Spend what did you by . It is a long list, but some outstanding books. Got every book for every age group from five until 52. Are we all set to . Speak with you are all set. Thank you so much. Okay, guys. Have a great holiday. [applause] you are watching booktv. Coming up next, daniel flynn argues that doctors and lawyers are pushing the idea that football is an overly dangerous sport to drum up business. He says that the conventional wisdom surrounding football is totally wrong and that the sport, a rite of passage for millions of american boys, is being unfairly attacked. This is about an hour. Ladies and gentlemen. Try it one more time. We are getting there. Ladies and gentlemen, almost there. Welcome. You dont have to stop eating. There still some soda back there. Welcome to the final authors night of accuracy in academias 2013 conservative University Lecture series brought to us by a generous grant. We do these to give you a chance to see and hear speakers and authors that you might not be exposed to on the campus of your from, or even those of you over on the hill, the Congressional Committee that you work for. And a big fan that accuracy in academia and accuracy in media have in common is that we continuously find that this is what keeps us going from daytoday, that just about everything weve heard in school and the newspapers and other news broadcast is wrong. So you can do this little experiment on your own. Just take one story youve been doing research on it and seeing how well it holds up. At one campus lecture. We do it day in day out. And a lot of hard talks focus on current events, history. So this might seem an odd one, but it fits because just about everything you hear about the dangers of football turn out to be wrong. I was astounded to learn that cheerleaders are at greater risk of physical danger than Football Players. But the gentleman we brought in, the author we brought intimate to speak on this topic is my predecessor at accuracy in academia, five books, right . Why the left hates america, conservative history of the left, blue collar intellectuals and how my doing . The war on football saving americas game. Now, how many people try to watch at least one game on the weekend . Thats about what i thought. Its usually fairly absorbing unless youre a redskins fan. Books on football are another story. This is the exception to the rule. It is a compelling read. I think we will find itself, and we have a compelling speaker in the man who wrote this book. Ladies and gentlemen, daniel flynn. [applause] thank you for coming out tonight. I figured since were in washington, d. C. And talk about football we could sort of mix a little bit of americas game with the local sport which is politics, and football for whatever reason is a big sport amongst politicians. People say the horse racing is the sport of kings. I think if thats true, football is serving the sport of president s. From everyone from Theodore Roosevelt the gerald ford playing at the university of michigan, an awful lot of president s who have had a relationship a real interest in the sport of football. I think if you were to ask the people in this building, whose your favorite football playing president , they would probably say Ronald Reagan. Ronald reagan, a lot of people dont know, played football at eureka college. He later was a playbyplay man for the university of iowa hawkeyes on w. H. O. Radio. His biggest involvement in football stand of course from his role in the movie nude rockne allamerican. In that movie Ronald Reagan got his nickname by playing the gipper, and i think notre dame in College Football brought a lot more from Ronald Reagan. What i mean by that is if you watch that movie, theres a sense in which notre dame do not only building young bodies on the football field but they were building character, that they were basically building young man. It was a real kind of problem propaganda tool for notre dame. What any by this that if you watch the movie at a certain point nude rockne, theres a gambler, a book you stumble syndrome and the kitchen that says when the user gambler surrender. Youve ruined baseball, horse racing. When the going to let you ruin this clean game, and he throws them out. At a later point in the movie there were some politicians that want to do a way with football because corrupting the academic, corrupting academia essentially. And he says any player who flunks classes is of no use to his coach, and any coach in place a flunky is just a cool. Reagan gets into the act. Reagan has the speech, really kind of hamhanded speech where he says there will never be but one nude rocking. Here at notre dame were no else but he gives us something they can teach in school. Something clean and strong. Not just courage but right way of living. That none of us will ever forget. The right way of living that nude rockne and george get engaged in was george gipp, they were both professional athletes posing as amateurs at notre dame. They were both being paid in other sports. Oath of them were heavy gamblers. George gipp, you could call him a degenerate gambler, someone who hung out at pool halls at night and also people for money. They both bet on notre dame. We no george gipp probably the greatest player that played at notre dame, the guy that reagan played in the movie, he averaged six points three yards a carry. Is grade point average was something less than that. It was like 0. 0. Is first to a half years at notre dame theres no real record of him being there. Hes called a trained athlete. He played for notre dame but didnt go to school there. And so my point in bringing this up is not to trash nude rockne he was a great coach or george gipp who was a great player or notre dame which is a Great Institution but its just to suggest that the power, the power of hollywood to shape perception. We have a perception of george gipp and nude rockne because of hollywood that is diametrically opposed to reality of nude rockne and george get. Hollywood has the power to make bruce willis see dead people. And also the power of making these two men sinners into saints on the screen. This is a lot like the controversy over football today. My book is about perception versus reality. We have a perception about football based on the mass media that the game is more dangerous than ever, that players die young if they played for a long time, that theres this epidemic of suicide in the nfl. What i do in the war on football is i get the signs and i try to overcome the speculation with the science on the game and the stories behind the game. And the reality is that the perception thats been created by the mass media with football over the last two years is almost in every instance wrong. In some cases just 180 wrong. I got into this genesis of writing the war on football was a study that was put together by the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and health. National institutes ofnational f Occupational Safety and health federal scientist. They put together last year, they looked at every nfl player who was pension vested who played in the league between 19591980. So guys like Lawrence Taylor and Joe Theismann and Walter Payton and dick butkus, all these guys, about 35 other players who played in the league in those 30 or so years. The reason they looked at these players is because theres a wide suspicion in the public that nfl players die young, that they died in the 50s, that the game takes such a toll on their bodies that their Health Outcomes are just absolutely horrible. This is something that has been spread in the mainstream press. Its not like an anonymous blogger seems to jewish wills was probably the most widely read columns in america, he the road for all players who play five or more years, Life Expectancy is less than 60. For alignment it is much less. Abc news, the average Life Expectancy of a retired Football Player is 58 years. Espn. Com, the average Life Expectancy for an average american male is 75. For nfl players 5359. The federal scientist looked into this and what they found shocked a lot of people. And nfl players dont die young. They actually outlive their peers in society. They have a longer Life Expectancy. This mortality study was expecting to find about an 18 death rate amongst these nfl players. They found the 10 rate, almost half what was expected based on the prevailing rates in society. They looked at 17 different disease categories, and in 14 of the 17, the nfl players have better Health Outcomes than the average joe, this terrible guy out in society. Things like heart disease, cancer, respiratory illness, diabetes, even suicide was much lower amongst the nfl players than it was amongst men in society. Theres sort of a if youre an up or down a practice you for two hours every day, if you have intensified in training, if you have access to the best medical care in the world like these nfl players do, if you have a restrained from vice and we know not every nfl player is restrained from vice, but generally if youre not smoking cigarettes and doing all sorts of crazy drugs, you will probably have better Health Outcomes. Its a little shocking to me that people were shocked by this survey. This is an example of the publics perception being shaped not by the facts on the ground, but by a lot of misinformation with regard to columnists and writers, being primed to believe that the nfl takes decades off your life. Win in fact the sciences, the nfl players our outliving their peers. They have better outcomes. Another one of these perceptions versus reality, the clash between the two involves the idea that bigger, faster, stronger means deadlier. That the nfl players are much bigger than they used to be and so the game is much more dangerous. The players at the high school level, college level, at every level, its a faster game, a bigger game so its going to be a deadlier game. Not really. Football in general used to be a pretty deadly game. People would die on the field. In the height of the violence was in 1960. There were 36 players at all levels of competition who were killed at football hits. Im a big fan of football but even for me thats a little hard to justify for what amounts to be a kids game, the id you can all these people dying on the field because of the game. Society didnt really notice this much in 1960 because in 1968 there were bombings and assassinations and riots in the streets. There were casualties in vietnam. So the American People it wasnt this outrage about football than it was now, but the football people notice and any changes to the game and thats a big point of my book, the war on football, that football is not just a game of violence and ruckus. Always evolving, progressing. Its not like baseball or soccer that are static game teams thaty the same but its an evolving game. After that season, within a few years they were rules on speeding. You could know longer to head spearheads. They used to be something called a web suspension. You would wear h. Hardshell, with a piece of fabric essentially keeping it from getting that hardshell window with the collusion. That technology was invented right before world war ii, and the military liked it so much they conscripted this football helmet essentially for military use. And, in fact, i was a marine for many years and i wore that web suspension helmet into the 21st century. Football got rid of that technology in the 1970s. And as twisted as it sounds, we equip our Football Players better in a country than we do our soldiers and marines. Coaching got better. Heads up tackling. Coaches not, you know, no longer sing put you between the numbers and that kind of thing. All of these things combined to bring football from the point where they had 36 deaths from galatians in 1968, to last season where there were two deaths from galatians. Again got dramatically safer. And at the time we shouldve been giving football a pat on the back, where getting a kick below the belt. To put this in perspective, there were no kids that died last year from a football hit. More kids died getting struck by lightning than playing football last season and getting struck by other players. And the perception from the news is that the game is more dangerous than ever. Its safer than ever and i think one of the ways you can kind of grasp that the game is safer than ever, is how the conversation initiated. No one much talked about players getting killed on the field anymore. They talk about players getting concussions, and i dont want to downplay the risk of concussion or the dangers of concussion, but i think its safe to say that a concussion is a much less permanent outcome than a death from a foot ball hit. That its something that the symptoms generally disappear and with death they dont disappear. Even the fact were talking about concussions and not players getting killed, i think that is a sign that the game has gotten safer. Now, when footballs critics talk about concussions, they generally do in conjunction with the idea of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Youve heard a lot of this on the news, a number of plays from nfl players, people like junior set out by Michael Webster and john mackey really great players who have a lot of trouble cognitively in the last years. When scientists look at their brains after they were dead they found that they had cte. If you were, if you watched the pbs documentary that has been airing, the impressions left by legal denial is the local causes cte and that the nfl has known about this for years but has tried to cover it up. That is the animating idea behind the documentary league of denial. Com and if you want to come you get that impression, its on until 72 minutes in that you actually are a dissenting voice. So for 72 minutes you get agreement and youre bound to think this is what scientists believe. Its action that what scientists believe the scientists believe the opposite. The best scientists in sports got together last year at internet conference on concussion in sports, and they crafted a consensus statement. In that consensus statement they had some words about cte and this is what they said. They said a cause and effect relationship has not yet been demonstrated between cte and concussions or exposure to contact sports. Why would the safest . The reason theyre saying this is because it hasnt even been a randomized study done on cte in football. We have anecdotes. We have autopsy. We essentially have junk science did people say its junk science. What i mean by junk science is that science that doesnt have any applications beyond the immediate subject of study, that you cant make any sweeping generalizations based on a. That if youre looking at an individual players bring, if youre not doing a randomized study, you can tell us about that individualize brain but you cant tell us about other players and you cant tell us the rate of cte amongst people in society or people in the nfl. This is the kind of study theyre done with cigarettes in 1966, the british doctors study shows theres a link between cigarettes and cancer. That kind of the study hasnt even been attempted with cte. What we have are autopsies done in italy with a selection bias. In other words, scientists going after brains that they believed to have been braindamaged improvise, and finding, lo and behold, when you do an autopsy that they have brain damage. Shocking. One of the big concerns that other scientists have, let me play that there is article after article, i mean if you look at academic publications, criticizing the Boston University group and others that are doing some of the cte research, just, this is just the stuff in the last few months, looking one of the criticism that they have is that the two main groups of studying cte have different definitions of what cte is. People studying cancer dont have two different definitions of cancer but cte is so new that you groups that are debating what exactly it is. And the Boston University group that was one of the criticisms levied at him is that the definition is so elastic as to almost guarantee that youll find what youre looking for. Theres a condition that naturally occurs in human beings that 97 of all people get in their brains, and that condition is being used to determine whether someone has cte or not. Doesnt have anything to do with drama, so why is it being used as a determined of whether someone has cte . Thats one of the criticisms of that group. To me, one of the great things about science is that even if youre not the person doing the initial study, if its science, the findings can be replicated elsewhere and no one has been able to replicate this amazing percentage of Football Players found with cte, that this bu group has done to their funding cte all most every case any of the other groups, all with selection bias on going after brains everything to been braindamaged. Other groups not find it to that level. I think thats something that really should set off a red flag and it has set off a red flag in the scientific community. One of the main reasons why theres such a huge interest in concussions in cte has to do with the players lawsuit against the nfl that was recently settled for 765 million. I think it would shock a lot of people who know that about 10 of the players suing the nfl never actually played a down in an nfl game. These are guys who got cut in the preseason, guys who may have made at taxi squad but they never got into an actual nfl game. If you look at the players who actually made an nfl team and got on the field, that went on this is the nfl, you have kickers who played in five games, you have backup quarterbacks who barely played at all. You have replacement players from 1987 strike who played in those three replacement games in 1987. I dont think you have to be a particularly cynical person to look at this and say, well, gee, these guys played in pop warner, high school, college, they may have played in other pro leagues, but they got the brain damage from it couple of coffee they had in the nfl . I really find it hard to believe. So i think for a lot of these guys, and i would say the bulk of the guys suing the nfl, it was