Boxing was an NCAA sanctioned collegiate sport until 1960, just like Basketball, football, wrestling etc. are today. Would the American boxing scene and prospect development be at a higher level today if Boxing was still an NCAA sport? The US does quite well at Olympic level wrestling due to the collegiate scene.
Not anymore. The US does not win Olympic golds anymore and NCAA not sanctioning boxing is one of the reasons for the downfall (though not the major one). Boxing needs to get back into the NCAA program and that will help resurrect the sport in the United States.
Ain't no way boxing is going to get sanctioned on college campuses. Football is there still only because of it's massive popularity, but any sport where people occasionally get beaten to death is not going to get approved. You aren't going to see MMA at Stanford or Michigan, either.
I agree with you. Imagine a college offering a boxing scholarship today? Professors would wet the bed in todays colleges.
Ehh, it's all money. I believe football is actually worse for CTE than Boxing but those professors at a lot of schools know how important their football programs are for funding their schools so they stay mum. The issue is that Boxing was banned in the first place, with what we know about brain trauma today it'd be hard to argue to ban boxing but keep football.
I have no idea. This story from 2019 says it's an average of about three per year: [url]https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/17/sport/boxing-deaths-patrick-day-spt-intl-trnd/index.html[/url] Plus those are just the deaths. Of course severe injuries or even guys who are down for a long time would cause alarm at a university. For example, the Jalolov KO against Torrez would be a big issue for a lot of athletic departments.
Football is a game you can modify and tweak to reduce CTE. And if that still doesn't work you can make it touch football. Back when there was a push to ban football in the victorian period they added helmets. Its a game that can morph into whatever people need it to be for it to survive. Boxing is boxing. Theres very little you can do to satisfy people who would want it banned.
Irony is that helmets actually made things worse. Players feel invincible and literally launch themselves in the air head first to tackle. American football could have tried to adopt Rugby tackling which is against using the head as a weapon. The Olympics got rid of headgear in Boxing as it also didn't particularly protect the brain and the bigger target on the head actually made things worse.
the structure of the headgear also causes whiplash, from experience as a glancing shot with pull your head straight back at certain angles
Helmets didn't make things worse because before them players were dying regularly. In 1905 19 college players died and double digit deaths were normal.
That was due to the way they would play the game. They used these odd wedge formation tactics and things like eye gauging would even occur from what I've heard. It was more trench warfare than actual sport. Nothing like the game is played today. There is a reason why rugby has less (not none) head injuries than the NFL despite them playing with no helmets. Just look at how Rugby players tackle compared to NFL players. You take the helmets away and NFL players will modify their tackles. NFL won't ever do that though because they know the American public likes those crazy hits with guys flying in the air.
