Recently concussed Michigan QB Tate Forcier ::AP

If you have a few minutes before Cincinnati and USF kick off, consider this your reading assignment. It's a New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of best-sellers The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, and it compares football and dogfighting.

If you're like me, you probably slammed the brakes when you read that last sentence, just as I did when I first saw the headline on the New Yorker site. Just ignore that instinct and keep reading. When I was researching a story last week about what doctors would want to see before they would allow Florida quarterback Tim Tebow to play, cranial rights advocate Chris Nowinski mentioned that he'd been interviewed by Gladwell for an upcoming piece. Concussions are very much in the news these days. Besides Tebow, Michigan quarterback Tate Forcier and Texas Tech quarterback Taylor Potts also have recently suffered concussions. Having read much of Gladwell's work, I was curious to see what he would juxtapose with the violence of concussions. In two recent New Yorker forays into sports, Gladwell wondered why NBA teams don't use the full-court press more often, and he used the pre-draft evaluation of Chase Daniel to illustrate that it's just as hard to find a good future teacher coming out of college as it is to find a good future NFL quarterback.

Gladwell picked dogfighting, and the connection seemed tenuous at first. But as the story progressed, the juxtaposition made more sense. By the end, I found myself counting up every blow to the head I ever took while playing football.

The conclusion should make you think. Are we as football fans no better than the Romans who cheered as gladiators died in the name of sport? Are we no better than the bumpkins who gather in deserted barns and watch dogs rip each other to shreds? Unlike the gladiators and the dogs, the football players have a choice, but does that let us off the hook?

These questions have no easy answers, but they're worth pondering.