Listen, if you actually had players when you played that weighed more than 180 pounds and did actual off-season training not just a set of squats and some curls before sneaking out back to smoke, you'd have had the same concussion issues these kids have and numbers would have trailed off earlier in the sport. You didn't play against 6'1 220lb RBs and 245lb LBs, 300+lb OL/DL and bang helmets with them all season. Force equals mass times acceleration. When you played your teams were scrawny and slow, these kids are jacked and fast which means the hits are nastier and so are the resulting injuries. You know why kids tear ACLs more than they did when you played? It's not because their knees are "soft", it's because evolution didn't design the knee to cut on a dime while carrying 215 lbs on it. Well guess what, our brains aren't designed to do ping pong inside our skull either.
This is a totally different game than when you played and anyone here who says otherwise is a liar and they know it. There are kids in college, not even pros but college, who now have CTE and have killed themselves because their brains became scrambled before they were even 22 which means the CTE developed IN HIGH SCHOOL. It is a FAR more dangerous sport than it was 30, 40, 50+ years ago and every single goddamn metric bears that out.
But sure, kids are "soft" because they want to remember what a toaster does when they're 35. It's bizarre that none of you can seem to take off your rose-colored glasses and see that your football and their football are completely different. Christ, don't even look at HS look at the pros. Do you have any idea how badly the Steelers of the 70s would be trounced by any random current NFL team? The 1972 Steelers OL and DL weighed an average of 250 pounds, how many of our team's high school lines are bigger?
