Shattered Brains of Dead Football Players

I picked up the recent issue of Time Magazine to flip through their article on everything that’s wrong with football and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the only thing standing between the sport and perfection was the thin layer of cerebrospinal fluid that floats between the brain and the skull.

Well, not quite.

The dangerous game of football has been under review for some time now. The earliest conclusive studies linking repeated head trauma to dementia, depression and an early death date back to well before 2002 and the logic should have preceded them. In 2006, Andre Waters committed suicide in his home in Tampa, Florida. Shortly thereafter, the NFL initiated a study on the correlations between concussions and depression. One year later, The United States Congress launched their first inquest into the disability program of NFL pensioners and decided that the league would have to improve their coverage.

The NFL has been slow to action on the subject of concussions and I wouldn’t doubt the topic has graced almost all of the CBA arbitrations between management and the Players Union. This will be a point of order in any new pension program and the pension program is at the top of the page at any of these discussions. What happens to the sport though? The banner of player protection seems to be carried higher by sports writers than fans. The Let-Them-Play mentality undoubtedly permeates the purist approach and it’s not unusual to see even the most compassionate fans speak protectively of their sport. I would expect that almost everyone’s livelihood comes with some kind of occupational hazard and a lot of people get paid less than a special teams gunner. Coal miners in Kentucky don’t have any misconceptions of what they’re walking into every morning.

Still, where is the silver bullet for this problem? Football is a violent sport and fans are going to protect their entertainment. There isn’t any one kind of helmet that can stop a concussion, although some do a better job than others. Studies show that even routine football hits can lead to a kind of aggregate trauma and everyone reacts differently to these types of physical stress. The issue is going to be hit hard in research and development, formal disclosures, attributed liability and post career treatment. I expect it to change the shape of the game as much as the shape of the helmets.