reportedly is disappointed that the present approach, which expanded last year to cover most Thursdays, hasn’t generated more interest. In addition to additional Thursday night games, some of the games currently televised by NFL Network could be sold to other networks.
While the first Thursday night of the season is an obvious spot for a second game, it would be hard to sell more short-week games once the season has begun. From the 13 Thursday night games on NFL Network to the three Thanksgiving games on CBS, FOX, and NBC, each of the 32 teams plays one game on a Thursday after playing on a Sunday. For competitive reasons, it could be unfair to compel some teams to play a second short-week game.
Also, the NFLPA would have to agree to more Thursday night games. With player health and safety now receiving so much attention, it could be hard to sell the players on additional Thursday night games.
Again, if it was real concern about player safety, then all of those NFL Network Thursday night games would disappear.
The Thanksgiving Day Detroit and Dallas games should be played by teams who came off a bye week, or the games go away.
The only Thursday game permitted is the first game of the season. Last decade, NBC and the NFL arranged for the start of the NFL season to begin with a key matchup on Thursday night. But the two teams playing in this league-opener ended their preseason on the previous Thursday or Friday, but most starters don't play in the final preseason game. So the players in this opening game on Thursday night had 7 to 14 days of rest.
Web poll in the story at the first link:
Are you interested in more Thursday night games?
- Actually, I'm interested in less Thursday night games. 50.08% (10,786 votes)
- No. 31.19% (6,718 votes)
- Yes. 18.73% (4,034 votes)
If the Web poll is correct, then either fans are concerned about player safety and recognize the NFL's hypocrisy, or fans want to keep it simple with the league playing mainly on Sundays. Selfishly, fans may not want their home team or fantasy team players exposed to a greater injury risk.
From the LA Times story:
As the [Frontline] show 'A League of Denial' has revealed, the NFL has long been complicit in hiding the truth about head injuries. But our love of the game keeps us from abandoning the league.
The Oct. 8 PBS show "A League of Denial" was a journalistic masterpiece. If you haven't seen it, find it. It is everywhere on the Internet. It should be.
It was two hours that can be oversimplified in one sentence:
For years, the NFL knew its players were suffering head injuries that would bring serious long-term damage, yet it denied that, stonewalled the players seeking help and spent millions to muddy the truth.
Many readers still respond to every written word about this with the predictable: "These guys knew what they were getting into. Why should we feel sorry for them?"
Uh, remember the huge tobacco lawsuit of the late 1990s? I think the key reason why the tobacco industry lost that one was because the industry was exposed for knowing the addictive qualities of nicotine. Whatever it was, the industry knew something and hid it from the public. Much like what the NFL has done. Hence the reason why the NFL will one day lose a huge lawsuit.
Warnings on the cigarette packs appeared in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The first lawsuits against the tobacco industry began in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Many or all of the initial lawsuits were tossed out of court. Remember, the cigarettes packs came with warnings. Smokers should have known what they were getting into.
That didn't matter. The lawsuits kept coming. And then, the smokers started to win.
More from the LA Times:
The PBS show was devastating to the NFL, which deserved to be devastated.
When Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Lakewood), questioning Commissioner Roger Goodell during 2009 congressional hearings, likened the NFL to Big Tobacco, we had no idea that she had hit the right keynote. After the PBS show, we know.
What a despicable label to have pinned on you.
But now, a masterpiece of documentation and reasoned journalism has joined them at the hip with … Big Tobacco. Bye-bye goodwill.
Were the owners complicit or fooled?
Cleaning-house time, a necessity now, will probably move forward slowly and quietly in the NFL. People who internally championed the public relations camouflage and "lie, deny and hope they die" strategy will be finding positions elsewhere.
People are still smoking and NFL players will still be taking shots to the head. Our country's freedom allows us the right to be stupid.
The NFL is as woven into our fabric as the singing of the national anthem before games. The NFL's biggest game, the Super Bowl, has become the equivalent of a national holiday. There is no turning back. We don't abhor the smashing heads. We celebrate them. Even those who should stand above it don't.
The pedestals are crowded with hypocrites. Often well-meaning, but still hypocrites.
ESPN, purporting to be a journalistic organization, walked away from any connection, or credit, with the program despite considerable early involvement. Forget the journalistic bump it would get. It needed to protect its business interests with the NFL.
The breast cancer charity groups whose interests prompted pink shoes and towels in games last weekend in the name of "awareness" hadn't thought things through enough to see that they were using an inappropriate messenger. Breast cancer should pause before partnering with Big Tobacco.
In the meantime, we have the glue. Peyton Manning.
Has there ever been a more dynamic, creative, entertaining player in the sport? Is he not reason enough to keep the roads open while the paving crews work? Is there anything more fascinating in football right now than watching him get the Denver Broncos to the line, start gesticulating and obfuscating while he is changing the play, and then throw a completion into the soft spot he has identified in a defense he has confused?
And isn't it interesting that a sport that systematically ruined so many human brains now has, as its greatest attraction, the best and clearest thinker in its history?
Dec 2013 stories
Dec 4, 2013 - CBS Detroit - Many NFL Players Want Thursday Games To Disappear; Reggie Bush Says ‘It’s Like A Car Crash’
Even for super-strong, supremely conditioned NFL players, it takes time to recover from several hours of Herculean effort accompanied by high-speed, high-impact collisions.
Normally, NFL players get six days to recuperate between games. Before Thursday Night Football contests that every team must now play each season, the turnaround time is cut in half, and many players do not like it.
Is the NFL — which touts its commitment to player safety in the wake of concussion lawsuits — risking players’ health for the sake of adding to the bottom line?
“I’m not a huge fan of it,” Bush said. “We don’t get a lot of time for our bodies to recover. Football games – I always try to relate them to for the average person – it’s just like being in a car crash. Like literally every time you’re getting hit is like being in a car crash. Imagine as a running back you’re getting hit – I touched the ball at least 20 to 30 times a game, that’s 20 to 30 car crashes you’re in in two hours. It’s tough to get your body back ready that quick for a game on Thursday.”
Many players would like to see Thursday games disappear or at least get pared down, but with the demand for NFL games, and the cash machine it’s become, that seems unlikely.
Pro Bowl tackle Duane Brown of the Houston Texans believes the expansion of Thursday games reveals a discrepancy between the NFL’s stated goals of player safety and its pursuit of big profit at all costs.
“You talk about player safety, but you want to extend the season and add Thursday games?” Brown told SI.com. “It’s talking out of both sides of your mouth.”
The extra day of games began in 2006 on the NFL Network with eight games on the Thursday Night Football docket. Last season, the NFL expanded the series to 14 games.
The addition to the schedule brings in an estimated $700 million in revenue, according to John Ourand of Sports Business Daily.
“We’re not supposed to say this aloud while we’re coaching, but I can say it now: Players and coaches mostly despise the Thursday games,” Billick wrote. “It leads to a schedule that’s even more maniacal than usual for coaches. And it’s a physical ordeal for players to recover in time to strap on a helmet Thursday — especially late in the season, when they’ve been beaten up and worn down by the relentless schedule, with only one bye week since early August.”
Lions coach Jim Schwartz did not comment on his thoughts on Thursday Night Football in general, but he said the short week is hard even for coaches, much less the athletes getting ready to go right back out on the field. “It’s tough on the coaches,” Schwartz said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like on the players.”
What a shock. The NFL is more concerned about money than safety. But this is not a cash-strapped business. The NFL makes a ton of money already. The league's arrogance and greed will be its undoing in the future, or it will contribute to serious legal problems in the future.
Dec 3, 2013 - Sports Illustrated - Thursday Night Football: ‘It Feels Horrible’
Getting another night in the week with football has been a good thing for fans, right? Well, it hasn't been for the players, who are still struggling to reconcile the NFL's push for safety with its effort to make everyone play on short rest.
I don't think it's good, and I'm an NFL fan. The Thursday night games air only on the NFL Network. It's hypocrisy by the NFL.
Brian Hoyer’s torn ACL was one of 2013′s most significant Thursday night injuries.
There are NFL players who welcome their turn at a Thursday night game or the annual Thanksgiving Thursday slate. Some guys like the weekend off that comes after two football games in five days.
Duane Brown is not one of these players. “It’s dangerous,” says the Texans Pro Bowl tackle. “It feels horrible.”
“That Friday, everything was hurting; knees, hands, shoulders,” he remembers. “I didn’t get out of bed until that night. I didn’t leave the house at all. You talk about player safety, but you want to extend the season and add Thursday games? It’s talking out of both sides of your mouth.”
The NFL has long played games on Thanksgiving, but its package of Thursday night games carried by NFL Network didn’t start until 2006, with an eight-game schedule. That was expanded last season to 14 games, and the NFL, with its stated commitment to player safety, sought to answer anecdotal claims of high injury rates for midweek games with an injury study. The league found that roughly the same amount of injuries happened in 2012 Thursday games (5.2 per game) as in games played on Saturday, Sunday and Monday (5.3).
It’s compelling evidence that Thursday games are no more dangerous than Sunday games, that is, if you can watch an NFL game and believe that only five or so injuries are happening in those 60 minutes. I can’t, Duane Brown can’t and neither can the chorus of players calling for the end of Thursday Night Football.
“It’s a problem,” said Broncos guard Louis Vasquez.
“I don’t like them,” says Texans wide receiver Andre Johnson. “I guess because they don’t play in the league office, they don’t understand how your body feels.”
That’s probably true. Most of the suits who bargained for an expanded Thursday slate don’t know what it feels like to play in the NFL. Here’s what they do know: Money. There is a big TV market for an eight-game package of Thursday games, which the NFL is expected and free to sell off now that its cable arm has 14 in its possession, thanks to the new collective bargaining agreement, approved by the NFLPA in 2011. Part of the expansion of the Thursday night schedule was to ensure competitive balance, with each team having to play on the short week once, but that was likely a secondary concern to the revenue selling the Thursday package would create.
How big is the market for that package? Let’s ask John Ourand, who covers the topic for Sports Business Daily.
“What I’ve heard, is that if you take an eight game package of Thursday night games to the market, you’ll have Turner, Fox, NBC, after it and ESPN waiting to see how high the prices would go. So you’d have four bidders. And it could go broadcast beyond that.
“People believe that such a package could bring in about $700 million a year. And the NFL would keep half of the games in order to maintain the value of NFL Network.”
That’s $700 million, $65 million less than the price the NFL paid the army of former players who sued over a half century of misinformation and mishandling of concussions. In essence, the NFL could and likely will recoup the losses suffered as a result of their historically cruel and obtuse injury practices, by selling off a product that many players believe puts their bodies at extended risk.
And the players don’t express these concerns with any illusions that things will change. They know they are cogs in the machine; brilliantly paid cogs, but cogs all the same.
Says Packers defensive lineman Ryan Pickett: “People don’t know this; after the game, it’s normally Friday and Saturday when your body starts feeling better. I’ve been around for 13 years, so it takes a little longer to recover.”
Putting aside for a moment the injury concerns, who would actually want to watch these 14 games featuring fatigued players, often pitting bad teams against good ones, or worse, the 2-10 Texans vs. the 3-9 Jaguars (8:25 PM ET, Thursday, NFL Network)?
Answer: EVERYBODY.
“You have Houston and Jacksonville, which no one is looking forward to,” Ourand says, “but even that game is going to win the night on cable within the male demographics everybody sells, and it will be one of the top 5 or 10 shows on TV. The power of the NFL and why they want to go to Thursday is more evident in this game than in any other.”
Not me. We don't have a full cable package. We only receive local stations and a couple other channels like the Travel Channel. No ESPN. No Weather Channel. No Food Network.
I watch the NFL on Sunday on over-the-air channels, and that's nearly the extent of my TV viewing for the entire year, concerning regularly-scheduled TV programming. I like to watch The Masters and U.S. Open golf tournaments, and some PBS. That rounds out my regularly-scheduled TV viewing. All my other TV viewing consists of watching DvDs and streaming TV shows and movies over the Internet through our Roku box. We don't need cable.
Watching TV is a waste of time/life, anyway. That's why I only catch some NFL on Sunday, and I'm glad the NFL regular season is only four months long.
http://mmqb.si.com/tag/head-trauma-in-football-a-special-report/
http://mmqb.si.com/2013/12/04/nfl-injury-increase-2013/
#sports - #football - #nfl - #health - #moronism - #blog_jr