Player welfare and Kalyn Ponga

[Danish]

Surely a proper medical retirement covers income protection and adequate compensation for players?

This situation reinforces the RLPA position on retirement funding, for mine.

id imagine any retirement guarantees would be for a fixed amount, not based off income at the point to retirement. would be pretty bullshit if a journeyman forced to retire from concussion received a exponentially smaller amount than a star.

If ponga was forced to retire I would assume selling his house would be a forgone.

 

[nick87]

Bloke who hates the Knights wants the Knights best player forced out of game.

on the contrary, the best result possible for me is the knights continue to tie up staggering amounts of their cap space on a guy who is a nearly weekly HIA, misses games regularly due to concussions and other ailments and who on the rare occasions does play a full game he plays as if he couldn’t be f**ked half the time

a medical retirement and the knights having that space to throw at someone else is the last thing I’d want

 

[Danish]

Do you understand that that's a 250% increase in the occurrence of CTE over a population where they say they didn't know if they were athletes? That is a massive difference.

the Canberra raiders chances of winning the premiership this year are 250% more likely than the tigers.

i’m still not betting on them.

I also installed a pool over the summer. The chances of my son drowning in my backyard went up immeasurably. I’m not worried about it occurring though

percentage differences mean nothing. The actual risk of it occurring is all that matters. A regular Joe has a 95% chance of not suffering CTE. A professional NFL player has an 80-85% chance of not winding up with CTE. In both cases the odds are very much in favour of avoiding it

 

[Exsilium]

CTE is the diagnosis at the end of a long list of symptoms.

I feel arguing the numbers of diagnosed CTE patients, which is often picked up too late, disregards the very tangible impact of the symptoms leading up to it. A lot of symptoms go unnoticed.

Aggression, memory loss, inability to make decisions or plan effectively, agitation, depression etc etc.

As someone who's suffered multiple concussions, head injuries, bleed to the brain and a fractured skull, I can tell you that the symptoms are often there well before any diagnosis of lasting brain trauma.

 

[Canard]

CTE is the diagnosis at the end of a long list of symptoms.

I feel arguing the numbers of diagnosed CTE patients, which is often picked up too late, disregards the very tangible impact of the symptoms leading up to it. A lot of symptoms go unnoticed.

Aggression, memory loss, inability to make decisions or plan effectively, agitation, depression etc etc.

As someone who's suffered multiple concussions, head injuries, bleed to the brain and a fractured skull, I can tell you that the symptoms are often there well before any diagnosis of lasting brain trauma.

Great point.

 

[Canard]

id imagine any retirement guarantees would be for a fixed amount, not based off income at the point to retirement. would be pretty bullshit if a journeyman forced to retire from concussion received a exponentially smaller amount than a star.

If ponga was forced to retire I would assume selling his house would be a forgone.

I'd say any player manager worth their salt would have some sort of personal income protection clause or insurance.

The journeyman situation you describe is exactly what the RLPA were describing during their negotiations and appears to be a genuine issue.

 

[Angry_eel]

Isn't Victor "love the way he plays" Radley in the same boat? 3 blokes fishing in a tinny - Ponga, Keary and Radley

 

[Mr Angry]

Isn't Victor "love the way he plays" Radley in the same boat? 3 blokes fishing in a tinny - Ponga, Keary and Radley

You can ad Wade Graham, imo.

 

[stryker]

While its a nice idea to want Kayln and the medical professionals to determine his fate, there is a responsibility to the game, which includes the idea that fans, especially young kids and parents, shouldn't keep seeing the same player(s) knocked out and returning to the field to repeat the same.

It is a bad look on the game and you can throw it back on policy to say it was all cleared by the right people but the liabilities still exist.

Imagine if one day its just a concussion for KP then the next hit causes a brain haemorrhage and possibly death? CTE is one of the risks but there are many, many more.

If you have a history of bad knocks, there has to be a very clear line in the sand.

My personal experience is that as a player of collision sports all my life, I was prone to concussions in the later years. After a series of concussions, the Neuro pulled rank and laid it out on me. One more hit and you'll be a vegetable or dead. Now, in my mid thirties, I have memory loss, suffer bouts of confusion and other head injury symptoms and I am not even a 1/10 on the scale of severity. Imagine what these blokes look forward to.

Well said man, this Danish character just does not get it. Coming at this topic from a purely academic viewpoint is stupid.
I was close to 30 when I stopped playing. Get headaches randomly, but regularly as well. Memory loss is quite bad for a guy in his mid 40’s but I’m good compared with a lot of guys I played with. Some permanently slur their words, others have become extremely volatile, and violent. Head injuries such as concussion change people. To argue against that is biased bullshit.

 

[stryker]

Isn't Victor "love the way he plays" Radley in the same boat? 3 blokes fishing in a tinny - Ponga, Keary and Radley

Excellent players but unluckily, they’ve had their quota of head injuries. Continuing to play as they do will only raise the risk that their quality of life will decline far earlier than it should.

 

[Angry_eel]

Excellent players but unluckily, they’ve had their quota of head injuries. Continuing to play as they do will only raise the risk that their quality of life will decline far earlier than it should.

Maybe NRL could do a study into what caused these particular players to have head injuries. Clearly, its not all players. Can the technique be improved?

 

[stryker]

Maybe NRL could do a study into what caused these particular players to have head injuries. Clearly, its not all players. Can the technique be improved?

Without a doubt.
Defensive techniques have changed dramatically in the past couple of decades.

 

[Slackboy72]

...

percentage differences mean nothing. The actual risk of it occurring is all that matters. A regular Joe has a 95% chance of not suffering CTE. A professional NFL player has an 80-85% chance of not winding up with CTE. In both cases the odds are very much in favour of avoiding it

Oh dear oh dear.
Comprehension isn't your strong point.

Let's go over the study you posted...

Here are the figures for CTE by various sports in 'athletes' (i.e. people they could determine played at least one sport)

Combined CTE pathology is:

Cases void of any CTE pathology were classified as “CTE-negative.” Features of CTE and CTE-positive cases were jointly classified and analyzed as “combined CTE pathology,” which was the primary outcome measure of the study.

Hence the conclusion:

Combined CTE pathology was found in 42 brains, or 5.6% of the study cohort and almost exclusively in men (8.8%). Collectively, 2.8% of subjects were CTE-positive, all of whom were male.

Importantly, we observed that participation in American football, specifically American football beyond high school, was associated with a markedly increased odds of both combined CTE pathology and CTE-positive outcomes in males; of the 15 males who played football beyond high school, seven (46.7%) had combined CTE pathology and 3 (20.0%) CTE-positive.

Of note, of the 124 individuals who played youth or high school football and did not play beyond that point, 110 (88.7%) did not have CTE pathology. Therefore, although our findings do suggest that playing youth or high school football may be associated with a slightly elevated risk of CTE (larger studies are needed to confirm this), they also indicate that most players of youth or high school football do not experience CTE outcomes.

Of note is the 6% of the study cohort.
300 were confirmed Athletes through obituaries or high school year books.
450 were people were sports participation could not be confirmed in obituaries or high school year books and were labelled as non-athletes.

You can see the problem there right?

Anyways for you to say:

frankly the entire CTE thing is massively overblown. In one of the larger randomised studies on CTE they found American football players had a CTE instance of 15% vs 6% in non-athletes in the study. That’s hardly world changing. Certainly no greater than the health risks taken on by any number of professions (mining, for example).

...is massively misleading and/or ignorant.

 

[macavity]

on the contrary, the best result possible for me is the knights continue to tie up staggering amounts of their cap space on a guy who is a nearly weekly HIA, misses games regularly due to concussions and other ailments and who on the rare occasions does play a full game he plays as if he couldn’t be f**ked half the time

a medical retirement and the knights having that space to throw at someone else is the last thing I’d want

Cap space means nothing when no-one ever wants to come here

 

[mave]

Cap space means nothing when no-one ever wants to come here

Which is surprising, considering how well known your coach is, and how many comps he has been involved in winning.

 

[Maximus]

the Canberra raiders chances of winning the premiership this year are 250% more likely than the tigers.

i’m still not betting on them.

I also installed a pool over the summer. The chances of my son drowning in my backyard went up immeasurably. I’m not worried about it occurring though

percentage differences mean nothing. The actual risk of it occurring is all that matters. A regular Joe has a 95% chance of not suffering CTE. A professional NFL player has an 80-85% chance of not winding up with CTE. In both cases the odds are very much in favour of avoiding it

Are you suggesting that 1 in 5 (or 6) NFL players getting CTE is not that bad?

 

[nick87]

the Canberra raiders chances of winning the premiership this year are 250% more likely than the tigers.

i’m still not betting on them.

I also installed a pool over the summer. The chances of my son drowning in my backyard went up immeasurably. I’m not worried about it occurring though

percentage differences mean nothing. The actual risk of it occurring is all that matters. A regular Joe has a 95% chance of not suffering CTE. A professional NFL player has an 80-85% chance of not winding up with CTE. In both cases the odds are very much in favour of avoiding it

I think the assumption that CTE science is static. That its been done and that's sorted, and we wont learn more about it and the impacts collisions have on the brain is a pretty niave... also there is the problem with your one single study which as highlighted above, has.... some holes in it.

Quite simply if I am his dad I begging for him to stop. Keary the same.

I come back to this point and it's exactly what i thought about and why i started this thread. (I do hate the knights and love to see them suffer but that's not why i started the thread and asked the question)
Its exactly how i feel.

 

[nick87]

Cap space means nothing when no-one ever wants to come here

Hey, look at that. You and me can find some common ground!
Cap space doesnt help my shit bag team a whole lot either haha

 

[NewySteel]

Some of the uninformed comments on this thread is enough to give anyone CTE.

Perhaps, and hear me out on this, we don’t all need to have an uninformed opinion of something we don’t understand.
Maybe we leave it to people that actually have some expertise in the area?

 

[Pierced Soul]

The move to 6 was only going it make it worse.

That was my assumption as well given the increased amount of defence. But it was pointed out on 360 tonight that he's had plenty on concussions at fullback regardless