The new industrial revolution. On cspan2s booktv, unflinching courage, former senator Kay Bailey Hutchison on the women who helped shape texas. And on cspanbe 3s American History tv cspan3s American History tv, memories of the Civil Rights Era at 8 30. Ladies and gentlemen. Tried one more time. Were getting there. Almost there. Welcome. You dont have to stop eating. Gentlemen, theres still pizza and sodas back there. Welcome to the final office night of accuracy in academias 2013 conservative University Lecture series, brought to us by a generous grant from the fresco foundation. We do these to give you a chance to see and hear speakers and authors or you might not be exposed to on the campus you are from or even those of you over on the hill, the congressional committees that you work for. And a big thing that accuracy in academia and accuracy in media in covering media and academia have in common is that we continuously find this is what keeps us going from day to day, that just about everything weve heard in school and in the newspapers and on news broadcasts is wrong. So you can do this little experiment on your own by the way, just taking one story and then doing the research on it and think how well it holds up. Are one campus lecture. We do it day in day out. And a lot of our talk 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 in tonight to speak on this topic is my predecessor at accuracy in academia, a very accomplished author. Five books, right, dan . Why the west hates america, intellectual morons, a conservative history of the american left, blue collar intellectuals, and how am i doing . The war the war on football saving americas game. Now, how many people watch, try to watch at least one game of the weekend . Thats about what i thought. It usually fairly absorbing unless youre a redskins fan. [laughter] books on football are another story. This is the exception to the rule. It is a compelling read. I think youll find it some, and we have a compelling speaker and the man who wrote this book. Ladies and gentlemen, daniel flynn. [applause] thank you, mal. Thank you for coming out tonight. I figure since were in washington, d. C. Im talking about football we can sort of mix a little bit of americas game with the local sport, which is politics. And football for whatever reason is the big sport amongst politicians. People say the horse racing is the sport of kings, and i think if thats true football certainly is the sport of president. From everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to gerald ford playing at the university of michigan, an awful lot of president s who have had a real interest in the sport of football. And i think if you were to ask the people in this building, you know, whose your favorite football playing president , they would probably say Ronald Reagan. And while 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 and, of course, from his role in the movie knute rockne, all american. In that movie of course Ronald Reagan got his nickname by playing george egypt, the gipper. And i think notre dame in College Football got a lot of more from Ronald Reagan. What i mean by that is if you watch that movie, knute rockne all american, theres a sense in which a notre dame they were not only building young bodies on the football field but they were building character. That they were basically building young men. A kind of propaganda for notre dame. What i mean by that is if you watch the movie, at a certain point knute rockne, theres a gambler, a book you stumbles in the room and he kicks them out and says we have no use for gamblers around you. He wrote to baseball, youve ruined or stressing. We will not let you ruin this clean game, and he throws him out. At a later point in the movie there was some politicians that want to do away with football because it is corrupting the at the gimmicks corrupting academia essentially. He said any player who flunks his classes is of no use to his coach, and any coach who plays a flunky as a player is just a fool. Reagan gets into the act. Reagan, really kind of hamhanded speech where he says there will never be but one knute rockne. Here at notre dame or anywhere else. He gives us something they cant teach in school. Something clean and strong inside. Not just courage under right way of living that none of us will ever forget. The right way of living that knute rockne and george get engaged in was they were both professional athletes sort of posing as amateurs when it played at notre dame. They were both being paid in other sports. Both of them were heavy gamblers. Gipp, you can call him a degenerate gambler, some who hung out in pool halls at night and just hustled people for money. They both bet on notre dame. We know george gipp as probably the greatest player that played at notre dame. The guy that reagan played in the movie. He averaged 6. 3 arts activity. His grade point average was something less than that. It was like 0. 0. His first one half years at notre dame theres no real record of him being there. He was what was called a tramp athlete. He sort of played for notre dame but didnt go to school there. And somewhat poignant bring this up is not too trashed knute rockne who could was a great coach or trigger on notre dame, which is a great institution. But its just to suggest the power of the mass media. The power of hollywood to shape perception. We have a perception of george gipp and knute rockne because of hollywood that is diametrically opposed to the reality of knute rockne and george gipp. Hollywood has the power to make bruce willis see dead people, to allow will smith to travel through time. It also has the power of making these two sinners saints on the silver 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 play for a long time, that theres this epidemic of suicide in the nfl. And what i do in the war on football is i get the science and i tried over, 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. And in some cases just, you know, 180 wrong. I got into this whole genesis of writing the war on football was a study that was put together by the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and health, National Institute of Occupational Safety and health of sciences. They put together last year. They looked at every nfl player who is pension vested, who played in the league between 19591980. Said guys like Lawrence Taylor and Joe Theismann and Walter Payton and dick butkus. You can go on and on for all these guys, about 3500 players who played in the late in those 30 or so years. And the reasons they looked at this point because theres this wide suspicion in the public that nfl players die young. That they died in the 50s. Again take such a toll on the body that their Health Outcomes are just absolutely horrible. This is something that has been spread in the Mainstream Press but its not like youre an anonymous blogger cinks. George wills was probably the most widely read columnist in america. Last year he wrote 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 says the average Life Expectancy of american male is about 75. The average Life Expectancy of a retired in the local player is 5359 years old. The federal scientist look into this at the guest of the Nfl Players Association and what they found shocked a lot of people. Nfl players dont die young. They actually outlive their peers and 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 a 10 death rate, almost half of was expected based upon the prevailing rates in society. They look at 17 different disease categories, and in 14 of the 17 different disease categories the nfl players have better Health Outcomes than the average joe, the comparable got out in society. So things like heart disease, cancer, respiratory illness, diabetes, even suicide was much lower amongst the nfl players and then it was amongst men in society. Theres sort of a trend for equality but if you run up and down the practice you for two hours every day, if you have intense diet and training, if you have access to the best medical care in the world like these nfl players do, if you have general have a restraint from vice, not every nfl player is restrained from flies but generally if youre not smoking cigarettes and doing all sorts of crazy does drugs, you probably have better Health Outcomes. So its a little shocking to me that people were shocked by this survey. This is an example of the publics perception eating shaved not by the facts on the ground but by a lot of misinformation with regard to columnists and writers and been primed to believe that the nfl takes decades off your life. Winning back the sciences, the nfl players are outliving their peers. They have better Health Outcomes. Another one of these perception versus reality, the clash between the two, involves the idea that bigger, faster, stronger means deadlier. That the nfl players are much bigger than it used to be and so the game is much more dangerous. The players at the high school level, college level, ma at every level, its a fast again, a bigger game, so its going to be a deadlier game. Well, not really. The nfl sorry, not the nfl, but football in general used to be a pretty deadly game. People would die on the field, and the height of the violence was in 1960. There were 36 players at all levels of competition who were killed by football hits. And im a big fan of football but even for me, thats a little bit hard to justify for what amounts to be a kids game. You can have all these people dying on the field because of a game. Society didnt really notice much in 1968 because in 1968 there were bombings and assassinations and riots in the streets. There were deep casuals in vietnam. So the american people, that wasnt the outrage and football as there is no, but the football people noticed and they made changes to the game. Thats a big point of my book, the war on football, is that football is not just a game of violence and ruckus. Its a game of change. Always evolving, progressing. Its not like baseball or soccer that are static games the remain the same but its an evolving game. After that 58 season, within a few years, there were rules on spewing. You could no longer do headfirst his. You would get penalized for the. Equipment changed. They used to be something called a webbed suspension of a. You would wear a hard shell helmet with a piece of fabric essentially keeping it from hitting that hard shell when it was a collision. That technology was invented right before world war ii by aei named john t. Rebuild to the military liked it so much they conscripted this obama essentially for military use. 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 this country than we do our soldiers and marines. Coaching got better. Heads up tackling. Coaches not, you know, no longer saying put you head 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, the last season where there were two deaths from galatians. Again got dramatically safer. At the time we should been giving football a pat on the back, were giving it 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, then getting struck by other players. But yet the perception that you glean from the news is that the game is more dangerous than ever. It is safer than ever. I think one of the ways you can kind of grasp that the game is safer than ever, is how the conversation has shifted. No one much talks 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 concussions, but i think its safe to say that a concussion is a much less permanent outcome than a death from a football hit. That its something, the symptoms generally disappear and, obviously, with the death they dont disappear. The fact were talking a concussions and about players getting killed, i think that is a sign by the football critics that the game has gotten safer. Now when footballs critics talk about concussions, they generally do in conjunction with the idea of ccd, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. You heard a lot of this on the news, a lot, never players can people like junior sail, mike wester and john mackey really great players who had a lot of trouble cognitively in the last years when some scientists looked at the brains after they were dead they found that they had ctd, this nurtured unit bring disease. If you watched the pbs documentary that has been airing, the impression left by lead to denial is that football causes cte and that the nfl has known about this for years that its trying to cover it up. That is the animating idea behind the documentary league of denial. If you watch you get that impression. Its not until 72 minutes in that you outsider a dissenting voice. So for 72 minutes to get agreement and youre bound to think this is what scientists really. Its actually not what scientists believe the scientists believe the opposite. The best brain scientist in sports got together last year at the International Conference on concussion and sports, and they crafted a consensus state. In that consensus statement they had some words about cte. This is what they say. They said the cause and effect relationship has not yet been demonstrated between cte and concussions, our exposure to contact sport. Why would they say this . The reason theyre saying this is because there hasnt even been a randomized study done on cte and football. There had been an it goes. We have autopsies. We essentially have junk science. People say, well, its settled science that football causes cte. Its not. Its junk science that centers. What i mean by junk science is that science that doesnt have any applications beyond the immediate subject of study. That you can make any sweeping generalizations based on it. That if youre looking at an individual players or brain, youre not doing a randomized study, you can tell us about that individual players brain but you cant tell us about other players and you get those the incident rate of cd a month people in society where people in the nfl. This is the kind of study that done with cigarettes in 1956 of the bridge doctor study to show that theres a link between cigarettes and cancer. That kind of a study hasnt even been attempted with cde. What we have autopsies done with, admittedly, a selection bias. In other words, scientists doing after brains that they believe to have been brain damaged in their lives, and finding lo and behold when they do and not toxic, they have brain damage. Shocking. One of the big concerns that other scientists have, let me take that there is article after article. And income if you look in academic publications, criticizing the Boston University group and others that are doing some of the cte research, this is just the stuff in the last few months, looking at one of the criticisms that they have is that the two main groups studying cte have different definitions of what cte is. Able studying candidature have 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 featured so prominently in later denial, one of the criticism thats been levied at them is that their definition of cte is so elastic as almost guarantee they will find what youre looking for. Theres a condition that naturally occurs in human beings that 97 of all people get in the brains. 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 at the determine whether someone has cte . Thats one of the criticisms of the group. To me, one of the great things about science is that even if youre not the person doing initial studies if it signs the fines can be replicated elsewhere. No one has been able to replicate this amazing percentage of Football Players found with cte that the bu group has done to their find almost cte in every case and yet theres other groups come the find 50 of the cases, all with selection bias, all going after brains everything to been brain damaged. Other groups not find it to that level. I think that something that really should set off a red light and has set off a red flag in the scientific community. The reason why, one of the main reasons why theyre 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, for a lot of money. I think it would shock a