In this podcast, we ask the question, how dangerous is football? As one of America's most played sports, you need to know just what the risks are.

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Today’s podcast is

Football: Who doesn’t love a concussion

First off, for those joining me today outside the US, we are

discussing American football.  I fully

admit that for those of you who play rugby, are MMA fighters or bull-riders,

American football isn’t that much of a contact sport.  However, for most of the US, football is the physical,

high contact sport. 

In my podcast on statistics,

we discussed a study on brain injury among football players.  The claim often made about the study was that

99% of all football players suffered from brain injuries which wasn't a valid

conclusion for the study.  That study did

get me wondering how dangerous football really is.

Just for full transparency, playing sports isn't something I

enjoy much.  I played a little soccer as

a kid and in high school, the closest I came to team sports was cross-country running

and wrestling.

As a father, one of my boys played football prior to high

school and since he enjoyed it, I supported his decision to play.  However, I do remember attending his 6th-grade

end of year football banquet.  The

introduced the players individually and said something about their

accomplishments.  I do remember that a

large number of boys had spent at least part of the season not playing due to

injuries.  At the end of the introductions,

the coach mentioned it too saying "if you don't get hurt playing football,

then you probably aren't playing hard enough".  To this day, I'm trying to find something

important enough about 6th-grade football to justify an injury that

could be with you for a lifetime.

However, I never really actually looked at the data to see

if my opinion had any validity. First off, let’s take a look at youth

football.  Most people would agree that

youth football isn’t comparable to college football and that college football

isn’t very similar to professional football.

High school football injury statistics

According to Stanford, 3.5 million children 14 and under get

hurt every year from sports and recreational activities.  About 215k children visited the emergency

room due to football injuries (both organized and informal).  Just to put this in perspective, the number

injured in bicycling accidents was 200K, basketball 170K, skateboarding/inline

skating 113k, baseball/softball 110k, soccer 88k, and trampolines 65K.  All of these were compared to 215K football

injuries.  As you can see, a lot of

children 14 and younger visit the emergency room.

A different study by UC Denver has been tracking sports

injuries at selected schools since 2005. 

They estimate that annually there are 1.2-1.4 million high school sports

injuries per year across all sports. 

From 2013-2018 football accounted for 39% of all injuries.  For comparison, girl’s soccer was 17%, boy’s

soccer 12%, boy’s basketball 6%,