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Brain Damage, the Super Bowl and Me

Brain Damage, the Super Bowl and Me

(Bloomberg View) -- NBC is televising the Super Bowl this year, and to the surprise of many, its best known sportscaster won’t be there. I am speaking of Bob Costas, who usually has a prominent role in the network’s high-profile sports events, notably the Olympics.

Costas, who is 65, has begun to wind down his duties, recently ceding the Olympics to Mike Tirico. But skipping the Super Bowl was not part of his long goodbye.

"I have long had ambivalent feelings about football, so at this point, it’s better to leave the hosting to those who are more enthusiastic about it,” he told Sports Business Daily. In the unlikely event that readers didn’t understand the source of his ambivalence, he spelled it out:

I have addressed the issue of football and its undeniable connection to brain trauma many times. Why? Because the evidence is overwhelming and the effects are often devastating. It’s the elephant in the stadium at every game whether others choose to acknowledge it or not. And it’s not going away.

Indeed it’s not. The degenerative brain disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy is now top of mind for everyone who has an interest in football, from television executives to parents to fans and players. Television ratings for National Football League games were down 9.7 percent this year after an 8 percent drop last year, and I’m convinced that a big part of the reason is that millions of fans are turning away from the game for the same reason as Costas.

During this year’s AFC championship game between the New England Patriots and Jacksonville Jaguars, the Pats’ star tight end, Rob Gronkowski, was subjected to a vicious helmet-on-helmet hit by the Jags’ Barry Church. A decade ago, the announcers would have marveled; now, as they watched Gronk stagger, they worried about whether his obvious concussion would force him out of the game. (It did.) Fans like me looked away guiltily.

Meanwhile, scientists are racing to find a way to diagnose the disease, which causes severe mood swings, uncontrollable anger, loss of memory and sometimes suicide. (Currently, it can only be detected after someone has died and his brain sliced open.) Lawsuits continued to be filed against the National Collegiate Athletic Association, universities and even some high schools by former football players who say they were never informed about the game’s effect on the brain.

And then there are the parents, many of whom simply won’t allow their children to play. According to Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program, the number of kids between 13 and 17 playing football has dropped from 2.6 million in 2008 to 1.9 million in 2016.

Farrey dropped this statistic during a conference the Aspen Institute held in Washington last Thursday. A former ESPN journalist, Farrey has been focusing on problems in youth sports. In the case of football, the biggest problem for kids is the possibility of brain disease later in life. Research shows that professional players who played tackle football prior to high school have a higher incidence of CTE than those who didn’t.

This makes perfect sense. For all the attention paid to concussions, they are not the primary cause of CTE among football players. Instead, it is “subconcussive trauma,” the constant helmet butting that is so much a part of the game, especially among linemen and linebackers. The longer a player engages in head-to-head combat, the more likely he is to wind up with CTE.

According to Robert Cantu, co-founder of the CTE Center at the Boston University School of Medicine, kids who play tackle football before the age of 12 are risking more immediate consequences as well. Those are the years when the brain is maturing, when things like IQ and emotional makeup are forming.

“If you play tackle football before 12 years old, you have a higher chance of mood problems and of brain atrophy,” Cantu said.

The core question Farrey’s forum explored was the effect on the adult game if children were kept away from tackle football until they entered high school. The one high school coach on the panel, Tom Green of Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, said he feared that teenagers playing contact football for the first time would not know how to tackle safely.

That objection didn’t move the other panelists. Cantu reeled off a long list of NFL stalwarts who had never played youth football. Buddy Teevens, the head football coach at Dartmouth College, said that he no longer allows tackling during practice to minimize potential brain injuries. “The skill of tackling can be taught on inanimate objects,” he said.

Farrey is promoting the idea that flag football, in which a play ends when a defensive player pulls a small flag from the belt of the player with the ball, should be the sport football-minded kids play before high school. There was a general consensus that flag football could indeed help reduce brain problems later in life. Yet as a solution to the problem of adult football players winding up with CTE, you’d have to say it is pretty marginal.

And that’s what struck me most about the Aspen Institute forum. Almost none of the people who spoke dared to call for the most radical, yet most obvious solution to the CTE problem: putting an end to tackle football. Instead, they were trying to save the game.

There were two exceptions: Domonique Foxworth and Chris Borland, the only two men in the room who had played professional football. They were hard-liners. Foxworth, a former NFL cornerback who now writes for the website The Undefeated, was adamant that his son would never play football at any level.

Borland, an ex-linebacker who famously quit the San Francisco 49ers after his rookie season out of fear of what football might do to his brain, said he had no patience for those who worried about the consequences of flag football to the pipeline to colleges and the NFL.

“If the quality wanes, so be it,” he said. “Our goal is to get kids through their youth with no cognitive deficits. Who cares what it does to the pipeline? This is a public health issue.”

Flag football is a fine idea. It would help kids who never play football past high school. But it’s no silver bullet. It’s still hard to envision how football can be played at the college and professional level without the possibility of inflicting brain damage. How many people would travel to Minneapolis on Sunday to watch the Patriots play the Philadelphia Eagles in flag football?

Even if every youth league in the country stopped tackling, it would not end the curse of CTE among football players. Ultimately, if the NFL and the NCAA can’t find a solution, the game is likely to go the way of boxing, replaced by the sport parents are putting their kids into instead of football, soccer.

Me? I’m going to watch Sunday’s Super Bowl, as I always do. And then I’m going to look over at my 7-year-old son, and think: Never.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg View columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the co-author of "Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA."

  1. The NFL was sued by former players, but settled.

  2. In case you’re wondering, Dartmouth was this past season.

To contact the author of this story: Joe Nocera at jnocera3@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net.

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