
NFL IS KILLING ITS PLAYER AND THE LEAGUE DOESN'T EVEN CARE
​Of all the football statistics you'll read in your time on Earth, none will be as shocking as this one: According to a 2006 report in the St. Petersburg Times, for every season a player spends on an NFL roster, his life expectancy decreases by almost three years. ​
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Read that again. ​
The average American male lives to be almost 75. According to the Times report, an NFL player, whose career lasts roughly four years on average, lives to be 55. The more years a player spends in the NFL, the more games and practices he survives, the quicker he dies.
So by all means, NFL owners, let's increase the regular season to 18 games! You cold-hearted bastards. And a merry Christmas to all of you, you greedy jackals. Add more games. More tickets sold. More concessions, more parking, more television money.
More early deaths. ​
What do NFL owners care? To them, players aren't people. They're commodities to be bought and sold, acquired and released. They're ​pieces in a brutal game of chess that has seen 273 players placed on injured reserve this season. ​​
Read that statistic again. ​
Exactly 273 players have suffered season-ending injuries this year. That's almost nine players per team. That's one-sixth of the NFL active roster of 53. Of those 273 players -- let's make it 280, since the official NFL injury report lists an additional seven players who aren't on the IR but have been identified as "out of the season" because of injury -- 14 are listed with head injuries, and 13 with neck injuries, and one with a spine injury.
That's 28 possibly catastrophic injuries, slightly less than one per team.
To play devil's advocate, I'm aware that injuries are going to happen in the NFL. The only way to avoid these injuries, these potential catastrophes, this absolute life shrinkage of NFL players, is to do away with the NFL.
And I'm not calling for that. So maybe I'm a hypocrite. Maybe I'm as bloodthirsty as the average NFL owner.
No, I don't want the elimination of the NFL. That's crazy talk. But so is the discussion -- to put it mildly; most insiders say an 18-game regular season is a done deal -- of lengthening the NFL season by two more games, or 12.5 percent. What happens to the average life expectancy of an NFL player with another 12.5 percent added to his slate of games? It would decrease even more, obviously. Every season saps some life from a pro football player. Every game. Broken down further, every snap. The violence on a pro football field is described by those who have played it as a series of car crashes on every play, and the car crashes get worse each year as players become bigger, stronger and faster.
The NFL, meanwhile, is transparently hypocritical on this issue. On the one hand, players are now fined for various forms of viciousness on the field. That protects people. On the other hand, players soon will be forced to play two more regular-season games simply because the league wants to make more money. That jeopardizes people.
Players too would make more money with a longer season, but they don't want it. To quote former NFL player Sean Morey, now the co-chairman of the NFL Players Association's Mackey-White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, "You can just see they're deflated" as they consider the 18-game schedule.
Players want to play, yes. But they want to enjoy their lives after football. Hard to enjoy all that money, all that fame, when you're dead at 55.
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By Gregg Doyel
CBSSports.com National Columnist
