SAN JOSE (KCBS) -- Matt Blea got up after he took a hard hit during Thursday’s game against a rival high school team. Then the San Jose Academy running back collapsed on the side lines a minute later.
The 16-year-old has been in critical and unstable condition since then because of a hairline skull fracture.
His injury comes amid growing concern about head injuries in football generally, and among young players in particular.
KCBS' Margie Shafer reports
“The NFL has been skirting around this issue for a number of years. Finally the research studies have started to come out looking at this issue, and everyone is frightened as they should be,” said Joel Kirsch of the American Sports Institute.
The National Football League Players Association has created a committee to look intot he diagnosis and treatment of concussions in light of that growing body of research.
Kirsch sees the only alternative—short of not participating in the sport at all—is to transform how football is played. “The ways you stop a receiver or a runner with the ball, the way they are considered down or stopped, has to be changed.”
There are already rules against head to head combat, but for reformers like Kirsch that is not enough.
“What we have to look at here is, what is the nature of sport?” he said. “I personally do not believe that the way football is played today is conducive to being called sport.”
Kirsch predicted such wholesale changes in college and professional football will probably require Congressional intervention.
(jro)
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