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Recent years have brought recognition that sportsmen and women may have mental health needs that are just as important as their ‘physical’ health – and that may need to be addressed. Athletes are people too, subject to many of the same vulnerabilities as the rest of us. In addition to our everyday anxieties, the sports world contains a whole host of different stressors.

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Get ready for the biggest football game of the year!

As you know, the Super Bowl is almost here. The 50th Super Bowl football game will be played on Sunday, February 7. The Denver Broncos will battle the Carolina Panthers, so I thought we could round up some of the best football facts and fun from the STACKS. Here are a few things for you to do to get ready for the big game.

• Take this Super Bowl trivia quiz.
• Play the Game Changers football game.
• Get the latest football books from Scholastic.
• Leave a Comment telling us which team you are rooting for in Super Bowl 50!
• Or if you prefer animal sports, will you be watching the Kitten Bowl on Hallmark Channel, or Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet?

Photos courtesy of Hallmark Channel and Animal Planet

By Anthony Scioli, Ph.D.

“Just look at the gladiators… and consider the blows they endure! Consider how they who have been well-disciplined prefer to accept a blow than ignominiously avoid it! How often it is made clear that they consider nothing other than the satisfaction of their [coach] or the [fans]! Even when they are covered with wounds they send a messenger to their [coach] to inquire his will. If they have given satisfaction to their [coach], they are pleased to fall. What even mediocre gladiator ever groans; ever alters the expression on his face? Which one of them acts shamefully, either standing or falling? And which of them, even when he does succumb, ever contracts his neck when ordered to receive the blow?”

The above passage, with the exception of two minor word substitutions on my part, was written by Cicero 2,000 years ago. My point is that his description of the sacrificial gladiator of the ancient amphitheater can be applied all too easily to the players who currently do battle on the modern gridiron.

I am convinced that football, in its present form, cannot last. I will put aside the physical carnage that piles up every weekend, the torn cartilage, broken bones, blackened, bruised and ripped skin, the shredded muscle fibers; I am not a physician. However, I am a psychologist. From my perspective, I believe that the greatest health crisis precipitated by football involves the brain and the mind, especially for those at the professional level, and particularly for those who are retired, and have suffered one too many concussions. For these former gladiators, there is a great risk of succumbing to severe, life-threatening forms of hopelessness.

The hopelessness that descends upon the retired professional football player should not be a surprise. It is understandable if you begin with some knowledge of what changes occur in a soft and mushy brain that has been repeatedly concussed, or more bluntly, tossed and smashed from side to side within a bony skull-box. Repetitive brain trauma can result in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)

CTE has been detected in the brains of ex-football players well as former boxers. In CTE, there are signs of a spreading tau protein that normally serves a stabilizing function but becomes dislodged, primarily from the axons which transmit nerve impulses. The floating Tau form a spreading tangle of tissue that disrupts brain function. Rare diseases can precipitate this pathological cascade but so can repetitive head trauma. CTE has also been found in the aged, and those stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. The most commonly affected areas include the frontal lobes (decision-making, planning, willpower), the temporal lobes (memory and speech), and the parietal area (sensory integration, reading and writing). The most common emotional symptoms in those suffering from CTE include depression, anger, hyper-aggressiveness, irritability, diminished insight and poor judgment.

On 2 May 2012 former football star Junior Seau shot himself in the chest with a .357 magnum. Eighteen months earlier, Seau had driven his SUV off a cliff following an arrest on charges of domestic violence. He claimed that he had fallen asleep. Back then, many in his circle of friends and family hoped and prayed it was the truth. His brain was sent to a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine. Their tests revealed a brain besieged by CTE.

A little more than a year earlier, in February, 2011, Dave Duerson, also a former professional football player, similarly committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He had texted a message to his family indicating that he was “saving” his brain for research. Three months later BU School of Medicine confirmed “neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions.” In high school, Duerson had been a member of the National Honor Society and played the sousaphone, traveling Europe with the Musical Ambassadors All-American Band. He attended the University of Notre Dame on both football and baseball scholarships. He graduated with honors, receiving a BA in Economics. Duerson played eleven seasons in the NFL.

Whenever interviewed, the researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine are reluctant to affirm a cause and effect link between CTE and suicide. They provide the typical (and not unreasonable) response that multiple causes often underlie human behavior, including suicide. While generally true, a case such as that of Duerson seems to beg the question, what else besides CTE could have led a formerly intelligent, well-organized, responsible, and successful individual to morph into a desperate failure that ends his own life at the age of fifty?

Anthony Scioli is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Keene State College. He is the co-author of Hope in the Age of Anxiety with Henry Biller. Dr. Scioli completed Harvard fellowships in human motivation and behavioral medicine. He co-authored the chapter on emotion for the Encyclopedia of Mental Health and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Positive Psychology and the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Read his previous blog articles.

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The post Why football cannot last appeared first on OUPblog.

When the Super Bowl at the Super Dome was plunged into darkness by a blackout last night, Twitter immediately pointed the finger at two possible suspects—halftime entertainer Beyoncé ,who doubtless needed a million hair dryers to get her 'do just so, and alight those neon Busby Berkeley tributes.

Disney has released the EXTENDED (well, really extensive) trailer for IRON MAN 3 a brief snippet of which was shown on the Super Bowl in the posh post Beyoncé spot.

By Ron Rodman

Sports fans eagerly anticipate television broadcasts of their favorite sports, whether it is baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, boxing, golf, auto racing, or any of the other events aired on the tube. In the USA, the biggest television sports event is undoubtedly (American) professional football: the National Football League. In 2011, NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was the highest-rated program on American TV; nine of the ten most-watched shows that year were NFL games or pregame shows (the other was the Academy Awards), and each of the 21 biggest audiences in TV history are Super Bowls. Football’s popularity may be attributed to the coincidence of the NFL season with the American holiday season (i.e., Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, New Year’s Day, etc.). For many sports fans, football on TV is synonymous with the holidays, and vice versa.  One might say that football is part of American holiday festivities.

Professional football was broadcast on television as far back as 1939, when the Philadelphia Eagles played the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 22nd. Games were not telecast with any regularity until the 1950s, but after the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants — the so-called “Greatest Game Ever Played” — football on television gained an enthusiastic following. The DuMont Network and ABC broadcast games in these early years, but NBC and CBS soon bought the rights to broadcast all professional football, with CBS broadcasting the NFL games, and NBC broadcasting AFL games.

By the early 1970s, NFL football became so popular that telecasts featured “pregame shows” that had high quality sets, analytical commentators (many of whom were former players or coaches) and, of course, catchy musical themes — all done to add an air of festivity to the broadcasts of the games. CBS offered one of the first pregame shows dating back to 1961, eventually becoming “The NFL Today,” in the 1970’s. The program was introduced by an upbeat, “light rock” musical theme, with a sort of light rock motif.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The theme was updated in 1982, adding a disco-style “wah-wah” guitar, and omitting the trombone glissando.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The arrangement was tweaked again in 1983, with the alteration of computer-generated visual images.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not to be outdone, NBC had their own pregame show, “The NFL on NBC.” NBC became the sole broadcaster for AFL football games in 1964, and when the league merged with the NFL in 1970, NBC retained rights to the AFC games, with CBS taking the NFC. (ABC began airing “Monday Night Football” in 1977.)

The musical theme of “The NFL on NBC” in 1973 featured a driving brass section with “wah-wah” guitar, and a jazz-like sax solo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unlike CBS, NBC changed its musical themes frequently. Here’s composer by John Colby’s 1992 theme to the show:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the 1995-97 version by Randy Edelman:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Like the CBS theme, the latter two NBC themes are festive, almost joyful, reflecting the playful nature of sports telecasts.

The Fox Network entered the NFL TV market in 1994 when the network outbid CBS for NFC games. The theme for its show, “Fox NFL Sunday,” was composed by Scott Schreer, Reed Hays, and Phil Garrod, who pitched three separate songs to Fox, who then spliced them together into one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The use of the minor key and heavy percussion of the Fox theme creates a more serious tone than the more laid-back light jazz/rock themes of its predecessor. The theme leads to a perception that the broadcast is less about a festive game of skilled athletes, and more about a life-or-death combat by gladiators.

Fox’s gladiatorial theme was soon imitated by both NBC and CBS, who in turn used minor key, martial music for their own broadcasts. In my September blog post, I wrote about John Williams’ theme to NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” called by at least one fan as “Football’s Imperial March.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

What caused the shift from festive athletes to combative gladiators in American pro football TV broadcasts? It may have much to do with America’s militaristic posture during the past decade (two wars fought), or television networks’ desire to align the game with the combative, hyper-masculine ethos that emerged from the post 9/11 era.

However, I would contend that we haven’t lost the festive spirit completely in pro football on TV. While the “Fox NFL Sunday” theme has become nearly synonymous with the NFL with its serious, militaristic tone, if we listen to the opening motif of the theme, we might detect a resemblance to a portion of a famous winter holiday song:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The song is Leroy Anderson’s famous “Sleigh Ride,” sung here in a classic recording by Johnny Mathis. The melody at the beginning of the “B” section (“Giddy up! Giddy up! Giddy up! Let’s go!”) has a melodic profile identical to the beginning of the Fox football theme. Here is a melodic comparison:

So, did Schreer, Hays, and Garrod get their inspiration from a festive holiday song? Maybe televised football hasn’t lost its festive spirit after all!

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

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The post Football, festivity, and music appeared first on OUPblog.

As a life-long Massachusetts resident, I have to pimp out my AFC Champs, New England Patriots.  I was absolutely thrilled that we would meet New York G-Men in the Big Game.  I have been a long-suffering fan of the Pats when they stunk it up in the late 70s and early 80s.  

I remember the beat down we got from the Chicago Bears in the 1986 big game.  My heart broke for our team, but we just didn't play well.  We went back to the big game in 1997 where we suffered a loss at the hands of the Green Bay Packer and Brett Favre.  Turns out that Parcells was leaving the Pats to go coach the NY Jets.  And so begins the rivalry between the two markets.  

From the moment Belichick came to New England, our football team has been reinvented and we have been on a winning streak that has shocked even some of the hardened fan.  We love to win in our hometown and we pride ourselves on being known as a title town.  I know there are many people that hate on this man, but he has football in the blood and he bleeds X's and O's.

Tom Brady.  What els

1 Comments on Thankful Thursday on the Shelf, last added: 2/2/2012

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Marie said, on 2/2/2012 8:09:00 AM

Happy Super Bowl Sunday Laura! :-)

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Get ready for Hunger Games the, uh, game… (Lionsgate is teaming up with Funtactix to build a social game that takes place in the world of Panem. Debuting the same day as the movie, it will give us the first official map of the futuristic... Read the rest of this post

Puppicasso is always on the off-season.  He is fully into baseball mode today.

I can’t get him to give me his picks for the Puppi Bowl.

And he could care less who is singing in the Kitty Half-time show, even if he owns all of her albums.

This means you, Puppicasso!

He doesn’t care about reading signs, unless he wrote them himself.

He's a selective reader.

So, he dashes onto the baseball field.

So fast, he's a Fuzz Fly!

And plays every position…

Pupp Dugg Out

On the Pawball.

… and watches himself play ball from the stands.

Bleacher Bumpupp

And with a full count and one out left and bases loaded in the two-minute warning in the bottom of 9th quarter for sudden death penalty kicks and one more round and lap to go on the 18th hole…

Puppi in a pickle sliding and...

Stealing Home.

If home is where the heart is or somewhere adjacent, or even nearby then…

Puppicasso stole my heart home plate and the umpire called it safe (even if the ump still needs to sweep it up).

Microsoft is billing its upgrade of the Xbox Live platform (as the “future of TV.” The new user interface comes with a wealth of content from video partners, including 26 live channels from Verizon Fios, thousands of On Demand options... Read the rest of this post

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By Louis René Beres

Adam Smith published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. A revolutionary book, Wealth did not aim to support the interests of any one particular class, but rather the overall well-being of an entire nation. He sought, as every American high-school student learns, “an invisible hand,” whereby “the private interests and passions of men” will lead to “that which is most agreeable to the interest of a whole society.”

Still, this system of “perfect liberty,” as he called it, could never be based upon encouragements of needless consumption. Instead, argued Smith, the laws of the market, driven by competition and a consequent “self-regulation,” actually demanded explicit disdain for any gratuitous or vanity-driven consumption.

What does this all mean for better understanding current economic dislocations and volatility? Above all, it suggests that modern commentators and pundits often speak in blithe disregard for Smith’s true beliefs, ignoring that his primary concern for consumption was always tempered and bounded by a genuine hatred for “conspicuous consumption” (a phrase to be used more pointedly by Thorsten Veblen in a later century).

For Adam Smith, it was only proper that the market regulate both the price and quantity of goods according to the final arbiter of public demand, yet, he continued, this market ought never to be manipulated by any avaricious interferers. In fact, Smith plainly excoriated all those who would artificially create or encourage any such contrived demand as mischievously vain meddlers of “mean rapacity.”

Today, of course, where engineered demand and hyper consumption are permanent and allegedly purposeful features of the market, especially here in the United States, we have lost all sight of Smith’s “natural liberty.” As a result, we try, foolishly and interminably, to build our economic recovery and vitality upon sand. Below the surface, we still fail to recognize, lurks a core problem that is not at all economic, fiscal or financial. Rather, as Adam Smith would have understood, it is a starkly psychological and deeply human dilemma.

Wall Street’s persisting fragility is largely a mirror image of Main Street’s insatiable drive toward hyper consumption. This manipulated drive, so utterly execrable to Adam Smith, has already become so overwhelming that many learned economists warn us sternly against saving too much.

If only we could all buy just a little more, they argue, life in America would be better. Retail sales are the authentic barometer of the “good life.”

Collectively, our national economic effort is always oriented, breathlessly, toward buying more. Many of our country’s troubling and troubled economic policies are a more-or-less direct consequence of this sorely misdirected effort. Until we can get an effective reversal of the frenetic public need for more and more things, any “recovery” will remain transient and partial.

Not from the start has contrived demand been a basic driving force of our economy. Obviously, before television and before our newer surrenders to an avalanche of high-tech gadgets, such demand would not have had any such compelling power. Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, it will take herculean efforts to detach healthy patterns of consumption from a distressingly ceaseless barrage of advertisement.

At the recently-played Super

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With Mike Tomlin on his way to his second Super Bowl in three years and with Black History Month upon us, this is an ideal time to examine the movement that broke down the color barrier at the top of National Football League’s coaching hierarchy and transformed the NFL into an unlikely equal opportunity trailblazer.  Moreover, as American institutions of all sorts, from the Association of Art Museum Directors to the National Urban League, contemplate the merits of emulating the NFL’s Rooney Rule, it is important to investigate what the NFL’s equal opportunity progress means to us as a nation. N. Jeremi Duru, author of Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL, explores this concept of a post-racial NFL.

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"Glee" star Matthew Morrison's (debut album gets a thumbs up from his costars, who compare his musical style to Justin Timberlake's. Fox is planning heavy "Glee" promotion during the Super Bowl, with Lea Michele performing at the game and a new... Read the rest of this post

This week's cuties are from the 2 teams who made it to the Super Bowl: Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers. Let me just say that, since my teams (Houston Texans and Chicago Bears) did not make it to Super Bowl XLV, I'm pulling for the Steelers. Let me also say, I've had an adult crush on Troy Polamalu since forever! Let me also also say, all three of these cutie pies have some very nice lips...I LOVE men with nice lips. *sigh* That is all...

Word(s) to Describe: Heavenly!

This week's ManMon is dedicated to cuties from teams who almost made it to the Super Bowl: Chicago Bears and New York Jets.

Kahlil Bell, #32 Brian Urlacher, #54

NEW YORK JETS

Braylon Edwards, #17

Mark Sanchez, #6