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Let’s say in the 80s and 90s with growing attention on safety in sports especially regarding concussions and brain damage the professional leagues and college athletics take a different approach to otl to avoid or lessen problems for them later on. This sees sports more changing the way they play and teach the sport over changing rules. They still update and make advances in how to handle injuries like otl but actually changes to rules and gameplay are little.

For football it could be argued concussions are partly due to tackling form. American football coaches often teach to put your face mask where the ball is when tackling. This does increase the chance of a fumble but also increases the chance of concussions since the majority of the time the runner is going to adjust himself for impact if he sees you coming at him. This often unintentionally leads to head to head impacts or the head hitting another part of the body at full speed which can often hurt players. Teaching rugby style tackles would solve this issue. If face mask to ball is looked at as poor technique like having your head down while a rugby tackle becomes the norm for tackling you are likely to see a massive decrease in brain damage. Another issue in American football is people can get away with being raw athletes more so then most sports but this creates issues with very physically gifted athletes using poor technique(because they can get away with it more) which increases the chances of injury. College football and even NFL to a lesser extent often take very big or naturally gifted athletes who lack in technique and discipline because they feel like they can more easily train that into them over time but often times you will notice clear technique gaps between your more physical and less physical players. This is one reason why someone like Brady or more IQ reliant QBs want to avoid running ball because someone like Richard Sherman could come rushing at him in open field and seriously hurt him especially if he hit him in a incorrect way. A rugby style tackle would still hurt like hell for Brady in this situation but likely won’t send him to the hospital like a helmet to the chest or in the worse case to his helmet.

For basketball the changing of rules seemed more about lowering the amounts of fights and making it more high scoring(to increase views but I think that has backfired somewhat). So what if a more defensive minded nba keep it’s Jordan era rules and just copy hockey and added a box for players who fight by the late 90s. Losing your player for certain amount of minutes in a game could cost you games so it is a fitting punishment. You can also be put in there for penalties. Players like Curry would not thrive as well in a more defensive nba. NBA is probably the most blatant when it comes to its favoritism of offensive gameplay.

Let’s even expand this into WWE while staged still has to deal with many of same, arguably much more, safety issues that other sports deal with. They are basically athletes who are trained stunt men and actors. Compared to most other athletics they were the last group to take employee health and safety seriously. It took the Chris Benoit thing happening before they started cleaning up things and taking employee health seriously. They honestly got lucky a employee never died on live cable tv given their record on this stuff. Eddie literally had a heart attack on live tv. But like football a lot of their safety problems can be lessen by proper technique(they do the moves correctly and with weapons focus more on body shots while making head shots more one and done. They can still do head shots like the 90s but not more then one or two a match because realistically people are usually knocked out by that alone. You don’t need 10 shots to the head to sell it. That’s just excessive by that point). Let’s say in pod where the Chris Benoit thing doesn’t happen they take a approach more like this. Since it is staged could wwe become the first athletic organization to encourage and openly support monitored performance enhancers? It doesn’t create a unfair advantage(it’s staged) and honestly probably helps the smaller guys compete better against the larger athlete. A smaller guy always has a higher chance to get hurt against bigger ones. It would have to be monitored and done by medical professionals to prevent abuse or overdoing it but can be done in a healthy way if supervised correctly. Performance enhancers have become much more advanced and refine in recent years. They all don’t do the same things and can have different benefits now with a decrease amount of negatives. But can still be dangerous if taken incorrectly or too much.

Could you have these sports develop more like this? Cheerleading and gymnastics have injuries all the time. Concussions are common in cheerleading too but usually seen as a result of poor technique or as part of the risk within the sport. With sports in the US especially contact the issue seems to be more focused on damage to the brain instead of general physical damage. Doesn’t rugby have injuries all the time but no one considers that sport as “too violent” because it’s more broken bones or tears and not as much brain damage? If sports and athletics focused earlier on more on lessening damage to the brain or preventing more damage to it couldn’t they still get away with being rather aggressive towards the rest of the body? People seem more tolerant of broken arms and limbs. For example NFL players would all be doing rugby be style tackles and will have remove players from league once they get certain amount of concussions. Wouldn’t that alone save them a lot of face in the long run if done in the 80s and 90s?
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