26 y/o Ravens linesman retires 2 days after CTE report released

[Apollo Creed]

I was "good" at ball but had no passion for it. I pretty much had a free ride in undergrad academically after my freshmen yr, and turned down the opportunity to walk on. Unless my kid is some rare Cam Newton Bo Jackson type of talent, my kid is only playing basketball, baseball, or soccer. Football culturally is on some other ish too if your kid isn't playing for Black schools their whole life.

 

[Paradise50]

White folks love seeing white quarterbacks. The league's ratings would be waaaaaaaaaaaay lower without them.

Fair but QBs don't get hit enough to stop playing so there'll always be white QBs around

 

[Lord Beasley]

cause the reward is way better than the risk

avg american won't make 1 million total in his entire working lifetime. while thousands of people are made millionaires every year, just for playing a sport. the risk is dying early, losing memory, going crazy by 50.. but those are the extreme cases.. the reward is you never having to work again, IF you handle your money right, even as a bum. and the highest high is your entire family never having to work again, IF you handle your money right AND you become a huge star

No amount of money is worth your ability to lead a normal life. Learn to hit a baseball or something. fukk foosball

 

[j.smooth4]

A lot of yall I can tell never played football or enjoyed playing it. Even with the risks I'd still would have played in HS and College.
There's just something about those 5am lifts, bonding with your teammates, learning all those fundamentals of weightlifting, hitting other people I enjoyed.

Theres the risk of concussions but I just loved hitting someone or outrunning them on offense. At the end of the day you need a certain personality for it.

The most physically brutal sports Football wrestling and track got me hooked in HS.

 

[j.smooth4]

This dude is sorta a liar though it's the physicality that drew him in

Quoted from 2015

"But as an offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens, John Urschel regularly goes head to head with the top defensive players in the NFL and does his best to keep quarterback Joe Flacco out of harm's way. "I play because I love the game. I love hitting people," Urshel writes. "There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."


He might be back sooner than you think that linebacker for us zach orr changed his mind after retiring too

 

[j.smooth4]

Another quote from him in 2015

"He shared his thoughts after San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland announced last week that he was retiring from professional football at age 24 because he was worried about the long-term effects of head trauma. Urschel says he envies Borland but doesn't feel able to quit."

"When I go too long without physical contact I'm not a pleasant person to be around," he writes. "This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work."


read the shyt here
Baltimore Ravens' guard John Urschel is a math whiz - CNN.com

 

[MegaTronBomb!]

Did you know what CTE was in 2005? I didn't.

I did a Google search between 1998 and 2007 for CTE & football and it was mostly only unknown spammy websites and scientific blogs writing about it.

There was one article by CBS & the NY Times in 2007.

I then did a Google search between 2007 and 2017 and there were HUNDREDS of articles.

This lines up with my memory. I was in high school in the early to mid 2000s like the Ravens lineman was.

Unless you were in the know, as in the NFL/College Football circle, you probably had no fukking clue what CTE was in 2005.

The death of Junior Seau brought nation wide attention to CTE and that happened in 2012.

From everything I can remember about back then, parents were more concerned with their children getting paralyzed.

Again..... You had no clue that multiple/severe head trauma could have lingering effects later on in life? did it take CTE to put 2 and 2 together?

Like think REALLY about that

 

[The Devil's Advocate]

No amount of money is worth your ability to lead a normal life. Learn to hit a baseball or something. fukk foosball

yea... if you're some rich millionaire or bo jackson

you act like this shyt is easy. oh just learn baseball.. first off you one of the few thousand out of millions to get a college roster spot.... then you're one of the few hundred out of 6000 some college players to even get drafted...

and you think a player like that can just as easily play baseball and make it or any other sport? some of these football players did try other sports... shyt most played multiple sports since middle school. at some point they were told, you're not good enough, and that other shyt was cancelled


now skip to what most of these kids are.. broke young black children. who get to middle and high school and are told, hey you might can make it. you might make MILLIONS. i think you got what it takes to be in the NFL

they ain't about to pass that attempt up. for what? they ain't all book worms or smart. they ain't all going to get great jobs and make 60-70k a year. at the least, they can get to college and get a free degree. at the most, they can save their entire family


ain't no different than coal miners risking their lives or people who have high risk jobs or military out there fighting wars for a check.... if someone said you can make 20 million but the risk is you may end up killing yourself at 50 or you may be competent like deion sanders or phil simms.. what you gonna choose?

 

[pimpineasy]

At 26

Well done young man

Gaddam I have undergrad in math and nothing impresses me more than a PhD in math or physics.
And at MIT no less. At 26 and an athlete.
This is mind boggling difficult to do.

 

[MalikX]

Again..... You had no clue that multiple/severe head trauma could have lingering effects later on in life? did it take CTE to put 2 and 2 together?

Like think REALLY about that

If NFL players didn't fully know about CTE until 2011, why would I, a high school student years before that, know about it?

 

[Lord Beasley]

Choosing soccer or beisbol. I won't fukking let my kids set foot on a football field.

yea... if you're some rich millionaire or bo jackson

you act like this shyt is easy. oh just learn baseball.. first off you one of the few thousand out of millions to get a college roster spot.... then you're one of the few hundred out of 6000 some college players to even get drafted...

and you think a player like that can just as easily play baseball and make it or any other sport? some of these football players did try other sports... shyt most played multiple sports since middle school. at some point they were told, you're not good enough, and that other shyt was cancelled


now skip to what most of these kids are.. broke young black children. who get to middle and high school and are told, hey you might can make it. you might make MILLIONS. i think you got what it takes to be in the NFL

they ain't about to pass that attempt up. for what? they ain't all book worms or smart. they ain't all going to get great jobs and make 60-70k a year. at the least, they can get to college and get a free degree. at the most, they can save their entire family


ain't no different than coal miners risking their lives or people who have high risk jobs or military out there fighting wars for a check.... if someone said you can make 20 million but the risk is you may end up killing yourself at 50 or you may be competent like deion sanders or phil simms.. what you gonna choose?

 

[The Devil's Advocate]

Choosing soccer or beisbol. I won't fukking let my kids set foot on a football field.

and if your kid is 6'5 with a 4.4 40 and fukking hates soccer and basketball but plays football with his friends every day after school??

everybody isn't FORCING their kids to do shyt.. sometimes the kid actually comes to his parents and says "i love _____. i'm going to try out for the team next year"

lets not act like we all grew up with our parents telling us what sports to play. we'd get together with friends and play tackle in the yard with no gear on... or go play some ball. nikkas was not coming home and dad had a list of sports picked out on some "little nikka you gonna play baseball cause i said so"

 

[MegaTronBomb!]

If NFL players didn't fully know about CTE until 2011, why would I, a high school student years before that, know about it?

Actually READ what i'm typing breh.

How did you NOT know that multiple head injuries could lead to issues later on in life?

Just cause you didn't have a general understanding of what CTE was, doesn't mean that you had no clue that a bunch of concussions and being knocked unconscious could have you fukked up later in life.

 

[MegaTronBomb!]

and if your kid is 6'5 with a 4.4 40 and fukking hates soccer and basketball but plays football with his friends every day after school??

everybody isn't FORCING their kids to do shyt.. sometimes the kid actually comes to his parents and says "i love _____. i'm going to try out for the team next year"

lets not act like we all grew up with our parents telling us what sports to play. we'd get together with friends and play tackle in the yard with no gear on... or go play some ball. nikkas was not coming home and dad had a list of sports picked out on some "little nikka you gonna play baseball cause i said so"

How many of these NFL players have parents who wouldn't even let them play football?

People proudly saying that they'd be Marv Marinovich rather than let their kid play football.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Smart man.

Happy for breh though. Real talk, offensive linemen were some of the smartest cats I knew in college tbh. Like some of them were scholars like this dude.

People make dumb jokes about linemen but O-linemen straight the smartest dudes on the team other than some quarterbacks. It's one of the few positions where you actually have enough time to think about what you're doing rather than just reacting, and they make a lot of decisions on every play.