Get Hurt Boi
Back when football was first played, in 1869, it was not played with helmets, and was banned for a short time in 1905 due to deaths on the field. To bring back football leather helmets were invented to protect the heads of the players. Since 1905, there have been many advancements in safety of football in America, but there are still problems today. Concussions in football from high impact hits can lead to a large drop in grades due to inability to focus, long term memory loss and CTE, a neurological brain disease in which proteins are produced by the brain and effectively suffocate the brain into dementia and eventually death. For those reasons I believe football should be played with more protection like bigger padding and helmets with cushioning inside.

Sports related concussions in football can lead to students not paying much attention in class and decreasing grades. According to neurological surgeons from the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology (year), a student who gets two or more concussions in a year has an average grade drop of about 1 letter (A to B, B to C, C to D) High school football is causing an abundance of kids grades to drop because it is unsafe. And according to Head Case Company (year) , a company which collects stats on brain injuries, one-third of all kids who get concussions in football report having two or more concussions in the same year[LB3] . So one might thinkif their grades are bad, they will be taken out of football, so no harm done, but what about long term damage done to their brain? Now that they are taken out of football, they are not able to obtain a scholarship to college, and their grades do not meet the academic standards of colleges because they got hit on the head too many times. So that is why high schools need to start making football a lot safer, to make sure that football players, who are also students, do not jeopardize their academic and athletic futures.
In football, there is a lot of hard hitting, especially during tackles. Repetition of this impact can damage the hippocampus, the center of the brain’s memory. If enough damage occurs in the hippocampus it can be very serious and have effects including long term memory loss. A study by Bill Pennington (year) which was published by the New York Times says, “Their studies showed long term effects of an extensive series of concussions include: amnesia, confusion, delayed cognitive responses, memory/learning difficulties, and for few- Alzheimer’s disease later in life.”(Pennington). This shows the plethora of problems that arise from the issue, most notably memory loss. The continuation of hard hits and concussions can eventually lead to dementia, which impedes heavily on normal daily life and keeps the patient from taking part in their regular actions and activities. The fact that kids in high school today have the chance of developing this major life changing problem is saddening.
Repeated concussions from high speed football collisions can lead to a highly damaging neurological disease called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE. According to the the Brain Injury Research Institute (year) , “Some of the most common effects of CTE include loss of memory, difficulty controlling impulsive or erratic behavior, impaired judgment, behavioral disturbances including aggression and depression, difficult with balance, and a gradual onset of dementia. Many football players in the NFL have been affected and by this disease and have been seen going insane. This disease is crippling our heroes right in front of our eyes, turning the figures our looked up to as kids into men they do not even recognize. CTE can also be a potentially deadly disease for the individual with CTE and the people around them. In the same article by the Brain Injury Research Institute, “Suicide deaths of NFL player Junior Seau, and professional wrestler Chris Benoit who committed suicide after murdering his wife and son.” . Both of these professional figures were so affected by CTE that they took their own lives, and in some cases took the lives of the people they cared about most. Dangerous collisions in football can lead to potentially deadly diseases such as CTE.
Some people might say eliminating the dangerous drills from practice would erase a part of the football’s history but is the health of the kids playing football not more important? By keeping these drills around you will keep the history of the game but more and more teens will suffer the damage in their everyday lives. This will cause football to damage more and more teens and soon the whole sport will be in danger. Soon less and less teens will want to play the sport, and the ones playing will keep suffering traumatic injuries, putting the sport in danger. Yes, the history of those drills is important but isn’t the entire sport being in danger too much risk to gain from just eliminating a few drills. You also can drastically lower teens getting GPA loss, long-term memory loss and the development of the CTE disease which all can occur from the dangerous rules in football today. It would be difficult to change the rules in the game, practice also can contribute to all the damage. This can be stopped by eliminating dangerous drills like the Oklahoma drill. The Oklahoma drill is when 2 players line up facing each other and they start performing various drills like try to stop the ball carrier from scoring by yourself and the players butt heads like rams
Research shows that 33% of all concussions occur during practice. By making practice safer we would be declining all the damage that happens to the teens in football. Rivalry builds up during practice and teens are more likely to try harder against their peers to show out to the coaches. In conclusion football is a really fun sport that is loved by people of all shapes and sizes, while we don’t want this precious sport to go away forever we should do all we can to make the game make safer for us to play. Instead of the normal helmets we wear we should wear more cushioned helmets and more padded equipment. Players should be required to take a exam to see if they are well enough to play.

SOURCES:
“Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Explained.” Brain Injury Research Institute. Brain Injury Research Institute, 2016. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.Schatz, Philip, and Rosemarie Scolaro Moser.
“Enduring Effects of Concussion in Youth Athletes.” ScienceDirect. Elsevier Ltd, 2001.Web. 2 Feb. 2016.
“Head Case – Complete Concussion Managements.” Stats on Concussions & Sports. Head Case, 2013. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.
Pennington, Bill. “A New Way to Care for Young Brains.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 May 2013. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.