What is to Become of Football?

83 more former NFL players add names to concussion lawsuit, so writes Sports Illustrated writer Scooby Axon, including ex-Redskins running back Clinton Portis.  There are now over 4500 former football players in that lawsuit.  As athleticism, size and stakes have grown, so have the severity, frequency and consequences of big hits.  So this ignominious list will no doubt balloon further, as much a legal quagmire as a sports tragedy.

Clinton Portis

  

I find out that PBS Frontline will air a program on October 8th this Fall - League of Denial:  The NFL's Concussion Crisis.  I've encouraged friends to mark their calendars.  Forbes has shown that the NFL is, by a large margin, the most valuable industry in big-time American sports.  So with its business monolith, how much will it truly deal with this concussion crisis.  I mean, seriously.  

The National Football League, a multibillion-dollar commercial juggernaut, presides over America’s indisputable national pastime. But the NFL is under assault as thousands of former players and a host of scientists claim the league has tried to cover up how football inflicted long-term brain injuries on many players.

What did the NFL know, and when did it know it? What’s the truth about the risks to players? What can be done?

All, weighty points and questions from FRONTLINE and ESPN Investigate the NFL’s Concussion Crisis.  One has to do with accountability.  Another has to with medicine.  The third is a collective call for sports strategy, emerging technology and societal wisdom to do something.

It's a colossal quandary, I'd say.  One, for which denying, ignoring, and minimizing are our primary responses.

You know how something takes you or grabs you.  For a while afterwards, what you think and what you see are shaded by that something.  So it was with me, when I watched Football High on PBS Frontline.  I was just flipping channels yesterday evening, after 9 o'clock, and even though I'm keen mostly on professional sports, this program effectively grabbed me.

These athletes were all young men.  Still developing, physically, mentally and socially.  Taken by the hopes, dreams and camaraderie of football.  Brutalized, too, in one way or another, by football.  Inculcated with an attack mentality vis-a-vis opponents.  Didn't I hear that this was just a game?    

How big a problem are high school football head injuries? 

At least 60,000 concussions occur every year on high school football fields. But now there's a new piece of the story: Researchers' neurological tests are showing that young players who never reported symptoms of a concussion, but had taken sub-concussive hits, have suffered significant damage to their memories. As the season wore on, these players performed increasingly worse on cognitive tests.

I found this fact especially disturbing in an altogether disturbing story.  Every play in football is a hit, especially for the linemen on both sides of the ball.  Those players who work the trenches of the game and scrum for positioning.

It is for them that the cumulative impact of sub-concussive hits can be staggering:  Many more players are involved, many more hits are involved.  

What is to become of football, then?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD