Intelligence Squared, Should College Football Be Banned?

[00:00:00.00]

[00:00:07.84] -The human brain is a mass of soft tissue that is suspended within a hard skull. Every time you get hit, that soft tissue rattles around inside your skull. And the effect of that rattling around is to stretch and sometimes tear the connections between your nerve cells.

[00:00:24.96] In the course of everyday life, that almost never happens. In the course of playing football, that happens all the time. It is not unusual in the course of the game for a player to sustain hits to head of between 40 and 100 G's.

[00:00:38.35] To put that in perspective, if you were to get in your car and not put on your seat belt and drive at 25 miles an hour into a brick wall so that your forehead struck the dashboard of the car, that would be a hit of 100 G's. If you reversed your car and went and did it over and over again so that you hit the brick wall 30 to 40 times at speeds between 20 and 25 miles an hour, that would be the equivalent of a football game.

[00:01:04.22] If you reversed your car, and over the course of the next three months drove it at 20 to 25 miles an hour into a brick wall 1,000 times, that would be the equivalent of a college football season.

[00:01:16.10] -It's how much can you take? How much can you take and keep going? And I think that's one of the great lessons of the sport of football. I think that's why it's great for our youth, it's great in Little League, it's great in high school, it's certainly great in college, because it teaches kids that life is tough, things are tough, and then you pick yourself up and you go on. I think it's the greatest lesson in the game, and I think it's the greatest game that we play.

[00:01:39.70] -The amount of money the coaches make is insulting. It is insulting when a coach is making five to 10 to 15 times more than a college president. What does it say about the priorities of a university? It says that the head coach runs the school.

[00:02:01.01] And make no mistake, that was the tragedy of Joe Paterno. He did run Penn State. [APPLAUSE] He did run Penn State. And I know he ran Penn State, because when Graham Spanier went to his house in 2004 and said, "Joe, it's time to retire," he threw him out. They never spoke for 10 years.

[00:02:21.91] Joe ran that school, and when it was his chance to do what was the morally right thing to do, which was the go to the police, the culture of omerta that surrounds football, he did nothing except harbor a suspected child molester.

[00:02:38.93] -Everything in America is connected to freedom, and to capitalism, and to democracy, and so you can't remove our institutions of higher education from capitalism and from freedom. You can't. We don't do that in America. We let capitalism exploit everything, whether we like it or not. [APPLAUSE] And so football has to be tolerated, no different than Ronald McDonald. Ronald McDonald has done far more damage to America than any football coach, any of these overpaid coaches you're [APPLAUSE] talking about.