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Recently, some disparate events have come together to make me increasingly uncomfortable with the impact on the brain from extended football playing. Given my position in life, with no role in the NFL or public health decision making processes, this manifests itself in reduced enjoyment when I’m watching football. I have a low-level thought in the background, when I’m not focused on this exciting play or that terrible call, that these players are beating up their own brains with every play and every impact. Each time a pulling tackle slams into a defensive end, the OT’s helmet is protecting his skull, but his brain is hitting the inside of his skull and causing some level of damage.
For some time, I have had similar feelings about the impact of football, but especially extended time in the NFL, on players’ joints and their bodies as a whole. Sports Illustrated has run several commendable articles over the years, profiling retired players who, at 45 or 50, have the bodies of a 65 year-old. That problem is only going to grow worse, despite advances in health care and increased retirement health care and pensions for NFL retirees, because average player weight at nearly all positions has increased dramatically over the decades–every collision is that much more violent. Force = mass x acceleration, after all.
In the last month, my attention has been drawn to the issue of brain health. The first trigger was a tremendous GQ article on efforts by a small group of scientists to study the brains of deceased NFL players, and their tussle with the NFL and its concussions committee (which was not headed by a neurologist for most of its existence…) regarding the scientists’ published conclusions. It is a very disheartening article, not only in the NFL’s fingers-in-the-ears level of denial, but the way in which it treats terribly ill former players. Unfortunately, that is not the first time the latter issue has come to light; a group of former players has waged a major campaign against both the NFL and the NFL Players Association, under former player (and recently deceased) Gene Upshaw’s direction, to obtain benefits that they believe are rightfully theirs–amounts that are miniscule compared to the revenues and profits generated every year in today’s NFL.
Among the more enlightening aspects of the article is the discussion of the impact on an offensive lineman’s brain on every single snap, as he initiates his block with his head. Up to this point, I have thought of concussions as the result of a blind-side hit that lays out a quarterback, or what happens when you run a crossing route across the middle of the field and Ronnie Lott or Steve Atwater arrives to separate you from the ball, or a situation where your head directly hits a hard object (see: Tim Tebow, below, in which the back of his head struck another player’s knee). Those dramatic impacts are frightening and have clear consequences: the player laid out on the field, perhaps unconscious, while the training staff attends to him and the broadcast cuts to commercial. Less evident are the accumulated impacts on every play for the offensive and defensive linemen, the linebackers, the safeties, the running backs. It seems that we are learning that playing long enough means those “routine” impacts will harm your brain as much as the clear-cut concussions.
A second trigger is the concussion suffered by Tim Tebow, reigning college player of the year, circumciser of Filipino youths and all-around good guy, who returned to the University of Florida for his senior year and another national title. Tebow is as high profile a player as one can find in the college game, so the discussion around Tebow’s concussion and when he should return to action has been illuminating and has brought a welcome focus on this issue in both mainstream sports media and the blogosphere. My take: Florida was perhaps aggressive bringing Tebow back for this week’s game against LSU, given that the brain is a mysterious object and it is best to err on the side of caution (although of course I have no medical expertise and no access to Tebow for medical review, caveat caveat).
Now Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author and New Yorker columnist, has written an article on the subject. I can only hope that the more attention is paid to these issues, the better the outcomes will be for players. Perhaps they will not be rushed back to playing too early, because of ignorance and a gladiator’s code. But better medical care and awareness cannot take away the cumulative impact of these collisions.
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Note: the video above is of Owen Schmitt, former West Virginia Mountaineer, current Seattle Seahawk. His willingness to lead with his head to clear running space reminds me of former Detroit Lion fullback Cory Schlesinger. I shudder to think how many concussions Schlesinger received–if it was merely one for every time he struck something so hard with his helmet that his forehead bled, a la Schmitt in the video, then he would have multiple concussions for his career.