Tasteless, but true

[yendi]

This bit of Darwin Award candidacy immediately reminded me of Tommy Sherman.

It really makes you think, doesn't it?

Comments

[terracinque.livejournal.com]

It doesn't say anywhere in the story that he participated in pulling down the goalpost, just that it hit him when it came down. If he was just an unlucky bystander, then he's not a Darwin Award candidate.

[yendi]

True. If that turns out to be the case, it would shift from darwin-award candidacy to something that those who were stupid enough to pull the goalposts down need to live with for the rest of their lives.

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

And the school will now ban the whole goal post thing...after the fact.

[montykins.livejournal.com]

Even if he had participated in the goal-post-pulling -- heck, even if he were the Head Puller of Goal Posts -- I wouldn't consider him a Darwin Award candidate. Lots of people pull down goal posts; on the average Saturday, dozens are pulled down at colleges around the country. And the custom has been going on for decades, which means probably thousands of goal posts have been pulled down by hundreds of thousands of drunken college students with a net result of one person killed.

Per capita, pulling down goal posts is fairly safe. More people get killed by lightning strikes.

[yendi]

Not having ever followed high-school or college football, I've never gotten the whole pulling-down-goalposts thing, but it always struck me as something that was both stupid and tempting fate (or, more accurately, gravity).

That said, searching the web seems to show a lot more injuries from soccer goalposts than football ones (avoid obvious jokes about them being one and the same in other countries). Weird.

[terracinque.livejournal.com]

More people get killed by lightning strikes.

Do you have statistics to back that up?

[montykins.livejournal.com]

Do you have statistics to back that up?

Sure. Snopes says that (http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/phone.asp) "Lightning
ranks second only to floods in storm-related deaths in the United States. On average, 73 people are killed by it each year. Not even tornadoes or hurricanes top it in terms of lives lost."

So unless 73 people are killed each year by pulling down goalposts (which seems pretty unlikely, since this is the first one I've ever heard about), lightning kills more people.

[yendi]

I'm not sure the statistics aren't apples and oranges. The pool of potential lightening-strike victims is basically the entire population of the US. The pool of potential goalpost victims consists of those who pull down goalposts or participate in on-field celebrations.

[montykins.livejournal.com]

Quite true. The comparison is only barely relevant. My basic point, though, that given the small number of goalpost deaths relative to the number of people who participate in the activity, it's not actually that dangerous (or unusual) of a behavior, so I don't think it's Darwin-worthy.

[terracinque.livejournal.com]

What I was asking for was statistics on goalpost deaths, and that's the one thing you failed to provide.

Lightning-strike deaths per year are well-disseminated and easy to find.

unless 73 people are killed each year by pulling down goalposts

As far as you've shown, that could well be the case.

[montykins.livejournal.com]

Well, the way I see it, there are two possibilities:

a) There are more than 73 deaths each year caused by pulling down goalposts. If this is the case, then it's not particularly uncommon and thus doesn't qualify for a Darwin Award; after all, lots of people die from drunk driving, but since it's not unusual, they get no awards.

b) There are very, very few deaths each year caused by pulling down goalposts. If this is the case, then it's not particularly dangerous and thus doesn't qualify for a Darwin Award; after all, just because somebody dies in a freak stamp-collecting accident doesn't mean that the act of stamp collecting is inherently life-threatening. Darwin Awards are for people who die by doing things that are obviously extremely dangerous.

Now, as to the question of goalpost statistics? It's very hard to quote statistics unless someone collects them, and if something is an extremely rare freak accident, no one's collecting those numbers. If someone jumps to their death out of the hotel room I'm sitting in, I say "Wow! That was unlikely!" even though I cannot absolutely prove that people aren't jumping out of this window three times a week. The actuarial don't go down as far as "one person killed nationwide every ten years".

Basically, the fact that it's reported here as an unusual thing (along with the fact that I personally have never heard of it happening before) leads me to believe that it is, in fact, quite rare. This news article is widely circulated; if it had happened fifty times this year (or, in fact, at all over the last several years), those instances would have gotten news stories too. The lack of news stories suggests to me that it's a very uncommon event.

And the fact that I can't find hard evidence of per capita goal post deaths (in fact, I can't find any but the Minnesota-Morris student in the original story) tends to bolster my beliefs. If you believe that more than 73 deaths per year are attributable to people pulling down goal posts, that should be easy to prove; the reverse is not true. Proving a negative is nigh-impossible.

I did locate this story (http://www.momsteam.com/alpha/features/head_injury_awareness_center/dangers_posed_by_soccer_goalposts.shtml) about soccer goalposts, which apparently killed 27 people from 1979 to 2003, so that's slightly more than one per year.