Watching football through the lens of CTE
Difficult read considering Tuerk was 26 when he life ended.
February 7th, 2022 at 10:19 AM ^
It's a very violent game and continues to get more violent as players get bigger, stronger, faster.
February 7th, 2022 at 10:28 AM ^
New rules to protect players as well as new technologies to protect their brains provide hope that this dangerous game can continue to be played as responsibly as possible. It has and always will be a dangerous and violent sport. Fortunately, the compensation for professional football players is extremely high. They play this game voluntarily with full access to the knowledge of its dangers. (Previous generations of players were unfortunately not aware of these risks). We are fortunate to live in a country where we can choose which sports to play and which not to play.
February 7th, 2022 at 10:38 AM ^
Android sports are probably in our future. The coaching staff will include programmers and engineers.
(I say this only half-jokingly).
February 7th, 2022 at 10:41 AM ^
If we're looking far into the future I feel that this is actually inevitable. Maybe not for football specifically, but perhaps for "sports" that don't exist yet.
February 7th, 2022 at 11:13 AM ^
Some might prefer OS/2 sports.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:15 PM ^
Or, as the French say, "Wii".
February 7th, 2022 at 3:24 PM ^
This will happen too late for me. I would have been a hell of a Robot Coordinator.
February 7th, 2022 at 5:45 PM ^
I used to love, love, love, that game in HS.
February 7th, 2022 at 6:31 PM ^
We used to have team Cyberball tournaments at the bowling alley, with money on the line. Good times, amazing game!
February 7th, 2022 at 11:10 AM ^
I think the argument that NFL football is justified, because players are being well compensated for known risks, is reasonable. At least now that the NFL isn't concealing concussion studies anymore.
However, the argument is harder to make for college, where the compensation is less (unless you're a 5* going to Texas A&M I guess), and the majority of the players won't reach the NFL.
It's really hard to make for high school, where an even smaller percentage of players will ever be compensated for the risk they're taking. I guess you have to make the argument that high school football is less dangerous than NFL football, because everybody's slower and weaker at that level?
February 7th, 2022 at 2:48 PM ^
Was in a first hand conversation amongst buddies 10 or so years ago, with a then-current NFL player included. He confirmed unless you're a big, BIG time player, he and his teammates were strongly encouraged to play through injuries, including concussions. Verbatim, he said trainers asked him, "Do you really think you have a concussion, or just a headache? Do you want us to tell the Coaching staff you're unable to play?"
With the small roster size and pressure to "be okay"... I don't believe for a second the NFL gives two shits about player safety. They're only concerned with the public's perception that they care about player safety.
February 7th, 2022 at 3:35 PM ^
I'm sure you're right, but even if they did adhere to concussion protocols I think the hit after hit is still damaging without a major injury occurring as well.
February 7th, 2022 at 3:25 PM ^
We will need more studies to see what the effect on high school and college players is.
I think we will find that the people with the biggest problems are the ones taking small head hits over and over and over again (linemen) vs guys who get absolutely clocked once in a blue moon (receivers)
February 7th, 2022 at 11:38 AM ^
The way the country is trending, over time football will become an endangered sport, due to the dangers of the sports to the athletes health. My sister and Sister-in-laws would never let their sons play football, they all had to play soccer. I think this is the trend with a lot of Today's parents.
February 7th, 2022 at 11:59 AM ^
In certain communities and parts of the country you're absolutely right. There are already plenty of high schools across the country that had to shut down their football programs because there simply was not enough players to field a team. But there are other parts of the country, namely Texas and the South, where I don't think the sport will ever be endangered. Its too ingrained into the culture and it's become part of daily life. Its what many small communities rally around, especially for high school football if there isn't a professional or good college team nearby.
I don't say that in a derogatory way, but I think there will still be parts of the country where the sport will continue to flourish even as the potential risks become more apparent.
You're also going to have plenty of situations where kids and parents are well aware of the dangers but the kid is still going to play anyway. Maybe because football is their son's "way out." The way out to a free education, a possibly incredibly lucrative and well-paying career, etc. Sometimes the pros that come along with playing just outweigh the cons, or they are just accepted risks.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:32 PM ^
It's also great fun. And I say that as someone who quit when it started hurting to get hit.
Everything is a risk in life. I think football will always be an acceptable risk to enough people it'll be played.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:59 PM ^
Agreed. I do believe there will be a noticeable drop in the coming years of kids who play, but not to the extent that I'd say college or professional teams are in danger of not being able to field teams.
If you're willing to accept the risks of playing and will make an active effort to play it as safely as you can (i.e. don't turn yourself into a human missile and try to hurt someone), then I say go ahead and play.
February 7th, 2022 at 1:16 PM ^
As a side note, while CTE rates are higher among football players than soccer, the latter is associated with a pretty high risk of CTE as well.
February 7th, 2022 at 3:28 PM ^
This is rather surprising, but yeah, apparently all of the headers aren't good for you. You wouldn't think a soccer ball is hard enough to do damage, but I think they are finding that small head collisions repeated over and over and over again are not healthy.
So, put your kids into baseball or basketball. Very few head injuries in either of those sports.
February 7th, 2022 at 7:12 PM ^
I'm not a soccer guy so feel free to correct my impression here but it seems like headers could be forbidden from soccer without much impact on the game
February 7th, 2022 at 11:46 AM ^
College players aren't professional athletes. You conveniently skip over that part.
February 7th, 2022 at 11:59 AM ^
I remember some fairly knowledgeable person doing some back-of-the-envelope figuring, concluding that maybe one in 200,000 kids who wanted to make it to the NFL did. Yes, if you make it you are compensated well (adequately? commensurately? who knows). But--ballpark or no--that's a lot of potential uncompensated damage along the way. And--too often--it's not just that individual who suffers, but families, etc.
I watch, of course, but I continue to doubt.
February 7th, 2022 at 4:29 PM ^
I’m not sure if this is a response to me as there are a lot of comments on here, but I didn’t say anything about college athletes. The article was about a professional football player. Tragically many professional football players have developed CTE. College football is another discussion, not one that I started. Freedom is a beautiful thing.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:27 PM ^
I'm not sure that kids who grow up in communities who worship football, who are so successful that they are worshipped and easy paths set before them due to football talent, really internalize full knowledge of the dangers, as you assert. I'd say that's more of a PR position, or grossly naive at best. It reminds me of Bill O'Rielly coming on after a mass shooting and saying it's the price of freedom.
On TV they see healthy players with diamonds, sports cars, beautiful girlfriends. They're visited by coaches who portray one single glorious side of the sport. When do they ever see the Junior Seaus of the world or hear from those families? Remember when Junior Seaus daughter wasn't even allowed to speak at his HOF induction? These kids are at the most impressionable periods of their lives, and they are turned into Gods because they can play football. So, how is it they are proceeding with full knowledge of the risks?
February 7th, 2022 at 11:23 AM ^
i absolutely love football. i played (mediocre-ly) from the time i was 7 until i graduated high school. i played (okay, practiced, mostly) against a number of players that ended up playing d1, and even in the nfl. i still find a visceral joy in the speed and power and hitting that i just don't experience watching any other sport.
now, though?
i find it almost impossible to watch college football without at least some consicous awareness that the players are constantly causing some measure of long-term damage to their brains.
February 7th, 2022 at 4:07 PM ^
The hit from the PSU game in 1997 has a completely different reaction from me than in 1997 and even then it was very, "OMG, I think one may have died but daaaang that was a hell of a hit"
not I can barely watch it
February 7th, 2022 at 11:33 AM ^
If you watch clips of games from the 50's & 60's you'll quickly notice two things:
1. Clothsline tackles were not only acceptable, they were encouraged
2. Players almost never led with their helmets when tackling. "See what you're hitting" was the mantra.
Now look at any clip from the mid 80's until today and you'll notice it's almost completely reversed. You NEVER see a clothsline tackle and players leading with their helmet, while penalized sometimes, is almost the rule, not the exeption. Football, at all levels, HAS TO get the players to stop leading with their helmets (making themselves human missles) just as they effectively stopped clothsline tackles.
I honestly think the future of the game depends on it.
February 7th, 2022 at 11:51 AM ^
I honestly think that, barring some major technical breakthrough -- which is always possible -- football will gradually fall out of favor due to ever-increasing health risks. I could see a point where players with CTE begin suing schools for the damages incurred, and some schools eventually deciding it's not worth the physical and financial risks. Most college programs don't make huge profits off of football anyway. We already see that fewer kids are willing to play football at junior levels, in part because parents don't want them to. No reason to think these trend will slow; it will probably speed up. I'd never let a kid play football.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:05 PM ^
Joe Paterno (this is not a comment on him as a person) said in the mid-90's that if you want to take the dangerous hits out of the game then the best way to do it would be to get rid of the facemask. We all know this will never happen of course but his point was that as helmets improved for safety purposes they then transitioned from being a protective measure to an offensive weapon. People don't fear being hurt on a single play anymore because the current helmet provides a false sense of security. And as we've learned in other facets of life, Americans don't exactly like paying for prevention
February 7th, 2022 at 12:38 PM ^
100%. paterno can rot in hell, right next to bo, but he was absolutely right about that. no facemask, no head shots. the paradox is that the plastic shell helmet has possibly caused as many injuries as it has prevented.
February 7th, 2022 at 3:31 PM ^
Some people say the same about boxing gloves. By lessening the blow and allowing guys to beat the pulp out of each other you increase injuries. In bare-knuckle sports, one solid blow to the head usually ends the fight. The single punch does more damage, but in the end, it does less damage because you don't absorb tons of head shots in one match.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:41 PM ^
I generally agree.
The momentum to deal with CTE has slowed. There was a big stink about it a few years ago, and there were some rule changes and some legal and financial settlements, and things have kind of plateaued. Most high schools that had football programs still have them, and the few that are dropping are probably mostly doing so for non-safety reasons.
But, like the NCAA punting on NIL until the law got involved, football needs to stay ahead of things, or eventually you may find a legislature or a court that, with shocking casualness, releases a law or a ruling that effectively bans certain aspects of football. It is absolutely a risk, whether we think it should happen or not.
Your specific issue, leading with the head, is important. And that's why, while I get annoyed with arbitrary and hard-to-evaluate targeting rules, I don't believe they should be suspended. I think they should actually be expanded.
Rulemakers must make the consequence for leading with the head so severe that it is in the competitive interest of the coaches and players for players not to do so. So if a defender leads with his head for a tackle, and he doesn't make contact with it and no call is made, his teammates and coaches are incensed that he did something reckless that could cost the team. Not unlike a dumb pass that is dropped by a linebacker or a ballcarrier carelessly holding the ball out with one hand and fumbling it out of bounds.
I also think an important step here is to fully equip players with sensors that judge things like impact forces on different parts of the body. Every helmet and every shoulder pad set. Build a data set that comprehensively describes what events on the field are dangerous, including currently routine events like the collision between OL and DL. Correlate that data with known injuries--maybe they'll find that there's an impact level at which potential head injuries are common, and learn what kinds of plays cause them, and even catch them in real time and intervene before players have a chance to aggravate incipient injuries.
The NFL is currently too big to evaporate, but they sure could start investing some money in this.
A sensor for ball location, too, while they're at it.
February 7th, 2022 at 2:48 PM ^
Yes. All too often -- almost inevitably, honestly -- the announcers on TV minimize the dangers, or say, "he didn't mean to hit him in the head, but the offensive player ducked at the last moment," or "if you look closely, he mainly hit him in the shoulder," or whatever.
I always want to yell, "it doesn't matter!" It's the act of lowering your head to tackle that needs to be penalized. The fact that the defensive player was fortunate enough not to seriously hurt the offensive player is certainly a good thing -- but it doesn't have anything to do with the culpability of the defensive player.
February 7th, 2022 at 1:34 PM ^
To emphasize your point about leading with the helmet: watch how the tackling is done back in 1957—none of these tackles are done with the tackler leading with his head. It's old-form, boring tackling that doesn't seek to make the "big hit."
It was still a rough game with plenty of elbows and clotheslines, but the head isn't used as a primary battering ram. I'm convinced that's at least partially because the helmets only had a single bar, and if you led with your head your face would eventually take a beating.
February 7th, 2022 at 3:32 PM ^
I'm not sure CTE is caused strictly by players hitting with the helmet. Studies have shown a very high incidence among linemen, who aren't ever taking big shots to the head. It is the head contact happening on every play, over and over and over again that causes them problems.
February 7th, 2022 at 11:50 AM ^
In light of CTE it always confused me why players and even announcers would celebrate big hits. Even if they aren’t helmet to helmet, full speed collisions aren’t good for the brain.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:14 PM ^
People knew that Coliseum fighting in ancient Rome would literally lead to death but it happened, and to the cheers of thousands.
Just been going on a long time, part of DNA.
But if only chess existed, then maybe we'd go so nuts over that. Maybe you drop the loser into a dunk tank so our physical joy is satisfied without CTE or death.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:18 PM ^
Adrenaline rush, my friend. Something about making a big play in front of the fans that can and probably should get most anyone jacked up about it.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:08 PM ^
its curious that you don't hear as much about CTE from hockey. with the league's push to make enforcers extinct, there is less on ice accountability, which generally leads to more blindside hits and cheap shots. the NHL has stepped up issuing fines, but when a coach gets fined more for questioning officials in a press conference than a player can get fined for anything they do on the ice..... player fines aren't that much of a deterrent.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:33 PM ^
I think one issue that football has is that a lot of the CTE stories coming out don't seem to be players that were on the receiving end of flashy hits, but players in positions like center (Max Tuerk specifically here) that endured collisions on virtually every snap. Hard to imagine eliminating those kind of hits without fundamentally changing the game. There are no doubt violent collisions in hockey, but they don't really experience the volume of collisions that many positions in football do.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:42 PM ^
You do hear about it, though. That's a big part of why enforcers have continued to diminish; some of the most prominent examples of CTE in hockey have been fighters.
February 7th, 2022 at 12:49 PM ^
scott stevens can burn in hell right next to paterno.
February 7th, 2022 at 1:51 PM ^
This is an interesting discussion concerning football and its risks. However, if we think football is questionable, how do we see boxing? In football, head injury is a risk that we try to mitigate. In boxing CAUSING a head injury (a "knock out") is the OBJECT.
February 7th, 2022 at 2:45 PM ^
Are you not entertained?
February 7th, 2022 at 4:01 PM ^
My son played from 5th grade through high school, O-line and D-line. In college he switched to rugby, played 8th man. 2 observations:
1) he took a lot less punishment from rugby than from football, due to the rules of tackling and (he and I both think) because they don’t have the illusion that a helmet and other “protective” gear is going to protect them from injury. No one is going to use their body as a missile when they’ll get badly hurt doing it, and tossed from the game as well.
2) Now in his early 30s, he’s suffering from depression, when from childhood through mid-20s he was happy and full of positive energy. I often wonder how much of that is due to playing tackle football at a young age. Or even at a high school level.
Unrelated to the observations about my son, I also observed high school coaches continuing to play kids who were obviously concussed. One of those kids still has debilitating headaches 15 years later.
I love watching football. I’m not convinced it’s worth the cost.
February 7th, 2022 at 6:36 PM ^
As someone who lived in rugby land for a bit, this came up a lot when american football was brought up. You're definitely going to get bruises and scrapes but people aren't as reckless to themselves or others.
Sorry to hear about your kid, hope he gets better!
February 7th, 2022 at 7:31 PM ^
I love watching football. I’m not convinced it’s worth the cost.
Same. I played and loved it. My kids played. My grandchildren won't and I'm happy about that.