“Football practices at the United States’ elite Ivy League universities may be a little bit quieter next year as coaches consider banning tackling outside of actual games, a spokesman for the league said on Tuesday.” …
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-education-tackling-idUSKCN0W35OW
Obviously your tackleing skills would diminish if you didn’t practice them…but if everyone else was doing the same thing in your conference than that would work out.
I think it’s great that the Ivies are taking a stand on this issue that affects the health of football players at all levels. Makes me proud to be a Yale alum.
And the Ivy champion doesn’t compete in the FCS tournament so no disadvantage there either. Obviously it’s extremely rare for Ivy alumni to make it to the NFL (there were 11 alumni on active rosters this season: http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/sports/fball/2015-16/releases/NFL_Opening_Weekend_Rosters_Boast_11_Ivies_on_Active_Rosters) but this move would almost certainly mean an Ivy league player will never make the NFL again.
To my knowledge there has been little study of CTE in players below the NFL/power 5 football level. If someone knows of them, please post links. On top of the extremely low NFL chances, Ivy seasons are already much shorter than the rest, and the ivy league has the strictest practice restrictions of any D1 conference already. I wouldn’t think CTE risks in multi year NFL vets is necessarily representative of CTE in people who play an absolute maximum 40 total games in college (vs. absolute maximum of 60 for FBS) have 20% less spring practice than other conferences, and don’t allow incoming freshman to participate in spring practices (don’t know if this is common in FCS but it definitely happens in FBS).
Probably will make the games more exciting actually since there will be more scoring 