Whether it’s on the job or not, players face struggles that coaches, referees, opponents and fans seem to often disregard. So many people get hurt playing each year.

At the start of the football season, we were only two weeks in when CNN recorded that 15% of football players in the NFL were already injured. And the fact that this isn’t even all that extraordinary for the season makes us wonder why these things are so common. Playing football, it being a contact sport, players have to take the risk that they will get hurt at some point. This can be said for every sport and it’s because of factors like opponents violating the rules and referees & coaches worsening situations that concern players. . . Especially when they know that they’ve signed up for sports with “You’re sure to get hurt” in fine print.

In the recent BYU-Utah basketball game, ESPN had reported on how Nick Emery punched Utah Utes guard, Brandon Taylor. About two minutes had been left in the game when Nick Emery became so heated. After he punched him in the face, he told Taylor, “Stay on the ground.” His intentions were to get this player to stop playing and even though it didn’t impede him from playing, Taylor was definitely caught “off guard” by it. Emery later told ESPN, “I got caught up in the intensity of the game and let my emotions get the best of me.”

Players know best what it feels like to get hurt during a game. The fact that people are willing to do this to each other on purpose shows how much players need to come to the realization that themselves having an injury sucks just as much as their opponent having an injury.

Things like this, where people are throwing cheap shots to get a guy out of the game are what is making BYU sports not fun anymore. And this isn’t the first time that BYU has done something like this. BYU is known for throwing punches. In another case at the beginning of the season, a BYU football player had blatantly punched a Boise State player in the groin. He hit him so hard that he had to get checked out before resuming play.

The worst part of the Emery-Taylor altercation is that the referees didn’t call it out on him  at first just like the previous instance. It took an entire crowd of fans to show the ref that Taylor had gotten hurt and that he needed to do something about it. This being said, Taylor dusted himself off, went back out to finish off the game and threw it back in BYU’s metaphorical face that Utah had won. Even still, though, why referees hesitate on ejecting people from the game or handing out harsher punishments for unruly behavior like this, is a question that needs to be addressed. Coaches are just as at fault for disregarding player’s health.

When a player gets a concussion, former Illinois coach, Tim Beckman, would tell them that they were ready play and A-okay even when they weren’t. With Illinois players being forced to play under such pressure as this, “There’s no way you can say no. I was forced to play while injured,” stated former Illinois player, Simon Cvijanovic.

Because of such instances as this, the sports world has come to find that there is a change in leadership needed to be discussed in order for people to take player’s injuries seriously.