Last Sunday, quarterback Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl — with his highlight pass being a two-point conversion — when the Denver Broncos upset the Carolina Panthers 24-10. As the confetti floated down and Manning adjusted his pre-made Super Bowl championship hat, a thought kept creeping into my head: what was really being put into these football games?
This thought didn’t appear out of thin air — four days before I read an article that discussed how magnetic NFL quarterback Ken Stabler had suffered high Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repetitive head trauma. A week before that, I read about how former Giants safety Tyler Sash’s brain had also been diagnosed with CTE, which had “advanced to a stage rarely seen in someone his age.”
As these stories lingered in my head, the typical enjoyment I got from watching football games slowly began to fade away. Football became too real and too quick. C.J Anderson, Josh Norman, Cam Newton and Peyton Manning were no longer football players dressed in colorful uniforms and wearing branded helmets — they became human beings on a field, risking the prospect of a long-lived and healthy life for the sake of others’ entertainment. I realized that when playing this sport, these players are not only risking physical harm, as any athlete in any sport does, but they are also risking their brains.
According to the NFL, players sustained “a total of 271 concussions across preseason and regular-season games and practice in 2015.” This is actually an increase from previous years of approximately 31.6 percent. Helmet-to-helmet contact accounted for about 92 of the 182 regular-season concussion ― a rate of 50.4 percent. What is most disturbing to me, though, is the fact that some players are willing to hide concussion symptoms. Some of these players, including Philadelphia safety Malcolm Jenkins, have admitted to doing this in order to avoid leaving the game and showing any signs of weakness.
The NFL hasn’t completely dismissed this threatening reality of the sport. In fact, it has taken important measures in recent years to detect concussions on the field at the moment that they occur, mainly by putting independent neuro-trauma consultants on the sideline. These measures have led to a huge increase of diagnoses of concussions in the field, which officials like to attribute to an increase of surveillance instead of actual instances.
Additionally, the NFL has adopted a total of 39 rule changes aimed at improving the safety of its players. These include moving kickoffs from the 30-yard line to the 35-yard line to increase touchbacks. The changes serve not just as evidence that the NFL is being responsive to these revealing findings about former football players, but also that the safety of the sport has a good chance to improve. The NFL needs to realize that football is not just a sport that generates a lot of money, but one that does so at the drastically high risk of brain damage to its players.
In light of these new findings, many opponents of the game have surfaced. Critics have called for a boycott of the game, calling it “despicable” and un-American. However, I believe this is not the response we should take or how we should treat one of this nation’s biggest sports. Football, as Roger Goodell likes to say, shouldn’t wait for science. The NFL needs to invest in new safety measures and technology in order to protect those who generate most of the sport’s value: the players.
These types of safety measures and technologies should be spearheaded by the people who are best equipped to find the best results. Specifically, the NFL should work closely with Dr. Bennet Omalu, who discovered CTE in 2005, and Dr. Robert Stern at the Boston University, another doctor leading the efforts to understand the connection between concussions and CTE.
It's difficult to enjoy a sport when one knows the players are risking their own long-term health and safety for the sake of our entertainment. If we want fans to truly appreciate the beauty and value of football, while at the same time lowering the risks of brain damage to players, the NFL needs to take the necessary measures to ensure a safe, low-risk version of the sport.
Carlos Lopez is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He may be reached at c.lopez@cavalierdaily.com.
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