Like Boxing, Football Causes Brain Damage - And Not Just In The Pros

Charles Pierce puts it out there:

Let us be very clear about this. It is impossible to play professional football for any length of time and not suffer brain damage. There will never be a helmet sturdy enough to spare you. There is no tweaking of the rulebook that will eliminate it. There is no fine, no penalty, severe enough to stop it. Play in the NFL and you will damage your brain. Period.

The Chris Henry story should not only scare NFL players. Pierce only focuses on the NFL, but what about all the other football players at every level going through thousands of contact drills and hits in games and practices?

Editing Pierce:

Playing professional football is intrinsically unhealthy. Every player knows it. Every coach knows it. Every fan and pundit ought to know it, but too often, they all pretend they don't. The NFL game is the great gravitational force at the center of the American sports industry. And it traffics in the destruction of the human body.

...There is nothing they can do about this, no matter how well-intentioned the league is about improving its workplace safety. The players are too strong, too big, and too fast for any rule changes, or improved safety equipment, ever to be fully adequate. It's about inertia and momentum, and not even Roger Goodell can suspend Isaac Newton.

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece last October went even further and compared football to dogfighting. Over six months ahead of the  sports pages, Gladwell exposed football's epidemic of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the chronic neurological disorder that results from brain trauma. Concussions are only the tip of a very large iceberg of brain damage that is being found in football players as young as high school.

Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

...in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

Read the whole Gladwell piece, which explores the links between football, boxing and dogfighting in a way that will not let you enjoy watching any of the three "sports" ever again.  The University of Wisconsin stopped participating in NCAA boxing after Charley Mohr's 1960 death - a story well-told in Doug Moe's terrific book Lords of the Ring.  Fifty years from now, will football be seen as a brutal anachronism, as boxing is largely seen now? Will universities still have teams and arrange much of their schedules around the games? Will parents still encourage sons to play as a means of earning an education at the literal expense of the health of their brains?

- Barry Orton