Everybody that watches any sort of football, knows that it is a very violent game. I'm going to be writing about how concussions are effecting the sport possibly leading to the demise of football.  I also may write more about how new technologies could be implemented into the game to possibly reduce concussions in the future. I know that there are new helmet technologies that companies are planning to implement into the sport.  The reason I chose this topic is because football is always all around everything so it's a well known issue in the country right now.  I played sports throughout my whole life, and loved them a lot so being surrounded by athletes, naturally I heard many conversations about the concussion issue in sports.  I love learning new things about sports topics as well and definitely like to learn about the economics of sports, which this paper may focus on.   I did a speech on concussions in football in my speech class so I have a fairly extensive back into knowing a lot about concussions in football and how the game is being affected. Interestingly, I heard somebody ask the question "Are we seeing the demise of football right before our eyes" which got me to start thinking about the sport and concussion issue.  When that drew my attention, I began to read many articles on the issue of concussions in all sports, but especially in the game of football at every single level. I'm mostly going to write about how the concussion era has effected football as we see it t oday, but I will also talk about how we can change it, why concussions are so prevalent, and much more involving concussions.

New helmets are a big thing that is being discussed in the game right now especially by entrepreneurs who are trying to hit a gold mind.  There are teams of scientists working on developing new ideas to make the football helmet safer, because the traditional helmets hitting each other are just like banging two rocks together.  Many people getting involved in making new helmets believe that the current helmets are very far behind the curve of technology and that they are not utilizing everything that they have right in front of them to create better, safer, and more sophisticated helmets.  The company I did research on has invented a helmet that absorbs the energy from the other helmet and displaces itself so that it takes all of the trauma rather than a player's head.  They say that the helmets being used right now are just like cars of the 70s, that is that they have a hard outer shell with a little bit of padding on the inside, which is not safe. They want the new helmets to be just like the new cars, that is they crumble and the car breaks rather than the person getting hurt, because they think that you can buy a new helmet, but you can't buy a new life.  When athletes endure concussions, their whole life can be changed, or they can even die in some situations.  This company thinks that athlete's lives are much more important than a helmet.

According to a study, this year in the NFL, there were over 200 concussions, and those are just the numbers of the players that officially reported them.  That number is entirely too high and gives off the impression that the sport is not safe to parents, when in reality it could be safe, we just have to take the proper steps to get the game there.  The sport actually had a 2% decrease in high school freshmen playing football which doesn't sound like much, but in the grand scheme of things, that is a huge difference.  Another issue is that people are wondering how many more rules are going to be made in order to ensure player safety.  I have heard someone say "by 2020 this is going to be a flag football league" which is an interesting theory.  The company vicis uses this idea to say that you can make every rule that you want to make in order to protect players, but the only way that the players are going to be safe is by changing the helmets to new, more advanced helmets that are being invented in order to keep players safe.  So all in all, this is going to be an interesting paper to read and also to write and I am definitely going to learn a lot of rich things that I didn't know about concussions before.
