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Football season kicks off soon, and there’s an elephant on the field. Not the University of Alabama’s pachydermal mascot, alas — but a new study on the incidence of brain injury in football players.
The startling paper, published this morning in the journal BMJ, examined the brains of 235 of the 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. It found that at least one in four of those players — and, in all likelihood, many more than that — had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at their time of death.
CTE is an ugly disease. It’s a progressive, degenerative brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head. It can be debilitating in its advanced stages, with symptoms including memory loss, confusion, depression, erratic behavior, and personality changes.
Researchers have long linked CTE to the recurrent head trauma common in football and other contact sports. But this study offers one of the clearest estimates yet of just how widespreadthe disease is. It’s not a freak occurrence confined to an unlucky few — it’s a significant occupational hazard, akin to black lung disease in coal miners.
Federal regulators have intervened to protect coal miners and other people in hazardous jobs, of course — but they’ve stayed on the sidelines when it comes to sports. Football is an American institution, after all. And regulators have few obvious ways to make the game safer.
Last year, the Trump administration also advanced a claim that, in my mind, gets straight to the heart of the moral dilemma of being a football fan. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed formally excluding from standards enforcement hazards that are “inherent and inseparable from the core nature of a professional activity.” (That proposal has not been finalized yet.)
Is danger inherent to the “core nature” of football? And, if it is, how do fans reconcile their love of the sport with the substantial harm that it inflicts?
“Part of what makes football interesting is that it refuses to resolve itself morally,” the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman told Vox earlier this year. “It doesn’t let you land comfortably on one side or the other.”
Klosterman, who recently published a book about football, is one of these people who believes that danger is inherent to the sport: Remove it, he said, and the stakes diminish — the whole game gets less meaningful.
At the same time, football arguably does a lot of good, too: It creates shared rituals and civic pride; it gives millions of people a sense of belonging in an otherwise atomized world.
So where does that leave fans? Somewhere uncomfortable, I suppose. But we can draw a couple practical conclusions: Kids should not play tackle football. And both the NFL and college football programs should keep working to improve helmets and cut down on contact, especially in practices.
➨ Treat yourself to a PSL. Yep: It’s (somehow, already) that time again. Since Starbucks debuted the divisive seasonal beverage in 2003, it’s become “a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of ‘basic.’”
