I believe in American football you are not supposed to lower your head when you tackle. Forget the long-term effect of concussions; spearing head first can paralyze you instantly.
In college, you would get penalized for targeting and ejected from the game. In the NFL, it’s a personal foul for unnecessary roughness for leading with the crown of your helmet. Both have people on the sidelines that are supposed to enact “concussion protocols” whenever they suspect a head injury (lot of good that did Case Keenum last week). The NFL also promotes a “head’s up” tackling initiative to re-teach kids how to tackle so they see what they’re tackling instead of trying to blow up people.
As a matter of fact, they are more popular than ever and recently started touring again.
And a female rugby player has just died from a head injury. Concussion is suspected of being a contributory factor.
They’ve been telling players that for decades, mostly to prevent neck injuries; in practice all it means is that they’ll hit with the facemask and the forehead part of the helmet, which isn’t any better.
The thing that people are more or less ignoring with all the focus on concussions is that it’s NOT concussions that cause the majority of the problems. It’s the small, non-concussive impacts that accumulate over time and cause the issues. That’s why soccer players are at risk from heading the ball a lot- almost nobody gets concussions from heading the ball.
American football linemen and linebackers are at particular risk for these kinds of impacts, as they’re taught to break the other guy’s charge with their heads- bighorn sheep style. So literally every play in practice and in games, they accumulate another one of those little hits.
Common wisdom would have you think that Troy Aikman with his history of concussions would be at greater risk than say… Mark Stepnoski, but in reality, Stepnoski is probably at as high risk, or even more so, due to playing center rather than quarterback.
Another death, only 27:
And Ken Stabler:
Football greats Dwight Clark, Gale Sayers battle brain diseases
The thing is, it’s not concussions that are the real threat to most players. It’s what they call “subconcussive brain trauma”; i.e. those helmet-to-helmet hits that players make every single play, especially linemen and linebackersm that don’t even come close to being an actual concussion. Apparently these hits cause damage that accumulates over time and causes CTE, even if they never have a single concussion in their playing career.
That, I think is going to be the elephant in the room at some point. The NFL is making a lot of noise about concussions, because that’s something they can possibly manage through rule and equipment changes that don’t fundamentally change the game. They either don’t want to, or are afraid to address the real issue, which is that the essential way that the game is played today contributes to CTE. It sure seems like a smokescreen to me- let’s concentrate on concussions and big hits and look like we’re doing something, while letting the real damaging stuff continue as before, business as usual.
Subconcussive brain trauma can’t be eliminated without eliminating the sport itself, because it can(and does) happen even if there is no direct contact to the head itself. A simple tackle can cause the head to jerk violently enough for it to happen.
And in football, those subconcussive impacts happen over and over and over again in the course of a single game. And add up over time.
Damn straight. While I doubt my son will have any interest in playing tackle football - he’s more the artistic type - if he did, there’s no way in hell I’d sign whatever waiver they require to let him play.
And re the NFL players, sure, they make a lot of money IF they have a long career, or did well enough at a skill position over a shorter time. But how can any amount of cash compensate for your brain going irrevocably haywire?
Not to you or me, but there are still people who want to be professional wrestlers, and that’s not even a real sport.
Obviously, there probably isn’t another sport that has the same rate of sunconcussive hits, but I wonder if any other leagues are sweating too. That might draw things out even more.
The sport may be able to reduce concussions by changing the way bodies collide. Institute a penalty ‘head high’ tackle much as exists in Rugby Union or League. In those games if a tackle is completed by grabbing the head or neck, a penalty is given and the offending player will be referred to a judiciary where they can and often are suspended for many games. Even in junior games they are serious about good tackling form. Rugby League can be a rough game but I never got seriously hurt playing it because even as kids we were taught and taught and taught to tackle at the waist or legs.
The latest brain study examined 111 former NFL players. Only one didn’t have CTE.
Note however that:
I have no doubt that playing football puts one’s brain at risk, and it wouldn’t bother me if the sport was drastically changed or even banned.
That said, I wonder what the incidence of CTE-associated changes is in the general population, and what the outcome would be for a study where pathologists were blinded as to the source of the brains they examined (or if they were told that the brains were from football players when they weren’t). I am not a neuropathologist, but how much subjective interpretation is involved in these studies?
I haven’t seen this study in detail, but I have seen some results where even to a layperson it’s obvious there is something amiss when the brain of a person is compared to a non-damaged brain so in at least some cases the difference is dramatic and not something to be argued.
But that’s a good point - were all the damaged brains in this study that obvious, or were there some near-normal and requiring an expert to determine that there was damage?
Well, I’ve always said that if they wanted me to watch football, they’d have to change the rules to allow knives, clubs and 2’ lengths of chain…
And the place to start is with juveniles. Ban high school football and let Texas commit mass seppuku.
Yeah, it wasn’t even on the radar of risks that we were taking in the late 80s/early 90s. Back then it was pretty much assumed you’d get minor injuries- bruises, sprains, strains, etc… and the chances of getting injured more seriously were large, although not definite. And we all knew that we ran the very slight risk of being that one kid per year who had some sort of catastrophic neurological injury- either broken neck/paralysis or outright death.
But at no point did anyone say “Every hit does a tiny amount of brain damage that is cumulative. At some point it’ll become significant enough to cause symptoms if you play enough.” Instead it was deliberate instruction to hit with our heads- I recall getting my ass chewed (I was an offensive/defensive lineman) because the front of my helmet above my facemask wasn’t chewed up enough, which meant I wasn’t hitting with my head the “right” way.
Ultimately I was willing to take the risks I knew about, but I’m not so sure I’d have risked CTE knowing what we know in 2017.
Personally, I think that rule changes, and more importantly equipment changes could change the sport into something more akin to rugby, but keep most of the important parts of the sport. Essentially eliminating the ability to actually use one’s head as a weapon, and getting rid of face masks would go a long way toward preventing most head impacts.