Football Is the New Smoking

[Geee]

American Spectator:

This morning, fat kids across America ran wind sprints until they vomited, drove sleds like beasts until muscle collapse, and alternated between jogging in place and hitting the deck so frequently that it jarred even the insides of onlookers. And they do it all again this afternoon.

This isn't a federal anti-obesity initiative. It's football.

Two-a-days are good for you. Video-game addiction, blasting ear buds to "11," and treating Skittles as one of the four food groups are not. Madly, it's the fitness-inducing pastime of teenage boys that public health crusaders inveigh against as though an end-around were as dangerous as a pack of Marlboro Reds. They're not called health nuts for nothing.

Football star Junior Seau's autopsy released Monday by the San Diego County medical examiner revealed no brain damage. What cerebral malady caused so many otherwise sensible people to reflexively blame the linebacker's suicide on decades of violent football collisions?

"Football's in trouble for two reasons," George Will explained in the wake of Seau's suicide on ABC's This Week. "First of all, the human body is not built for the violence that is inherent in football at the highest level. Second, people are going to watch football differently from now on, because they're going to feel a little bit like the spectators in the Coliseum in Rome, watching people sacrificed for their entertainment, with a kind of violence that is unseemly -- third suicide in 15 months."

It may surprise the bow-tied baseball buff to learn that total suicides among Major League Baseball players greatly outnumber suicides among National Football League athletes. Should a numbskull baseball-hater have made a connection between Hideki Irabu's recent self-inflicted death and, say, his 98 mph fastball, surely George Will would recognize the logical fallacy at work.