Jim Irsay compares the risk of playing football to taking aspirin

Over the last decade or so, the game of football has been at risk of possibly being done away with for younger kids. This is because many of these children’s parents know the long-term dangers of playing the violent sport, but it doesn’t seem that Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay is too worried about the real dangers of the sport.

Irsay spoke with the Sports Business Journal at the annual owners meeting last week and had a lot to say when the subject of the risk of playing football came up. He actually compared it to taking a drug to help with a headache, citing that it could affect one person severely and not hurt another.

“I believe this: that the game has always been a risk, you know, and the way certain people are,” Jim Irsay said. “Look at it. You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin, it might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body … may reject it, where I would be fine. So there is so much we don’t know.”

He then went on to talk about how football isn’t the only violent and dangerous sport.

“It is a tough sport. It is a contact sport. Again, whether it is bobsledding, rugby, what have you now: Any of those sports it takes a commitment [that] ‘I am all in here.’”

He also said that there isn’t a link between CTE and playing football.

The bad thing about Irsay’s comments were that they were published on the same day that Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah retired due to health reasons. He suffered five concussions during his career.

While Irsay may have some validity behind his comments as everyone is affected differently. However, there is no denying that some sort of link exists between football’s violent nature and the reason less and less young children are playing the game.

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*Featured Photo (above) credit to USA TODAY Sports

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