Football has never been my favorite sport. It really is not that I am averse to rough competitive games with serious risks of injury. I played competition Judo for twenty years, only retiring when injured (again) at age 37.
Is there anybody who does not know that football is a rough sport? Have the players ever been unaware of that? From day one, didn’t they calculate the potential hazards and compare them with the expected benefits at the margin in their decisions whether or not to keep playing?
And yet here are 2000 retired NFL players who were extremely highly paid over their careers (most of us can only dream of such salaries), now suing the NFL for damages. They claim they were denied information by the league on the risks of receiving a concussion. The league claims they knew, and those that ended up with head traumas or other injuries just incurred the bad luck of the draw on risks that they willingly accepted.
Consider some relatively simple economics of employment and compensation. Suppose there are two (or more, but let’s keep the analysis simple) alternate employments for people with the same basic capacities and skills. Consider, for example, a set of miners who could work either for any one of a group of firms engaged in open pit mining, or for any of a different group of firms doing underground mining.
Now suppose (I don’t know this to be true, but go with me) that the objective risks, the literal likelihood of injury and death, are higher in underground mining. We might also assume that it is less pleasant being down in those holes than out working in the sunshine and (comparatively) fresh air.
Further suppose that at some initial point in time the wage rates (defined to include the dollar value of non-wage benefits) were the same in both employments. Underground and open pit paid the same. Let's also assume that the miners hear about this. What would happen?
Clearly, some miners employed by the underground mining firms would start handing in their two weeks' notice and applying for jobs with one or more of the open pit firms. After all, they can get paid the same and have better work conditions, including lower risks.
In economic terminology, the supply of labor available at each wage rate offered to underground mining firms would decline relative to demand, generating a shortage at the initial wage rate, and the supply of labor offered to the open pit firms would increase, generating a surplus at the initial wage rate.
To obtain and retain the workers they need the underground firms would start increasing their wage offers. The open-pit firms, in contrast, would start reducing their wage and hire more miners. Thus a differential would appear in which the wage paid to employees of the underground mining firms would exceed that of open pit miners. And thus, miners facing higher risks would be compensated for doing so.
The shift of workers out of underground and into open-pit mining would stop at some point, and the size of the wage differential would stabilize. Why? People differ in their degree of aversion to risk. Think of risk aversion as normally distributed (a bell curve) across the miners, with the more risk-averse workers in the right tail. Those would be the first to quit the underground firms and shift over to work in the open-pit firms. As that continued only progressively less risk-averse workers would be left working for the underground firms.
Eventually a ‘marginal employee’ would be reached in each underground mining firm for whom the extra pay earned would just suffice to compensate for the extra risks he/she faces. It is a coin toss to him whether to shift or not, and not worth the trouble. The net advantages of working in either type of employment are the same at the margin.
By such rationally self-interested actions taken by persons in the labor market, an efficient allocation of scarce labor resources across the alternate employments would be reached. Those with greater risk aversion fill the lower risk employments, and those with lower risk-aversion fill the higher risk employments.
Empirical research confirms that higher physical risk employments do tend to pay more than lower risk employments available to similar employees. And, of course, the same type of economic process operates in financial markets. Relative risks of economic profit and loss have similar effects to relative physical and health risks. Equities earn higher yields over time than debt instruments do, precisely because equity returns are more variable, and people are risk averse. It takes real gumption to be an investment banker because of the high risks of profit and/or loss they bear. Risk is a very real cost of doing business, and all costs must be covered for a firm of any kind to stay in business.
But you monkeys know all that, so back to the player’s suit against the NFL. Were they compensated for the risk they took? Well, NFL players are the best of the best, short in supply and high in demand and much of their high compensation simply reflects that scarcity value.
Were the litigant’s unaware of the head trauma risks? They faced those risks directly in every game. They knew. It seems improbable to me that they are not fully compensated for the risks.
I think the retired NFL player’s suit is without merit. Am I wrong, monkeys?
You're missing the whole point of the suit, which is that the players were not given the full information needed to make their decision. Everyone knew that football was dangerous, and guys who broke their legs suing would have no case. The players' case, though, is that they didn't know about the long-term brain damage from concussions and that the league had this information and kept it secret. I don't know if the league had this information or not though.
Come on bro. Yes they are paid copiously and yes they need money management skills. Go to JDoasis.com if you want some real answers (scroll to the bottom of this screen). really judo?
Sure, players knew/know football is a dangerous sport. Most people (including doctors) didn't know of the serious impact multiple concussions can have on the brain until very recently (post 2000 is when concussions started being talked about more). Concussion research is still ongoing, and there have been very few long term studies.
I think the compensation of a football player is derived from the entertainment they provide, not the risks they take. You can argue that the risks they take are part of the entertainment.
But where are the incentives in coaches, team doctors, and staff? They want a player on the field, concussion or not. I think there was a much greater incentive for the NFL (coaches, doctors, staff, etc) to lie/mislead players on the dangers of head injury than there is for players to have known about the dangers, continue to play, then sue the league. These guys love the sport, and in some cases the sport is killing them.
There is nothing in a football players salary that compensates them for potential brain injury that may lead to a suicide. David Duerson and Junior Seau killed themselves in such a way as to preserve their brain for examination. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a disease we still know next to nothing about, and can't be diagnosed until after a death.
I'm not saying the NFL knew that repeated head injuries could lead to diseases like CTE. I'm saying it is likely the NFL knew more than the players about the risks of head injury, and that they encouraged players who had head trauma to keep playing.
i didnt read the whole post, but i def think football players bitching about injuries is non-sense. That being said, they are definitely the exception and not the rule. For every ex-player bitching about his injuries, there are many multiples of that who ARENT because they knew what they were signing up for. I mean honestly, like yea I had 4 knee surgeries by the time I was 27 and now that I'm 35 I'm surprised my knee is fucked up, lol. If you're afraid of injury and wanna play a big 4, its called basketball and baseball (basketball fans who say it is a physical sport are so fucking cute....no comment on baseball bcuz they literally dont even make the claim, lol)
The problem is that players didn't know the actual risks involved. Knowing a sport is violent meant players were aware that they could break a leg, neck, blow out a knee etc any time they stepped on the field. Brain research is just now starting to identify the long term risks involved with repeated hits to the head. I'm sure players were aware of getting injured on the field. However, they had no way of knowing that they could play a career, never get seriously injured, and end up with dementia, memory loss, or depression after they retired.
The crux of this lawsuit is that the NFL ACTIVELY witheld information that would have alerted players to the potential long term, negative effects caused by playing the game. If your employer witheld health risks about performing your job that would have allowed you to properly weigh the risks of employment, I'm sure you'd file suit.
The entire analysis could have been summed up with the expression all else equal higher risk jobs have hire wages to accommodate the extra risk. The real point is what is expected of a reasonable, responsible individual in terms of their knowledge of the future risk of concussions. It doesn't matter if they knew their risk of a concussion. They could know the risk to a "t" and that still doesn't excuse the NFL from liability. The question is whether a definitive cause and effect is found between concussions and future damages and whether a reasonable individual should have accurately accounted for those risks. I think there is almost not argument that proves football players over the last 10-15 years had enough information to make those determinations. In that scenario the employer, not the employee, should assume the risk.
Yeah, but in this case this is not true at all. NFL players' compensation has nothing to do with the risks involved with the job.
Guys, lets also not forget that the majority of NFL players didnt have alternatives. When you consciously make the decision to be a dumb ass jock all through high school and college, you're really putting all you're eggs in one basket "career opportunities" wise. Most of these guys would rather take millions of $ at the risk of injury than $10/ hr working the drive-thru. And lets be real, idk if you guys were friends with athletes in college- but trust me thatd b their alternative, lol
Most of you monkeys seem to think the case to be valid because little was known about long-term effects of multiple head shocks, etc. Well, okay, but I still doubt the players were unaware of the risks, even long-term. How much sense (in every sense of the term) does it take to suspect that there are going to be long-term effects of getting hour head bashed game after game, when you are on that field experiencing it repeatedly? This is very direct information, from which accurate estimates can be made. Plus, current players not only observe the health of players just leaving the game, but they all know old retired players. Back in the 1960s economists began trying to model how expectations of simple variables (such as future inflation rates) were formed. Eventually they discovered that expectations of such variables were rational in the following sense: some people underestimated the magnitude of future inflation, and others underestimated that magnitude. But across the population, individual's errors were normally distributed with a mean equal to the correct value. Now the question for NFL players, with all the direct information they have, is why would their estimates of the risks of future injury, including long-term effects, not be rational in that sense? Why should the players persistently underestimate them? Frankly I don't believe they could or did. Hence, their supply (or not to supply) decisions would have built adequate risk premiums into their NFL wages, and hence the suit is without merit.
I do not care about their lack of alternatives. They took the chance for the fortune and glory of playing in the world's premeire sports league. They would have played big-time college football before and should be familiar with how gruelling and brutal the sport is. Do they think that we would watch every Sunday if they started playing flag football?
Don't get me wrong, I think the NFL should go out of the way to monitor the safety of the game. It appears that they are doing that in some capacity. I have met a few people who have played in the NFL for a few years, most of them older (50+), and they have pain every day of their lives. Knees, back, hips, shoulders, etc. What I would ask of these former players behind the lawsuit is would they give up all of the benefits (both tangible and intangible) of playing in the NFL in exchange for relieving them of some of their physical ills?
FormerHornetDriver (cool pseudonym, by the way), I agree with you completely, except on one minor point. It should not be conceded that football players had no alternatives. In fact they did. The vast majority of them played college ball and have college degrees that could have been used to find jobs. Many could have coached high-school or college ball. Some of them have been trained in the health and medical aspects of their sport (which, by the way, is another source of information available to them on the hazards involved), and could have obtained jobs in those fields. The actual situation is that playing in the NFL, even with its risks, was far the best (in their own opinions) of the alternatives available to them, given the high pay and prospective glory involved.
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