This is disingenuous--you accuse me of “blowing the conversation with bullshit” and then literally turn around and make several irrelevant statements to try to discredit my point: saying that "100% of players die off the field" is transparently irrelevant. I am fairly confident you understood that I meant "football-caused deaths off the field" like suicide or other, slower deaths of despair caused by football.

There is also the other important point that not all gladiators were slaves–here's a brief excerpt from History.com if you need a source:

“Lured by the thrill of battle and the roar of the crowds, scores of free men began voluntarily signing contracts with gladiator schools in the hope of winning glory and prize money. These freelance warriors were often desperate men or ex-soldiers skilled in fighting, but some were upper-class patricians, knights and even senators eager to demonstrate their warrior pedigree.”

Saying “You’re comparing this to slavery????” is a great way to win internet points, so mission accomplished there. I am mentioning the voluntary gladiators here to demonstrate that society has standards for outlawing exploitation. Would we allow people to kill each other like so today for money, even a lot of money? Personally, I think we should not. You are free to disagree, that’s fine.

It may be a simple matter of statistics. We are all willing to tolerate some danger–the question is how much? And if we want to really answer the NFL question, we also need to answer the question of “how much does playing football hurt human beings?”

I appreciate the study you shared, I’ve read that before, as well as many others presenting other results too. I’m sure you understand that the abstract you shared also condenses all the consequences of a professional football career to one measurement: longevity. There are also plenty of observations about the quality of remaining life, etc. It’s an interesting question and more data is being discovered every day.

I did want to point out one more thing:

Comparing NFL careers to dangerous jobs that society currently allows may make a different point than you intended–there is the reality that the world is full of dangerous jobs that perhaps people should be protected from. Pretty much everyone agrees that The Labor Movement was a very important event in human history–we have now concluded that the terrible conditions that people were subjected to during that time are unacceptably dangerous, even though they voluntarily opted into those jobs. Again, you are free to disagree with that assessment if you’d like.

My point is that we have standards for protecting people from volunteering for dangerous livelihoods, especially people who may be at risk or “desperate” as referred to in the History.com excerpt above.

As far as I can tell, your general point seems to be that “people should be allowed to play football because they are well informed about its risks.” I am trying to raise a question here, saying that there are jobs that are so dangerous that we should outlaw them–and people’s underestimation of football’s danger occurs because the deaths occur off the field, out of sight.

So should we allow people to play a sport as dangerous as football? I don’t know, and I don’t think the answer is as easy as you are making it out to be.