Danny Kanell: Liberal media waging war on football
Danny Kanell has never been one to shy away from giving you his opinion.
And on Tuesday, the former Florida State QB and current ESPN college football analyst took to Twitter to combat what he believes to be a “war on football.”
The war on football is real. Not sure source but concussion alarmists are loving it. Liberal media loves it. Doesn't matter. It's real.
— Danny Kanell (@dannykanell) December 8, 2015
That Tweet received some heavy criticism from Twitter users, which only reinforced Kanell’s thoughts on the matter:
If u have ANY doubt whatsoever that football isn't under attack just check my time line. It's worse than I thought.
— Danny Kanell (@dannykanell) December 8, 2015
The source of Kanell’s displeasure appears to be an op-ed piece published by the New York Times on Monday titled “Don’t Let Kids Play Football.”
An excerpt of that piece to give you an idea of what he’s talking about:
As we become more intellectually sophisticated and advanced, with greater and broader access to information and knowledge, we have given up old practices in the name of safety and progress. That is, except when it comes to sports.
Over the past two decades it has become clear that repetitive blows to the head in high-impact contact sports like football, ice hockey, mixed martial arts and boxing place athletes at risk of permanent brain damage. There is even a Hollywood movie, “Concussion,” due out this Christmas Day, that dramatizes the story of my discoveries in this area of research. Why, then, do we continue to intentionally expose our children to this risk?
Kanell has faced heat for his Tweet, but is not backing down from its sentiment.
My apologies for calling the NY Times "liberal". They can feel free to correct me if I was inaccurate.
— Danny Kanell (@dannykanell) December 8, 2015
Dangit SDS, you’re not allowed to make me agree with Kanell on something….
Lol…I was gonna say how does a Nole have the ability to have anyone from the SEC agree with him…
I 100% agree with Kanell on this one.
This is a real issue. The injury risk is real. The damage done by collisions is real. Concussions are a fact of life in football, and there is really no way to prevent them without a major overhaul of the game’s structure. The game will increasingly come under pressure as medical science educates the public about the damage done to players. Unless medical science finds a way to “cure” concussions, football, as we know it, will be in danger of extinction. I know, it sucks. But that’s where this is going.
Here’s a solution: Take away the helmets. They won’t be so quick to use their heads as a battering ram when they don’t have the illusion of safety.
The issue here is sample size and still too much is unknown. Suicide rates are not higher in football players than in normal society. Deaths from kids playing football are not higher than kids doing normal kids things, like riding skateboards. Arrests are not higher in football players than normal society. While there is a link with concussions and CTE, not everyone who sustains concussions develops CTE. Plenty of football players live normal lives after football. More needs to be uncovered about this issue before blanket statements like that can be made.
That’s why we have a thing called research.
I agree with this one. The argument is being made “we have a link between something and something else, but we’re not sure what the exact factors are, so just go ahead with status quo.” This makes no sense. We need more research, but we shouldn’t discount what we already know. The kind of thinking that it only matters when you know the exact link is the kind of thinking that didn’t dissuade families to stop their kids when they tried pick up smoking because not everyone who smokes dies of cancer.
1) NY Times is far from liberal. They’re as mainstream and donor based as it gets and 2) As much as I absolutely love football and other contact sports, concussions are a HUGE issue and we need to work together to find reasonable solutions.
1. If you don’t realize that the ny times and other main stream media is liberal, then you might be an extreme liberal.
2. A reasonable solution would be for you to quit playing, watching or supporting football. In other words, go away.
1) if you think the NYT is liberal, you’re most likely so deep into biased news sources, you’ve lost ability to discern rounded coverage from biased depictions.
2) telling others what you think they should do is just what you did. That’s what the writer of the opinion piece in the Times did. Seems like you’re the dope.
NYT not liberal? Where do these people come from?
Kanell is a dope. The guy writing the piece is a scientist using science. As someone who has had concussions not from playing football and then have to get back into situations where I’m risking another, the threat of head injury is very real, and I’d challenge Kanell to go spend time with some CTE/TBI sufferers like the SCIENTIST who wrote the NYT piece does, and tell me how his call to arms is unwarranted.
You’re a disgrace to the Tigers and don’t deserve the right to pretend to support them. Everything in this world, worth doing, has inherent dangers. Why don’t you go live in a cave, hopefully in Eastern Afghan, and stay safe from the boogeyman. People like you enjoy nothing more than destroying cultures. Yes football culture is dangerous but so is many jobs making much less than NFL players.
Fight the good fight brother. The Sky is Falling crowd will always try to destroy whatever they can.