102,504 Wikipedia Articles Preserved

There a number of issues relating to public awareness and health aspects of American football. Since the invention of the game, it has seen a higher injury and death rate than any other major American professional sport. Due to the game's popularity, several universities have been criticized for allegedly valuing wins and losses above the educational welfare of the student-athletes. The extent of steroid use also has some controversy attached to it.

Health

Steroids

Recent attitudes toward and awareness of steroid use are also evolving, spurred on by the recent (and highly publicized) baseball steroid scandals. Bill Romanowski, a former player for the San Francisco 49ers, Philadelphia Eagles, Denver Broncos, and Oakland Raiders, recently admitted that he had used steroids while in the National Football League (NFL). Because the use of steroids is an unfair competitive advantage, they are banned by the NFL, which randomly tests all its players for steroids and penalizes those who are caught.

Injuries
Despite the helmets and heavy padding worn by all players on the field, injuries are common in football. An "Injury Report" section is ubiquitous in American sports sections, detailing, for each injured player on each team, his injury and the amount of time he is expected to be out. Twice-weekly during the season (Wednesdays and Fridays), all NFL teams must report the status of their injured players, or be subject to a fine from the league. The standard severity descriptions are "out" (will not play in the coming game); "doubtful" (25% chance of playing); "questionable" (50% chance of playing); or "probable" (75% chance of playing). Note that teams occasionally manipulate their injury reports, minimizing or maximizing the extent of a player's injury, as an attempt to strategically deny their upcoming opponents a clear picture of the team's health. Similar systems are in place for most major American sports.

The NFL has a roster limit of 53 players per team during the season; 45 of which dress for a game plus an "emergency quarterback" who only plays in limited situations. Players who are injured are frequently among the eight that do not dress. If it becomes certain that a player will not play for the rest of the season, the team may put him on the "Injured Reserve" list and replace the player on the roster.

Statistics
From 1931 to 2006, the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research has reported 1,002 direct and 674 indirect fatalities resulting from participation in all organized football (professional, college, highschool, and sandlot) in the US . While the yearly number of indirect fatalities has remained near 9 per year, the yearly number of direct fatalities has declined from an average of 18.6 per year between 1931-1970, 9.5 per year from 1971-1990, to 4.3 per year from 1991-2006.
In 2006, with an estimated 1.8 million participants in organized football, the survey reported a relatively high 16 indirect deaths but only one fatality directly attributable to football play (a highschool running back who suffered a fatal spinal injury when tackled) .

On the other hand, the number of injuries (per participant) seems to have increased over the years: a 1994 Ball State University survey found that "players in the 1980s suffered serious injuries and underwent operations at twice the rate of those who played in the 1950s or earlier" . A 2000 University of North Carolina study found that in the period between 1977 and 1998, each year on average 13 athletes had suffered catastrophic injuries (primarily permanent paralysis) through direct result of participation in football: " 200 football players received a permanent cervical cord injury, and 66 sustained a permanent cerebral injury" . Concussions are common, with an estimated 40,000 suffered every year among high school players alone [http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT104&STORY/www/story/08-23-2005/0004093186&EDATE=]. The National Football League now collects benchmark measures of awareness for each player, which can be used during a game to judge whether he has been concussed.

Impact on post-career life
The average NFL career lasts only 3.8 years. Injuries sustained by football players are often permanent. Many former football players experience pain, sometimes severe, that lasts for the rest of their lives. Many players require surgery, even multiple surgeries, for injuries experienced years earlier.

Newspaper reporters who have interviewed former football players who are crippled or in pain as a result of their former sport find that a player will never (or virtually never) express regret over his choice of career. The players often state that the thrill of playing football was worth the price of a lifetime of subsequent pain.

Deaths and long-term disability attributed to illegal use of anabolic steroids have become a new factor in this picture, starting in about the 1990s.

Preventative measures
Instances of heat-related death, especially during professional practice sessions, have begun receiving press attention in the decade of the 2000s, and led to new standards intended to respond cautiously to possible danger signs that traditionally had been ignored. There is also the prospect that conventional first-aid technique has been in error, and an apparatus to circumvent this: apparently efforts to cool an overheated patient quickly, by wetting a large fraction of the body, are misguided, with the sudden chilling of the skin causing the body to reduce superficial circulation, and making that chilling near the surface ineffective at cooling the core of the body and thus the brain. A device suitable for professional teams has been developed, that provides for rapid cooling of small areas of skin where large blood vessels are near the surface, and is proposed as a means of cooling the blood quickly without evoking the reflex of isolating the body surface from the core.

Certain rule changes have been implemented in an attempt to reduce the number of more serious injuries. An example of this is the illegal "crackback block", when a blocker positioned wide blocks back towards where the ball was snapped. These blocks are infamous for causing severe leg injuries. Another rule recently implemented is that a defender can't dive a quarterback's legs while bringing him down. The rule has been colloquially referred to as the "Carson Palmer" rule, after he was injured from such a contact in the 2005 NFL season.

Public Awareness and the Media

Media/Football Entanglement

Because College and Pro Football are such popular spectator sports, both in person and on television, and are reported on in detail by radio and print media, it is sometimes difficult for the public to differentiate between "news" and promotion. Pro Football, for example, has networks competing to carry its games. This has resulted in less-than frank discussions by play-by-play men and commentators, who know that their jobs might depend on the whim of the NFL at the next television contract negotiations. Similarly, print reporters often are loathe to critcize any aspect of the NFL, as it might lead to curtailment of the availability of players or team staff for interviews.

The NFL also fully owns two media organs, NFL Films and the NFL Network. The former, with on-field privileges and state-of-the-art film and video capabilities, produces high-qualty films of NFL games, films which are essentially commercials for the NFL. Rights to show these films are then sold to the networks, who in effect pay the NFL to show its commercials. Meanwhile, the NFL Network has full control over production and broadcast of its own product, a situation that is often thought to be less than conducive to honest and open presentation of both the good and the bad aspects of the game.

The unrest among retired Pro Football players over demeaning retirement packages for the players from earlier years, and for disabled players, has been brewing for many years, but has essentially gone unreported, until the retired players' recent all-out thrust to have their problems acknowledged and corrected finally caught the eye of the more independent reporters who question the activities of NFL and NFLPA authorites.

Leslie Lee Sanders (born February 18, 1982 in Phoenix, Arizona), is an African American author.


Biography

Sanders grew up in the poverty stricken Avondale, Arizona, with six sisters and one brother. Sanders began writing stories in elementary school. By middle school one of her school counselors began encouraging Sanders to write scary stories for a young adult magazine.

Although Sanders did not publish any of her stories, it did not stop her from getting her education. After acquiring her High School Equivalency Diploma in 2000, Sanders enrolled in Apollo College and graduated in 2001 as a Medical Assistant with a 4.0 GPA.

After working in the healthcare field, Sanders became a Caregiver for disabled adults and has been in that field for over three years.

In 2005 Sanders finished her first manuscript and published Three's A Crowd: The Beginning with iUniverse, inc. The tale of three individuals in a forbidden ménage à trois produced interesting feedback from her family and friends.

With the debut of her second novel : A dark but vivid glimpse into a life of Dissociation, Self-Injury, and Incest through the mind of an adolescent, published in the spring of 2006, Sanders got much more notoriety as an author.

Her third novel Bittersweet: The Diary of Brandy Morgan was published in early 2007, immediately after Sanders enrolled in Longridge Writers’ Group in late 2006.

As of 2007, Sanders resides in Mesa, Arizona, with her family, and is working on more novels.

Writing style

The reoccurring element in most of Sanders’ novels is the element of controversy. In her first novel Three’s A Crowd: The Beginning, the raw sexual attractions and explicit sex scenes were enough to get people talking. In The Sky Is Falling, the main character’s father’s ill-mannered expectations really pulled some nerves with her audience. And in Bittersweet: The Diary of Brandy Morgan, simply touching on racism in today’s youth got readers to open their eyes to what’s surrounding them.

Sanders understood the responsibility she has as a writer, especially when her last two novels were marketed toward adolescents and teens. Sanders included facts about the subject matter of her particular novel in the back of each book to help teens understand the subject better.

Sanders enjoys learning more about the skill of writing each day. She reads at least an hour a day and writes at least an hour a day. She believes that reading and writing on a regular basis is what makes a good author.

Characters

Most of the main characters in Sanders novels have the personalities that Sanders has herself. She creates her main characters out of parts of herself, while the antagonists of her stories are parts of other people she knows or knows of. Her purpose for putting parts of herself into her characters is so they seem more realistic and the reader can identify with them.

*Smart characters that enjoy reading or are very artistic in other ways.
*Characters that have absent fathers or abusive fathers.
*Mostly loners or introverted characters with trust issues.
*Characters that are considered different and eccentric, and have untraditional beliefs.

Plot

Sanders' first three novels all take place in schools. Because most of her readers are in school, Sanders wants to start the character out in a familiar location. But most of her characters wonder off to secret places.

*Either they have a secret place of their own, or they make friends and together share a secret place away from their peers.
*Characters live on a college campus, or frequently go to high school where most of their problems occur.

Themes

Sanders writes about serious themes that are usually overlooked in today’s society. Her purpose is to raise discussion and awareness in adolescents of today.

*Homosexuality.
*Infidelity.
*Self-esteem.
*Self-injury.
*Physical abuse.
*Psychological abuse.
*Sexual abuse.
*Incest.
*Rape.
*Racism.
*Hate crimes.
*Discrimination.

Sanders provides information on these subjects in the back matter of her novels.

Bibliography
Novels

*Three's A Crowd: The Beginning (April 12, 2005)
* : A dark but vivid glimpse into a life of Dissociation, Self-Injury, and Incest through the mind of an adolescent (March 9, 2006)
* Bittersweet: The Diary of Brandy Morgan (March 22, 2007)

Jason Rider, (born Jason Giacchino on 26 August 1976), is the author of the fantasy fiction series; Tucker O'Doyle. The author has released two works under his real name: Human Interface (Publish America, 2005) and The Uncommon Adventures of Tucker O'Doyle (Lulu Press, 2005).

As of 2/20/2007 Bellissima Publishing LLC released a statement announcing that they would be publishing the entire Tucker O'Doyle series (under pen-name "Jason Rider") and planned to re-release the previously independently published The Uncommon Adventures of Tucker O'Doyle.

Book 2 of the Tucker O'Doyle series is entitled Night of the Stalkers and was made available in February of 2007 by Bellissima.

In addition to novels, Jason's work appears in a variety of magazines, periodicals, and websites including ATVsource.com, and Mountain Bike Tales Digital Magazine of which he is currently editor in chief.