Here's to Another Century of Dead Kids on the Football Field

Let's play a morbid game called Compare the Deaths. Here is how a newspaper described one football player's death, occurring a hundred years ago last week:

"Lyman was attempting to tackle running back Stanley Brown when Lyman's head struck Brown's thigh. Lyman collapsed at once and went into convulsions. Doctors arrived within 10 minutes, but Lyman died a few minutes later.

Coaches reported that Lyman had earlier asked to come out of the scrimmage, by saying, 'I'm all winded. Put in someone else.'

The assistant coach sent another man in, but later Lyman asked to return to the field. The assistant coach said, 'No, you're not fit to go in.'

Lyman insisted, but the coach again refused. The coach said that Lyman went in anyway, since there were only 10 men on the field. That's when the accident occurred.

The college president said that it was the first fatal accident ever experienced at the university and he said he thought "the accident will put a serious damper on football enthusiasm at Idaho."

And here is how a website described a football player's death that happened last week:

"The King County Medical Examiner's Office said earlier Thursday that an autopsy showed [Kenney] Bui died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

In an interview with Q13 FOX News Thursday night, Enfield revealed that Bui had suffered a previous concussion before he collapsed at the game last Friday night.

'Apparently he had had a concussion a couple of months ago -- or several weeks ago, I don't know the exact date -- but was seen by a doctor and cleared by a doctor before he even beginning our concussion protocol,' she said."

Much like how news reports of school shootings are now characterized by the numbness, media outlets have adopted an anesthetic disconnect from the individual tragedies football creates nearly every week. Five high school players have died so far this season; dozens of others have been hospitalized with severe head or neck injuries, for whom a normal life remains a goal rather than a given.

For more than a century, Americans have wondered how to make football safer. For more than a century, equipment, rules, protocols, emergency personnel, and safety measures have been gradually implemented so Football People can assert that "the game has never been safer." For more than a century, we have maintained an unhealthy cognitive dissonance that allows us to love a game in which people—almost always children—routinely die. These measures have worked, because we love the game more than ever, and children still die.

"All of our coaches are certified in concussion recognition and prevention, CPR, and sudden cardiac arrest," the spokesperson for Kenney Bui's school district told a local news network. Bui was 17.

Here's to another century of dead kids on the football field.