Hey, Edge of Sports listeners, this is Dave Ziron.

If you live in Seattle, you've got to come out to Town Hall, Seattle on January 5th.

I will be interviewing Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett, otherwise known as Moses Bread 72.

I'm going to be talking to Michael Bennett about sports, politics, and everything in between by one of the most thoughtful guys out there.

Details to get tickets in the description of this podcast.

Welcome to The Edge of Sports podcast. I'm Dave Zyron.

Today is our year-end show, and I'm going to speak about the joy and resistance sports gave us

while the world simply seemed to burn.

But first, I have Vice Sports contributing editor Patrick Ruby for the uninitiated. That's Ruby,

H-R-U-B-Y. On his article, Friday Night Lights Out, The Case for Abolishingishing high school football this article's making waves

people so glad to have Patrick on the show so you interviewed lots of folks who are you know running for

school board you talk to doctors you talk to people making this case that there should not be high

school football what is their case? What is their argument?

How would you sum it up? Well, it sort of breaks down along three lines. So essentially,

there's a medical case, which is the thing we're all kind of familiar or more familiar now,

where we know football can cause brain damage. And we know the risk now is a lot more significant that we used to

think. We used to think basically, okay, skull fractures, worst case scenario, you could die from that.

That's a pretty big risk. We came up with plastic, hard shell helmets. Those seem to solve that

problem for the most part. Sure, there are some freak deaths every year in high school football,

and we shouldn't discount that. That's a big deal. But as a culture of society, we accepted that. We sort of embraced the sport. It's our favorite high school sport. Most kids participate in that than any other sport. By more than a two to one margin, which your article had the next one being track and field. Right, which is even more amazing if you consider high school football is essentially played by half of the student population. And it's also amazing when you think about, and this is something we've talked about on the show before, how budgets for sports like track and field have often found themselves on the chopping block to pay for sports like football. Right. That actually gets into one of the arguments, by the way, against it. It's a very's a very expensive sport. But getting back to the first part, the medical argument, so it turns out, as we now know, these same helmets that protect against skull fractures do not protect against concussion, nor do they protect against, and this is the really big deal, the series of subconcussive blows that players take every season, you know, 500, 800, a000, sometimes 1,500 hits to the head in a single season.

And the more we study this, the medical science community studies this, the more they realize those add up.

They're creating a larger risk of brain damage.

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