a generous grant from the frank foundation. we do these to give you chance to see and hear speakers and authors who you might not be exposed to on the campuses you're from, or even those of you over on the hill, the congressional committee you work for. and a big thing that accuracy in academia and accuracy in media in covering both the 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 we have heard in school was in the newspapers and on news broadcasts is wrong. so, you can do this little study on your open. just taking one story and then doing the research on it, and seeing how well it holds up. or one campus lecture. we do it day in and day out. and a lot of our talks focus on current events, history, and 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 miss pred desare so at accuracy in academia, five books, right, dan? why the left hates america. intellectual more rones, conservative history of the left. blue collar intellectuals, and -- how am i doing -- the war on football, saving america's game. now, how many people watch at least -- try to watch at least one game a weekend? frsh that's about what i thought. usually fairly absorbing, unless you're a redskins fan. books on football are another story. this is the exception to the rule. it is a compelling read, i think you'll find it so, and we have a compelling speaker in the man who wrote this book. ladies and gentlemen, daniel j. flynn. [applause] >> thank you for coming out tonight. i fired since we're in washington, dc and we're talking about football, we could sort of mix a little bit of america's game with the local sport, which is politics. and football, for whatever reason, is a big sport amongst politicians. people say, yeah, the horse racing is the sport of kings. if that true, football is the sport of presidents, and from everyone from theodore roosevelt to gerald ford playing at the university of michigan, an awful lot of presidents who have had a real interest in the sport of football, and i think if you were to ask the people in this building who is your favorite football playing president, they'd probably say ronald reagan. and ronald reagan, a lot of people don't know, played football at eureka college, was latary play-by-play man in iowa, and his biggest involvement in football stemmed from his role in the movie "knut rockney, all american." and in that movie ronald reagan got his nickname, playing george gip, the gipper. and the game got more from ronald reagan. if you watch that movie about newt rockney, there's a sense at which notre dame they were not only building young bodies on the football field but they were building character. they were basically building young men. it was a real kind of propaganda coup for notre dame. and what i mean by this, if you watch the movie, there's a gambler, a bookie who stumbles in the room and kicks him out. you have ruined baseball and horse racing. we're not going to let you ruin this clean game and throws him out. at a later point in the movie, there's some politicians that want to do away with football because of the corrupting the academic -- corrupting academia, essentially, and he says that any player who flunkses his classeses of no use to his coach and any coach who plays a flunky as player is just a fool. and reagan gets into the act. reagan has this speech, really kind of ham-hand speech where he says there will never be but one knut rockney, here at notre dame or anywhere else. he gives us something clean and strong inside, not just courage but a right way of living that none of us will ever forget. well, the right way of living that knut rockney and george gip engaged in, they were both professional athletes, sort of posing as amateurs when they played at notre dame. they were both being paid in other sports. both of them were heavy gamblers. gip was you could call him a degenerate gambler, hung out in pool halls at night, and just hustled people for money. they both bet on notre dame. and we know george gip as the greatest player that played at notre dame, the guy that reagan played in the movie, and he averaged 6.3 yards a carry. his agreed point average was something less than that. i it was like 0.0. first two and a half years at notre dame there's no real record of him being there. he was called a tramp athlete. someone that sort of played for notre dame but didn't go to school there. so my point in bringing this up is not to trash knut rockney, who was a great coach, or georgepy, who was a great player, and notre dame, who is a great institution, but just to suggest the power of the mass media. the power of hollywood to shape perception. we have a perception of george gip and of knut rockney because of hollywood that is diametrically opposed to the reality of knut rockney and george gip. hollywood that he power to make bruce willis see dead people to allow will smith to travel through time. and also has the power of making these two men sinners into saints on the silver vein. 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 it for a long time. that there's this epidemic of suicide in the nfl, and what i do in the war on football, get the science, 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 that has been created by the mass media with football over the last two years, is almost in every instance wrong, and in some cases just 180 degrees wrong. i got into this whole -- the genesis of writing "the war on football" was a study that was put together by the national institutes for occupational safety and health. federal scientists. they put together last year -- they look at every nfl player who was pension-vested, who played between 1959 and 1988. so guys like lawrence taylor and joe theismann, and walter peyton, and dick butkus, and 3500 players who played in the league in those 30 or so years. the reason they look at these players, there's a wide suspicion in the public that nfl players die young, they die in their 50s, the game takes such a toll on their bodies that their health outcomes are horrible. and this is something that has been spread in the mainstream press. not like it's anonymous blogger thing. george will, the most widely read columnist in america, last year he wrote, for all players who played five or more years life expectancy is less than 60. for linemen, it's much less. abc news, the average life expectancy of a retired football player is 58 years. granderson from epps en.com. the average life expectancy of the american male is 75. the average life expectancy of a retired nfl player is 53 to 59 years old. the federal scientist looked into this at the behest of the nfl players association and what they found shocked a lot of people. nfl players don't die young. they actually outlive their peers in society. they have a longer life expectancy. this mortality study was expecting to find an 18% death rate among nfl players. but they found 10%, half of what they expected, based upon the prevailing rateness society. they looked at 17 different disease categories in in 14 of those 17 different disease categories the nfl players had better health outcomes than the average joe, the comparable guy out in society. so things like heart disease, cancer, respiratory illness, diabetes, even suicide, was much lower amongst the nfl players than it was amongst men in society. and there's sort of a duh quality to this. if you run up and down a practice field 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 the nfl players do, if you have a generally restraint from vice -- we know that not every nfl player is restrained from vice but if you're not smoking cigarettes and doing crazy drugs and that kind of thing, you're probably going to have better health outcomes. so people were shocked by the survey, and this is an example of the public's perception being shaped not by the facts on the ground, but by a lot of misinformation with regard to columnists and writers and being primed to believe that the nfl takes decades off your life, when in fact the science is the nfl players are outliving their peers. they have better health 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 it much more dangerous. that players at the high school level, college level, at every level, it's faster game, a bigger game, so it's going to be deadlier game. not really. the nfl -- sorry -- football in general used to be a pretty deadly game. people would die on the field. and in the height of this violence was in 1968. there were 36 players at all levels of competition who were killed by football hits. and i'm a big fan of football, but even for me that's a little hard to justify for what amounts to be a kid's game. you can have all these people dying on the field because of a game. society didn't really notice much in 1968 because in '968 the were bomb little and assassinations and riots in the street, casualties in vietnam so the american people there wasn't that's sort of outraging about football then as there is now. but the football people noticed, and they made changes to the game. and that a big point of my book, "the war on football." it's not just a game of violence but a game of change, always evolving and progresses, not like baseball or soccer that are static games but it's an evolving game, and after that '68 season, there were rules on spearing. you could no longer do the head, first hits. you got penalized for that. equipment changed. used to be something called a webbed suspension helmet. a hard-shelled helmet with a piece of fabric keeping your head from hitting the hard shell when the was a collision. that technology was invented for -- right before world war ii by a guy name john rid dell, and the military like it so much they conscripted this football helmet for military use. was 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 -- no longer saying put your head between the numbers and that kind of thing. so all these things combine to brick football from a point where they had 36 deaths from collisions in 1968, to last season where there were two deaths from collisions. the game got dramatically safer. and at the time we should have been giving football a pat on the back, we're giving it a kick below the belt. to put this in perspective, there were more -- no kids that died last year from a football hit. more kids died getting struck by lightning playing football last season than getting struck by other players. but yet when you -- the perception you glean from the news is that the game is more dangerous than ever. it's safer than ever. i think one of the ways that you can kind of grasp that the game is safer than ever, is how the conversation shifted. no one much talks about players getting killed on the field anymore. they talk about players getting concussions, and i don't want to downplay the risk of concussion or the dangers of concussion, but i think it's safe to say that a concussion is a much less permanent outcome than a death from a football hit. it's something that -- the symptoms generally disappear, and obviously with death they don't disappear. so even the fact we're talking about concussions and not players getting killed, i think that's a sign, a tacit admission by football's critics that the game has gotten safer. now, when football's critics talk about concussions they generally do in conjunction with the idea of cte, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. you probably heard about it on the news. a number of nfl players, junior seau and webster, had a lot of trouble cognitively in their last years when they looked -- when scientists looked at their brains after they were dade they found they had cte. this chronic brain disease. now, if you were to -- if you watched "league of denial." the pbs documentary that's been airing, the impression left is that football 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." that -- if you want to -- get that impression because it's not until 72 minutes in you actually hear a dissending voice. so for 72 minutes you get agreement, and you're bound to think, this is what scientist believe. actually not what scientist believe. scientist 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 statement. and in that statement they had some words about cte. and this is what the said: a cause and effect relationship has not yet been demonstrate between cte concussions and exposure in contact sports. why would they say this? because there hasn't ban ram dommized study done on cte in football. there have been -- we have anecdotes, autopsies. we essentially have junk science. people say, well, it's settled science that football causes cte. it's not. it's junk science that says this. what i mean by junk science is that science that doesn't have any application beyond the immediate subject study. you can't make any sweeping generalizations based on it. if you're looking at an individual player's brain, not doing a randomized study, you can tell us about the individual player's brain but you can't tell us about other players and you can't tell us the incidence rate of cte amongst anymore society or people in the nfl. this is the kind of study they did with cigarettes in 18956. the british doctor study, to show there's a link between cigarettes and cancer. that kind of a study hasn't even been attempted with cte. what we have are autopsies done with admittedly a selection bias. in other words, scientists going after brains they believe to have been brain-damaged in their lives, and finding, lo and behold when they do an autopsy, they have brain damage. shocking. one of the big concerns that other scientists have -- let me tell you, there's article after article -- if you look in academic publications, criticizing the boston university group and others that are doing some of the cte research. just the stuff in the last few months. looking at the -- one of the criticisms they have is that the two main groups studying cte have different definitions of what cte is. people studying cancer don't generally have two different definitions of cancer, but cte is so new you have groups that are debating what exactly it is. and the boston university group that was featureed so prominently in "league of denial." their definition of cte is so elastic to guarantee they're going to find what they're looking for. there's a condition that naturally occurs in human beings that 97% of old people get in their brain, and that condition is being used to determine whether someone had cte or not. doesn't have anything to do with traumatic. so why is it being used as a determinant or whether someone has cte? that's one of the criticisms of the bu group. to me, one of the great things about science is that even if you're not the person doing the initial study, if it's science, the findings can be replicated elsewhere, and no one has been able to replicate this amazing percentage of football players found with. cte this bu group has done. they're fining it in every case and other groups find it in 50% of the case. all with selection bias, going after brains they think to have been brain-damaged. and other groups not fining it to that level and that's something that should set off a red flag and has set off a red flag in the scientific community. the reason why -- one of the main reasons why there's such a huge interest in concussions in and cte has to do with the players' lawsuit against the nfl that was recently settled for $765 million. , a lot of money. i think it would shock a lot of people to 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 a taxi squad but never actually got into an nfl game. of you look at the players who actually made an nfl team, and got on the field, that went on to sue the nfl, you have kickers who played in five games, you have backup quarterbacks who barely played at all. you have replacement players from then 1987 strike, who played in the three preplacement games in 1987. you don't have to be a particularly sip cal person to look at this and say, these guys played in pop warner, high school, college, may have played in other pro leagues. but they got their brain damage from the cup of coffee they had in the nfl? i really find that hard to believe. so i think for a lot of these guys -- i would even say the bulk of the guys suing the nfl, it was a giant money grab. i'm not doubting there's some guys that were suing the league that had damage, that walked away from the game with a lot of damage, and we know there's guys that is true of. but i think for the 4500 or so guys that are suing the nfl, a lot of. the thought they'd hit he litigation lottery, and they were right. now, what bothers me about all this is that the propaganda surrounding the professional game has been projected upon high school and pop warner. there are players who have played football and have come away dammed, -- away damaged, and at the nfl level they're finding this confines itself to alzheimer's and als generally, with skilled position players, have really elevated rates. to project those findings upon high school and pop warner players to me is beyond reckless. they've done science on this. the mayo clinic last year released a study in which their incoming hypothesis was they were going to find elevated rates of neurodegenerative diseases amongst high school football players who playedle at mid-century, and they compared these guys with members of the glee club, with the choir, with the band. and they were shocked find out that not only were there no real differences between the glee club members and the band members and the choir and the football players, but in a lot of instances those guys with the musical instruments had a little bit higher levels of parkinson's, lou gehrig's disease. in other words, what is happening to a very small subset of players at an elite level, there is no evidence that is happening at a high school level. there's a couple thousand guys that play in the nfl, according to this study, of the 3500 guys they looked at, 12 of them died of neurodegenerative diseases. less than a half of one percent of all the guys they're looking at. 12 guys. the rate was higher than anticipated, but we're still talking a very tiny, tiny fraction of pro players. is there something there? if you're playing a certain position, like linebacker or defensive back, at the nfl level for years, there might be something year, but that doesn't mean every kid playing pop warner is going to be condemned to a brained aled existence and it's reckless to put that forward and that's what the lawsuit did. the irony of the nfl lawsuit was that the players hurt every league they weren't suing but didn't hit the league they were suing. the nfl is approaching 10 bill -- $10 billion in revenue. they have the highest rated television show. sunday night football. a league that fills parking spaces on game day for 50 bucks. they don't have to worry about paying out $765 million. they'll survive. they're doing fine. but a league that sells candy bars door-to-door to pay for shoulder pads, those are the leagues that have to worry. recently there was a poll conducted by hbo real sports and merritt college and they asked people, knowing what you know about football and brain injuries, would you ayou your kid to play? and 33% had reservations about allowing their kid to play. we are already seeing this in action. most recent statistics show that high school football was down. the numbers were down for the first time in 20 years. youth football lost six% of its player population last year. so i you think about football as a spectator's sport, football is doing fine. if you think about it as a par tis paer to sport that kids play in football is struggling for its life. there's an existential crisis going on with football and it's not ten or 20 years down the road. it's happening right now. >> this is terrible four young guys. our culture is very passive aggressive, it's an indoor culture, it's ante -- antiseptic, and football with young boys, it's muddy, outdoor, aggressive, rough. if football didn't exist some ten-year-old boy would invent it. football clashes with culture but really meshes with boys, and i think boys really need football. if you think about the crisis of boys in america today, you go into almost any classroom in america and there's some boy that is bouncing off the walls. has a lot of energy. and instead of giving him a basketball or a football, we give him ritalin. we drug 'em up. or the medical condition known as -- think about obesity. 40 years ago, about one out of every 20 teens was obese. now it's one out of every five. so we have an obeseity problem in the country to me football traditionally has been the way to get the class fatso off the couch and into cheats because the advantage of the game is braun and bulk and football makes those an advantage. a lot of people think you bulk up for football. but mowing people play at the youth level where there are weight limits. so football can be a tool to fight against obesity. and obesity is the biggest public health concern for young people in this country today. there are some people that think the biggest public health concern has to do with our brains. it doesn't. has to do with our bellies. we're increasingly becoming an obese, fat nation. in sports we should be encouraging sports. we shouldn't be encouraging sloths. the biggest crisis facing american boys today is the lack of male role model they have. 40% of kids grow up without a dad in the home. and i'm not suggesting that sports or football can replace a dad. it can't. but if you're a kid and you need some discipline, you can find that on a football field. if you need focus, male camaraderie, a male authority figure, you can find that on a football field. a lot of what ails american boys maybe not can be cured but can be helped in great degree by sports, and especially be the sport of football. and the war on football is not just bad for boys. it's bad for america. football is america's game. if you think about the things that unite us as americans you can probably counsel them only a four-fingered hand. there's not too many thing wes come together on in this country, and we're divided by politics and religion and what cable news network we watch, but on sunday, two-thirds of america comes together and watch football. they these on super bowl sunday. most of american is sitting in front of a tv set. you may not like it but it's a fact. when you look up in the stands at a football game you see america. when you look on the field, you see people from all geographic locations, people from all different classes, people from all different racial groups. it is america down on the field. that is something we should be encouraging and shouldn't be trying to stamp that out. think about what happened in new orleans after hurricane katrina. the city locked down and out. almost looked like their football team. remember the new orleans saints? such a pathetic football team that their fans wore bags over their heads. and all of sudden, after hurricane katrina, there's all these politicians trying to bring back new orleans. they all failed. they can't get the city united. they can't bring it back. what brought back new orleans, what sent america on notice that new orleans was back, was the new orleans saints super bowl run. that animated the city, brought it to life, showed us that new orleans want -- the reports of its death were exaggerated. some people say that's silly that we unite behind a football team. it's just a fact that's what they decided to unite behind. isn't that a good thing? shouldn't we appreciate senate shouldn't we be encouraging that? not just professional teams. look at texas, the high school football on friday night, what that does to a community. some of these college towns turn into major metropolises on saturdays. very few things have the power of football. it's america's game. we started talking about the presidents and their obsession with football. i think it would be a good place to close and then we can take some questions. the president who was most closely associated with football is theodore roosevelt. and theodore roosevelt's interest in football was highlighted in 1905 because they had such a brutal season. there were more players killed on one saturday in 1905 from football hits than were killed all last season. that's how brutal it got. and theodore roosevelt held a white house summit on football, where he wanted to have the big schools pledge for a cleaner game to follow the rules, and after that 1905 season, it sort of a microcosm of football. the game evolved. and that is the message of my book, the message of "the war on football." however bad the situation seems for football now and people are upset about safety, football always evolves and adapts and overcomes and after that 1905 season we got the forward pass, the neutral zone, they banned the idea of forward motion. used to have offensive players able to get a head start against the defense, and they said no more of that. there will major changes in football. and i think if football can survive the introduction of the forward pass it certainly can survive the fact that we're going to flag running backs from lowering their head into defensive players now in the nfl. that's a minor tweak compared to the major changes that football has endured over the years. change is a component. it's an integral part of the game of football. the tradition of football is almost a tradition of change. and theodore roosevelt, despite the brutality he witnessed and read about that season on the football field, many years earlier he made the remark that he would rather have his kids play football annie -- football than any other sport, and that year his son played football. got bloodied and beat up replying at harvard and that was for shadowing for his life in europe at d-day, the oldest man at d-day, the only father-son team to be at d-day. a bloody nose at harvard. i don't know if that habit waited him to what he would experience later in life but there's some benefits to the game of football. the president that i more interested in his interest in football is woodrow wilson. a guy that theodore roosevelt ran against later and lost. and woodrow wilson, before he was president, a lot of people don't know he was actually a football coach. he helped coach the team at wesleyan and princeton, and this controversy over football today, the war on football, didn't start the day before yesterday in the 19th century, woodrow wilson debated the subject to big audiences, should we encourage the game of football and he took the affirmative position. and his reason was that -- let me but get my trusty notes hereo not misquote president wilson. he said he thought football developed more moral qualities than any other game of athletics and pointed to decisiveness, endurance, presence of mind. a lot of sports encourage those qualities but there are two qualities that are really unique to football, that you don't find so much in other sports, and those were cooperation, and self-subordination. if you think about it, in baseball we just witnessed the boston red sox win a world series based on they had a good deem but they rode one guy, or at least one position player, the designated hitter to the world series. he had amazing world series and the rest of the team was okay. in hockey, if you have a hot goalie, your players can play mediocre, but you can win a stanley cup base evened hot goaliism can't just have one great player in fortunately and expect to win. it's a team effort and if you think about it, these guys that are called linemen, it's really strange. you dent find this in other sports. they're not even allowed to touch the ball really. at least on a designed play. let alone score a touchdown. every other sport generally you're allowed to score -- you get a chance to score points. but in football there's that unheralded position of the lineman. the guy who fights in the trenches, never hears the crowd chant his name but he is more integral to the success of the team than guys that hear their names chanted. that's a lot like life. we don't always get a gold star for our efforts or a pat on the back, aren't always people chanting our names. that's a great life lesson that football teaches. i think for the big takeaway for anyone who has ever played the game -- i heard this said by vince lombardi and some random nine-year-olds who just stepped on the gridiron for the first time this past fall. the observation that on just about every play in football, someone gets knocked on their ass. someone gets knocked in the dirt. knocked down in the mud. and what does football teach them? it teaches them to get up. to fight. to don't stay down in the dirt. that when you've get knocked down, you get back up. you can walk a few blocks from the heritage foundation you'll see all sorts of people who have been knocked down and never got up. the common denominator of everyone in this room and everyone watching at home, is that we have all been knocked on our butt at some point in life, everyone has been knocked down. in the great thing about football is that it teaches this enduring lesson. get up after you've been knocked down. that is a good habit to have in life. football is a great life lesson. it is a metaphor for life in a lot of ways, and i think that basic lesson is a great guide to live by. when you get knocked down, get up. there's a lot of people out there that are saying you should be ashamed to watch football on saturday, sunday, that it's a gladiator sport, you're no better than the romans looking at guys dieing in the kole seam, desspy the fact in nfl nobody has been hit by a football head. two guys in a stadium died building it. construction is a dangerous profession. police officer is a dangerous profession. football is a rough profession but it's not a deadly profession. and we shouldn't be ashamed to watch human greatness. because a lot of what we see is athletic greatness in the nfl. we shouldn't be aggrade to watch that -- be afraid to watch that. we shouldn't be ashamed of. and the message i want to leave you with today, it's okay to watch. it's better to cheer. and it's best of all to play. thank you so much. i look forward to your questions. not everyone at once. sure. >> brian madden -- is this on? district of columbia.com. wanted to ask a question about your thoughts on the science of dr. robert cantu. >> there's a company known at impact, and if you're a -- you're playing football there's something called a -- these neurotests, baseline tests you take before the season, and then if you get a concussion, or if there's a suspected concussion, you take the baseline test again to see if you're up to speed. i you're not, this can be used as a tool to keep you out of play. in the book i talk at great length about this company, impact, because there's been a lot of scholarship on impact, by a guy named mark levelle, and a lot of the scholarship touts impact and suggests that impact is effective, and many of these collarly articles you don't learn that robert levelle, the guy touting impact, is the president of the company and the ceo, the guy who is making millions of dollars off the deal. nfl teams use this, formula one racing uses it, wwe use it. so it's a big business and ahave a chapter called concussions inc. concussions have become a big business, and the internet is not that much different from these sort of 19th century buckboard snake oil saysmen. you can go into health food stores and buy a sports drink elixir that promises to help you cure your concussion. you can get pills. there are things called brain pad, and mouth pieces that act as though they're going to help you with a concussion. head bands. as if a head band is going to do something. there's a lot of money to be made on concussions, and a lot of what we're seeing out there in health food stores and sporting goods stores, on the internet, it's just snake oil saysmen capitalizing on historia. and the traditional role of the doctor is to throw a bucket of water on the fires of historia, -- hysteria, and that's why i wanted to speak in front of an academic audience, because so much work is done by academic. the media sensationalized the issue and the academics are saying this has gone too far, it's aliving roomism. and -- alarmism. these are academics doing a great job and one of the things they're doing a great job of is pointing out that, look, all these concussion elixirs and mouth pieces and head bands are not going to do anything for you to prevent a concussion or to do anything if you have a concussion. so, everyone calm down. you don't have to pay 150 bucks for mouth piece. might be something for your teeth. i have some chipped teeth. maybe i should have been wearing a mouth piece. but not going to do anything for your brain. >> my question was, obviously football is a blamed by big guys wearing a lot of pads and a heavy helmet. one could argue that hockey is a fast game played by a lot of big guys with lighter padding and less protective helmets who play on a harder surface, meaning the ice, encompassed by boards that don't give at all when they get hit. do you think the nfl and football should look at outfitting players in a lighter pad and lighter helmet to encourage less head-to-head hits? >> if you look at what is going on there's a natural progression that it's not going stop with the nfl. it moves on to hockey, which has a concussion incidence that is less than football, but not that much less. it will move on to lacrosse, other sports, until maybe we have marbles left. there are people saying let's ban head-first slides in baseball, ban checking in hockey. so it's not just going to stop with football. i think there has been talk about -- maybe the helmet is giving too much confidence to players and that's why they're getting these injuries. now, the problem with the argument i see is that helmets are designed to protect the skull, to protect against these sort of catastrophic -- the reason players were dying before is they would get fractured skulls and brain bleeds and that kind of thing. that doesn't happen much anymore, if at all, because the helmets are so effective. but no helmet can be effective at preventing a concussion. you would have to have a helmet inside your skill to protect your brain from rattling around. people think helmets -- better helmets means no concussion. that's not going to happen. the help is marginal. but there's an argument that all this equipment is giving guys sort of a false sense of security, and that's why they're playing with their heads down. a lot of interest in brandon moreyweather, if noticed him tipping the head down. it's very dangerous, and there's a sense in football that this is -- we have to protect the offensive players from these evil defensive guys, chuck cecils, dick butkuss. he reality if you look at the history of football, the guys who are suffering death and catastrophic injuries tend to be defensive players much more than offensive players and what these rules are designed to do is to protect guys as much as protect the offensive players. we have a very -- some of the conceptions we have about the game of football are wrong in 1905, the conception was that all these injuries were happening because it was very bunched up gamism didn't have a forward pass. you had a lot of runsful the defenses were seven men on the line, three linebackers and one safety. so it was a bunched up game. so they said let's open it up. they were wrong, because when you open the game that's when most injuries occur, people going at each other at full speed. the kickoff is an example of that. nowdays the misconception is we have to protect the bambi offensive players from the defensive players, when in fact the guys getting really hurt, catastrophic injuries, deaths, historically tend more to be defensive players than offensive players. >> roger. >> dan, congratulations on the book. >> thank you. >> this week there's a new controversy going on in the nfl which has to do with psychological damage. is this a hidden epidemic in sports that we haven't seen much about before, when 300 300-pound guys bullying. >> touching about the richie incognito and a second-year player with the miami dolphins. looking at this, there's no way to defense this guy, incognito. sounds like they're shaking people down for money. up sos like some of the dolphins players are kind of abusive hurts -- towards the younger guys. the only way i can make sense of it -- i was in the military there's a lot of things i did in the military, if i said this is what we dead, you would look at me, what the heck how talking about? theirs a military culture, and i stress the word cult -- that's you're indoctrinated into it, and people on the outside will say, what do you mean you were walking around naked with your rifle and your gear on. that's crazy. that's the kind of culture when you have these sort of install unit mentality, and i wonder if that kind of thing is going on in the nfl, where anyone in the nfl, this is making sense to them, but anyone myself outside of the league saying this is crazy. how can this guy leave this insane voice mail message on this guy's answering machine and tomorrow him. and richie incognito will be able to defend himself and maybe we'll find out he wasn't as villainous as we all think. right now i don't know how you can really defend that. there's a lot -- the only people i see defending him are guys in the nfl which makes me believe that there's this culture going on that seems normal to the people within the cult, but to people outside are saying, who drank the kool-aid? this is crazy. so i don't really know where that story is going. and i -- my sense is some heads are going to roll in miami, and i wonder -- richie incognito is a great player, but how can he be a great teammate after what we saw? how is anyone going to bring that guy on when he is that kind of a teammate. football is a team sport, and so i think he should maybe worry about his draw prospects. >> next question. >> hi. you mentioned numerous times that football is regarded as a very evolutionary sport. we see this even down to the ball of choice. an oblong shape versus a round ball in stark contrast to basically every other sport. >> sure. >> but having an evolutionary spirit also means it's subject to change, and change is not always good. so is not the evolutionary spirit of football both a gift and a curse? >> well, i think it is a gift, because there's always these controversies about the sport of football, and football is able to react. if you were to play baseball 100 years ago, if wowyear ty cobb and suddenly you were to appear through time travel on a baseball field today, you'd know how to play the game. the game hasn't changed. it's a static game. soccer is the same way. if you try to change a rule in baseball, even something like instant replay, the traditionalists will stream bloody murder. you can't do that. i understand because baseball is different. baseball is a very traditional game. football is not a traditional game. you brought up the ball they play with. and that came about because harvard was playing a canadian university, mcgill wanted to use the rugby ball. harvard wanted to use the round ball and at a certain point harvard liked the rugby ball and forced anyone who was playing harvard, play with our rugby ball. so the rules changed that way. you can tell a harvard man but can't tell him much. so everyone had to too what hard regard -- harvard was doing. football started, the first collegiate game in 1969, they kicked the ball in a goal just like soccer. kicked a round ball in a goal. within a few years the players decided, it's a lot more fun to kick the ball above the goal than beneath it. and that's where are you get the goalposts and the ball elongated, and the forward pass and the neutral zone. we were talking earlier about the fact that the touchdown, you had to touch the ball down physically. they didn't have end zones. there are all sorts of innovations in football that in equipment in rules, in the field of play, that it changed, and that's no different now. the point i think i made to the speech, if you're able to change the size of the ball, if you're able to add end zones, able to say, let's kick the ball beneath the goalposts instead of above it. add a forward pass, which no rugby based game hat done. people complained, this is grass basketball. and they were purists that were screaming bloody murder at that time. if you're able to do all that, to introduce a running game and pass the ball and so negate kick but you can still call the game football? then i think we're okay if ncaa officials are able to kick out defensive players who put on these hits on defenseless receivers, defenseless offensive players. we're okay with that because those are minor tweaks concerned the bigger picture. what your question may be getting at and the big nightmare see anywheror for football fames, one day we're going to wake up and the players are not wearing pads, they're wearing flags and this has already happened. this happened hat a school in new jersey. morrisville prep, where the head mistress decided football was too dangerous and so they got rid of the oldest tackle football league in the country, and they replaced it with a flag football league. in my own state of massachusetts in newton, every year they had this powder puff girl's football game. a flag football game. the principal of the school decided to ban it because flag football was too dangerous. so it's not going to stop with football. it's not going to stop with flag football. and it's -- if you like some other sport better, they may be coming after that one next. let me just close with this. football has not grown too rough. the message of my book, "the war on football" is that society has grown too soft. thank you for coming out. i appreciate it. [applause] >> just a couple notes. visit the following web site, our sister group, www.aim.org, and our web site, accuracy in academia, academia.org. mr. flynn's web site, flynnfiles.com. a variety of cultural, political, observations on there that are well worth reading. and of course, check out mr. flynn's book. once again, this meeting was brought to you, as all our are, from a generous grant from the frank a fresco and nelly fresco foundation, which sponsors the conservative university series that we run every year. thank you all for joining us. have a good night, and stay in touch. [applause] >> every weekend, booktv offers 48 ours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> here's a look at some books being published this week: party's over. in the triple package, how three unlikely traits explain the rise and follow of cultural groups in america. examining why some groups are more successful than others. the detail of the creation and development of the pharmaceutical company in, the antidote, inside the world of knew pharma. the civil rights and meredith match against fear, the james meredith's attempt to walk from memphis, tennessee to jackson, mississippi in 1966 to promote black voter, and the emerging power struggle win the u.s. and china, the new era of competition with china and howmer can win. in lincolns boys, john hay and the war for lincoln's image, historian recounsels the relationship between president lincoln and his two closest aides and their work to preserve lincoln's legacy after his death. look for these titles in book stores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and booktv.org. ... the experience teaches important lackluster. for example, how to deal with severe and ongoing disappointment. i have learned that humor helps. who knows the difference between the detroit lions and a dollar bill? it turns out from a dollar bill u