Biggest Looming Threat to Football

[purplefaithful]

For the NFL and all of football, a new threat: an evaporating insurance market

From the NFL to rec leagues, football is facing a stark, new threat: an evaporating insurance market that is fundamentally altering the economics of the sport, squeezing and even killing off programs faced with higher costs and a scarcity of available coverage, an Outside the Lines investigation has found.
The NFL no longer has general liability insurance covering head trauma, according to multiple sources; just one carrier is willing to provide workers' compensation coverage for NFL teams. Before concussion litigation roiled the NFL beginning in 2011, at least a dozen carriers occupied the insurance market for pro football, according to industry experts.
The insurance choices for football helmet manufacturers are equally slim; one helmet company executive said he was aware of only one. Pop Warner Little Scholars, which oversees 225,000 youth players, was forced to switch insurers after its longtime carrier, a subsidiary of the insurance giant AIG, refused to provide coverage without an exclusion for any neurological injury.
"People say football will never go away, but if we can't get insurance, it will," Jon Butler, Pop Warner's executive director, lamented to colleagues after discovering that just one carrier was willing to cover the organization for head trauma, according to a person who was present.
Dr. Julian Bailes, Pop Warner's medical director and a member of the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee, told Outside the Lines "insurance coverage is arguably the biggest threat to the sport."
With youth participation rates continuing to fall, the insurance crisis adds another layer of uncertainty to the future of America's No. 1 sport. Insurance companies, which earn billions of dollars each year by taking on risk, are increasingly reluctant to bet on football and other sports associated with traumatic brain injuries. Some insurance industry executives compare the issue to asbestos, an occupational hazard that has cost insurers at least $100 billion. Traumatic brain injury "is an emerging latent exposure the likes of which the insurance industry has not seen in decades," Joe Cellura, president of North American casualty at Allied World, wrote in a blog post last year for the website Risk & Insurance. Cellura declined to comment for this story.
"Basically, the world has left the marketplace," Alex Fairly, CEO of the Fairly Group, an Amarillo, Texas-based risk management firm whose clients include the NFL and Major League Baseball, told Outside the Lines. "If you're football, hockey or soccer, the insurance business doesn't want you."
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[Guest]

Wow, really interesting.You get down to just one provider in any market, and they can raise their price without limit. NFL might be rich enough to pay but Pop Warner will not. How are the NCAA and high school leagues insured?

[Guest]

They'll change the "Warning - Do not Butt, Ram or Spear an opponent" stickers to "Terms of Service - you are not authorized to use this product to Butt, Ram or Spear an opponent." If insurance won't pay out maybe court will.

(lol... a bad joke)

[Guest]

its simple,  all participants and/or their parents will be required to sign a legal form waiving their right to sue based on known (and likely unknown) potential health risks.

[Guest]

in looking for a recent version of the helmet/sticker warning, I noticed that it is basically written like, "hey, this won't protect you. You're gonna die. If you don't like that, don't play football." Here it is:



What I guess struck me after a joke popped to mind, was how none of that is written to say, "you can hurt someone else." It's written "cause you to suffer," but not, "cause another to suffer or die." 

In a new age of "ToS" and becoming bound to legal terms by simple purchase, I guess I'm wondering why these helmet manufactures couldn't follow suit and drop the liability directly onto the user. If they included some BS legalese at purchase that not only warned individuals about their own safety but other's safety from their own misuse maybe they can deflect liability... 

maybe this is what the new helmet rules were really all about... getting to a place where the onus can be put on a player who caused injury because they clearly misused their own helmet.

[Guest]

@BlackMagic7 said:
in looking for a recent version of the helmet/sticker warning, I noticed that it is basically written like, "hey, this won't protect you. You're gonna die. If you don't like that, don't play football." Here it is:



What I guess struck me after a joke popped to mind, was how none of that is written to say, "you can hurt someone else." It's written "cause you to suffer," but not, "cause another to suffer or die." 

In a new age of "ToS" and becoming bound to legal terms by simple purchase, I guess I'm wondering why these helmet manufactures couldn't follow suit and drop the liability directly onto the user. If they included some BS legalese at purchase that not only warned individuals about their own safety but other's safety from their own misuse maybe they can deflect liability... 

maybe this is what the new helmet rules were really all about... getting to a place where the onus can be put on a player who caused injury because they clearly misused their own helmet.

now that would be the end of football.... where the player that makes the hit could be sued.  nobody would be willing to lose everything because their kid lowered his head while making a tackle.

[Guest]

I think it's going to make football a poor kid's sport. It's already seen as a "way out", and those are the families who will sign those waivers. Not like we are going to miss the Johnny Manziel spoiled rich punks, but I don't like seeing anything become too divided.