THE FUTURE
OF FOOTBALL AND ITS
PLACE IN OUR
CULTURE
THE GAME CAN
BE MADE SAFER BUT AT WHAT EXPENSE?
RATIONAL ARGUMENTS
VERSUS OVERBLOWN RHETORIC
TAGS: NFL HEAD TRAUMA, NFLPA CLASS ACTION SUITS,
NATURE OF THE GAME,
NFL
CONCUSSIONS AND SUB-CONCUSSIVE TRAUMA,
CTE,
NEURAPOTHY, LONG TERM HEALTH EFFECTS,
BRAIN
EFFECTS BEGIN BEFORE A PLAYER GOES “PRO”,
NEUROPATHOLOGY
AND HISTIOPATHIC STUDIES,
RISKS
AND REWARDS,
THE
LURE OF MONEY
(Friday January 31, 2014 “Football
Boulevard”, NYC) The National Football
league is a brand worth upwards of $9 billion dollars annually. It is more profitable than many Fortune 500
companies but remains a privately held entity.
Each of its 32 teams is private owned franchises except for the Green
Bay Packers who are partially supported by the public, most notably by their
fan base in Green Bay Wisconsin. The NFL
brand transcends our national borders and has been rapidly gaining popularity
internationally in countries from England to Japan. There has been much discussion at the NFL
headquarters just a few blocks from here about expanding the League by fielding
foreign teams.
In every sense the NFL has
been a juggernaut generating wider and wider appeal, raking in greater revenue
and marketing merchandise, owning a cable television network while standing
atop the “sports-ertainment” landscape as the penultimate professional
spectator sport in America. The raw
numbers speak for themselves. Over the
last 25 years the NFL and its franchised teams have enjoyed revenues that have
grown at a near exponential rate of growth.
As far as the “economy” of the NFL is concerned, it is solid, solvent
and a true powerhouse wielding tremendous influence throughout American
athletics at every level. It is a
business model that is difficult to replicate.
Professional football is a worldwide phenomenon that has left all the
other professional sports leagues in the United States in the dust. However, it
is not without a budding strain of controversy.
HEADS AND SHOULDERS ABOVE THE REST
The collegiate footballer who
actually earns a slot on a NFL team roster is a rare, elite athlete. These young men possess athletic prowess, a
combination of size, speed, strength and overall athleticism that elevates them
to breathe the rarified air of the professional footballer. Approximately one tenth of one percent of the
collegiate footballers playing on FBS teams will even have a chance of making
an NFL squad. The completion is fierce
as it is brutal. Football has
historically celebrated the type of controlled violence that can simultaneously
mesmerize and terrify. The speed of the
game is not fully captured by television cameras, the forces of impacts,
tackles, blocking and rushing can only be appreciated from the sidelines.
The professional football
player today has been trained, coached, educated and conditioned in such a way
that would have seemed impossible even 30 years ago. Most of those pros who played in the 1960’s
and 1970’s would likely not even make a “practice squad’ in today’s NFL. The fact of the matter is that significant
advances in physiology, nutrition, strength and speed training, kinesiology and
sports medicine have helped create with a young man with a hefty dose of
“God-given” ability into the elite athletes we watch on Sundays in the
Fall. Of course virtually every NFLer
has played college football most at the highest level of competition. But their road to professional fame, fortune
and glory begins long before they ever step foot on a college campus or receive
a recruiting letter from a big time collegiate powerhouse.
DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH
In today’s world once a young
boy demonstrates a particularly high degree of athletic prowess, what will be a
years long process of conditioning and training begins. Boys at increasingly younger and younger ages
are now being identified by some parents and coaches and at the still tender
ages of 7, 8 and 9 years old are already being groomed to climb the steep
ladder to the next level of competition.
This practice that has evolved into something of a cottage industry with
highly specialized coaching, position clinics and conditioning programs has
raised concerns about the long term health effects of such raising a young
child in such a regimented structure.
Certainly parents of young football players are not alone in this
practice. Some of our “amateur” Olympic
athletes such a female gymnasts begin rigorous years of training hoping to gain
a highly coveted spot on the Olympic team.
Several longitudinal medical studies have yielded troubling results
ascribed to this process. Many of these
young female gymnasts suffer developmental problems from chronic
musculoskeletal conditions to the delayed onset of menses. Some young amateur
athletes, reach their peak performance level and have seen their best days
before their sweet sixteenth birthday.
We are familiar with some of the young faces with beaming smiles
adorning boxes of Wheaties only to drift away into obscurity often plagued with
long term health issues.
But those youngsters who
participate in Olympic events represent a miniscule number compared to
youngsters who participate in organized sports from an early age, through high
school and hopefully into college. Not
every child has access to gymnastic centers, swimming pools with high diving
boards or ice skating rinks. But, most
kids have Pop Warner football leagues, basketball courts, Little League
baseball fields and playgrounds in their neighborhoods where they first begin
to develop the skills that may vault them into the stratosphere of their chosen
sport. In far too many cases the parents
are to blame. They see a gifted child as
a ticket to glory that may have eluded them when they were younger (and
probably less gifted) or simply as a potential “meal ticket” once their child
“goes pro”.
Professional football is
unique in some important ways from other professional Leagues. While a major league baseball team can draft
an athlete right out of high school and the NBA is allowing younger and younger
athletes to declare to go pro, the NFL still maintains a strict policy
regarding the eligibility of an athlete to enter the annual draft. This makes sense since football is a vastly
different sport requiring a unique skill set and the ranks of collegiate
football players are akin to a “farm system”.
Major League baseball operates a farm league in which they develop
players at a well-paced, well-structured manner. The NFL relies on the “Big Time” collegiate
football programs to groom and prepare their prospects. This arrangement works to the NFL’s advantage
while often leaving a long trail of broken dreams and broken bodies throughout
the NCAA sanctioned university and college ranks.
OUR FOOTBALL CULTURE
Football long ago surpassed
baseball as our “national pastime”.
Baseball, that sedate, comparatively leisurely game lost its mass appeal
as our culture became more in-your-face, less respectful, and semi-addicted to
violence of every sort. The game itself
has changed as well. Many innovations
designed by famous coaches from the seventies and eighties forever altered the
way the game is played. Highly potent
offenses featuring the forward pass and skilled runs from scrimmage have been
designed causing defensive schemes to adjust accordingly. Many if not all of these components of the
game as it is played today have demanded more and more of the young men who
play it. Every Sunday during the season
the audiences are treated to feats of such athleticism that sometimes a series
appears more like an acrobatic display than a football game. Each yard gained is hard fought; each
receiver blanketed by man or zone coverage while the big men in the trenches
engage in gladiatorial battle.
As the game evolved so too did
have the athletes and equipment. In an
odd twist indicative of the “Laws of Unintended Consequences” as the athletes
became better conditioned, bigger, stronger, faster, more nimble yet powerful
and as the equipment provided more advanced levels of protection, the game
actually became more dangerous. When an NFLer at 6 feet 3 inches weighing 250
pounds of well-developed muscle who can run a forty yard dash in 4.5 seconds clad
in the protective padding and helmet that constitutes his full battle regalia
sets his sights on a receiver coming across the middle, the collision can be
brain rattlingly ferocious. And, with increasing frequency they are just
that: concussion causing collisions that can leave both receiver and defender
dazed, confused and worse for the wear.
But that is a big part of the
attraction; watching men do battle on the gridiron has an almost primal appeal
and the harder the hits, the more crushing the tackle or goal line stand, the
more we cheer and have another beer.
However now, as more and more former NFLers are coming forward about their
post playing careers health, some very unsettling developments are causing
greater concern in the NFL and NCAA communities as well as on the Pop Warner
Junior League and high school levels. As
the evidence is mounting regarding the long term effects of playing football on
the cognitive and motor functions of ex-players and degenerative processes such
as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease and, perhaps most disturbingly, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). The focus on chronic degenerative,
progressive, neurological diseases has the NFL, the NFL Players Union, current
and former players, their families and lawyers on all sides of the debate each
utilizing medical science data that supports their respective positions. As of
June 1, 2013, there are more than 4,800 named player-plaintiffs in the 242 concussion-related
lawsuits. Including the players’ spouses, there are more than 5,800 plaintiffs,
total. There has already been a $725 million settlement for the plaintiffs –
the players and their families – but none of the parties are satisfied and
neither of them sees this settlement as the end of litigation.
WHAT DID THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT?
Implicit in the $725 million
payout is a de facto acknowledgment
that the NFL was aware for many years that there is a direct correlation between
playing professional football and neurologic disorders later in life. Some
legal observers have equated this situation with the successful litigation of
“Big Tobacco” wherein scores of former smokers sued the cigarette companies for
not fully disclosing the array of health problems related to smoking. Those cases were assembled into several huge
class action suits and to this day the tobacco companies are paying for
“damages”. It seems more than a bit
disingenuous if not hypocritical for life long smokers to blame the makers of
cigarettes for their health problems.
What is different about the
plaintiffs in the tobacco class action settlements and the plaintiffs
contentions in the NFL cases is that there were decades of accumulated
empirical medical and scientific data that proved overwhelmingly the
correlation of cigarette smoking and certain types of primary lung
malignancies, as well as malignant lesions of the lip, mouth and throat, in
addition to cardiovascular deficiencies.
Those CEO of the big tobacco companies were not only made aware of the
potential hazards of using their products but, despite such facts, the
irrefutable results of studies they themselves had underwritten, went as far as
to design specific marketing strategies to attract younger and younger smokers. All of
this condemning information was made public by the prosecuting attorneys and it
cast an entirely more ominous shadow over the entirety of subsequent legal
proceedings.
The big question now is what
did the NFL know about the long term effects of concussions and accumulated sub
concussive injuries and, when and how did they acquire such information?
At this point such questions remain largely
unanswered.
However the highly acclaimed
PBS investigative documentary series, “Frontline”, has established a
timeline
tracing the genesis of this debate back to 1994.
At that time 20 years ago, then NFL
Commissioner Paul Tagliabue was only able to admit to a potential problem with
concussions and he formed the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) committee to
study the issue.
START AT THE CENTER
The chronology of this debate
can be tracked back to the case of
Mike Webster,
the offensive Center of the Pittsburgh Steelers from their storied Super Bowl
winning teams of the late 1970’s. The All Pro Center’s career lasted 17 years.
According to his family and several doctors
who had treated Mr. Webster for a variety of injuries, ailments and symptoms,
within a dozen or so years of his retirement from the NFL he began to exhibit
signs of some form of neuropathy.
His
short term memory was failing; he had profound mood swings, difficulty
concentrating aside from the regular “garden variety” type of musculoskeletal
troubles that are accepted by former NLF’ers as a fact of life.
Webster’s behavior and symptoms increased as
did the concern of his family and doctors. At age 50 Mike Webster passed away
from a heart attack.
His autopsy, most
notably, the
neuro-histogical
examination of sections of his brain revealed troubling findings.
On microscopic evaluation of his brain
sections there were a pronounced number of areas that showed the presence of
residual proteins known to be a result of traumatic head injuries and closely
associated with other more common progressive brain diseases that typically
strike older people.
The proteins that
react to a head injury are quickly engulfed by surrounding normal cells if the
brain is healthy.
Obviously Webster’s
brain was anything near “healthy” and his autopsy began the efforts to
understand CTE and head injuries of all kinds. Today there are a number of
rigorous studies looking into traumatic brain injuries and the effects of
cumulative effects of concussions and sub-concussive trauma.
So preliminary finding may let the NFL “off
the hook”, if you will however, complicity culpability might be much closer to
home than has been previously thought.
HEADING FOR TROUBLE
Like several facets of this
debate about head injuries and football, the etiology and causative factors
being examined seem, in retrospect, to be so obvious that to realize that we
have thought otherwise for all these decades is in itself
counterintuitive. On so many levels the
debate reeks of convolution, ignorance and plain old-fashioned stupidity. The NFL, as sleazy in this regard as some
might see it has a good argument in their defense when considering the amount
of liability they carry.
By the time the rare athlete
that earns a slot on an NFL roster goes pro he has already sustained hundreds
if not thousands of significant sub-concussive blows and, perhaps several
concussions of a more serious nature. Again,
relying solely on incomplete preliminary data, it appears that the younger the
age a boy begins playing a full contact sport such as “tackle” football, the
higher the likelihood of him developing some form of neuropathy in the future. Parents of youngsters have had to sign
insurance waivers and other such documents permitting their sons to play
football at the Pop Warner level, in high school and in college. Injuries such as strains and sprains of
cartilage and ligaments, fractures and dislocations of bones and joints have
always been part of the game and are taken with a grain of salt particularly in
today when medical science has made non-invasive surgical repair of certain
injuries an out-patient procedure and rehabilitative modalities and techniques
have shortened the recovery time from months to weeks in many cases that just
years ago would have meant only a remote possibility of rehabbing sufficiently
to return to action in less than a year or more.
Given the tender age virtually
every professional football player was at the time of his first exposure to the
game as a participant, the premise that head trauma sustained only during his
NFL career has caused CTE or any other related neuropathology is simply
wrong. More accurately it can be
asserted that whatever head injuries he incurred as a pro were simply icing on
the cake of his already frequently shaken and rattled brain.
By the time a future NFLer is
identified, let’s say in high school, and is taken under the tutelage of a
coach or coaches, trainers, conditioners and the like, he has suffered any
number of head injuries. In the old days
such head injuries were commonly referred to as having your “bell rung” and,
the antidote often was a small gauze covered ampule of ammonia waved under the
nose of the stricken player. The ammonia
would suddenly rouse him but had no positive affect whatsoever on the
underlying problem; all the inhalation of ammonia did was wake him up. Anyone
who has ever strapped on the hip girdle, shoulder, hip, knee and thigh pads and
donned a helmet to play football as a youngster knows full well the feeling of
having his bell rung. It used to be all the player needed was to “shake it off”
and return to play. Now there are strict
concussion protocols that must be followed in college and the NFL after a
player has suffered an apparent head injury.
This debate has spawned other
debates such as what is the appropriate age for young boys to begin playing
tackle football? Many parents are
seeking a reasonable, informed answer but it may be up to a parent’s common
sense and their level of comfortability having a son participate in football as
the pre-high school level in particular.
Just as a child’s body continues to develop well into the late teen
years, the young skull bones and brain are not yet fully developed and
significant head trauma during these young years have the potential for doing
the most long term damage.
As is so often the case what
were meant as new generation protective padding and helmets the donning of
which was designed to decrease the severity of hits to the body and head have
become the culprits instead. The new rib
and back padding worn by quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and most
defensive backs have given the sense of false security. The better the equipment the more readily
prepared were players to deliver vicious blows and it propel themselves like
human projectiles at their targets.
Although sports medicine, equipment manufacturers and the ruggedness of
highly trained very powerful young players, the incidents of head injuries had
continue to escalate over the past 20 years.
The disturbing finding from postmortem studies of retired NFL’ers have
brought the League, their policies and practices under a level of scrutiny that is most
unappealing.
In recent years there have
been several suicides committed by high profile retired NFL’ers.
One,
Dave
Duerson, a defensive standout for the Chicago Bears intentionally shot
himself in the chest so that his intact brain could be examined by the doctors
and researchers laboring in this field.
Many more than the thousands who have signed on to several class action
suits naming the NFL as the perpetrator are legions more who suffer chronic
pain, degenerative joint diseases such as arthritis and all other manner of the
ailments and injuries that persist well beyond their playing days.
CHOICES, RISKS AND REWARDS
There are many very
dangerous,
hazardous professions in America many of which we give little or no thought
to as long as we can go about our daily business without undo interruption or inconvenience.
Among the occupations with the highest casualty rates as measured in acute
injury and chronic exposure to chemicals, toxins and environment causing long
term ailments are coal and ore miners, commercial fishermen, oil field/natural
gas refinery personnel, long-haul truck drivers, high steel walkers and many
more are typically legacy jobs; a coal miner likely had a dad and granddad,
uncles and cousins who mined before him or even with him.
The same can be said of urban firefighters,
police officers, and most of the other construction trades.
While these jobs are inherently dangerous
they pay well enough to raise a family but, the operative phrase here is “well
enough”.
A top draft pick from the
ranks of the NCAA collegiate “farm team” into the NFL in this modern day may
receive a signing bonus worth millions of dollars and that is before he’s ever
played a down in the NFL. The money in
professional sports particularly football is measured in astronomical numbers
difficult for your average person to get a grasp of. In two weeks hundreds of NFL
hopefuls will travel to Indianapolis Indiana for the NFL Combine; a sort of
athletic audition where young men can display their athleticism to coaches,
general managers and scouts representing all 32 NFL teams. The competition is always brutal. Each participant knows the odds and, if they
are concerned about the long term effects of their chosen profession they
certainly would not show up at The Combine.
But show up they do; by the
hundreds. Some from the big collegiate
powerhouses, others from smaller more obscure colleges and some come for a
second and third year because they so desperately want to make a team. It can take a long time for an athlete who
enjoyed notoriety on campus, TV and in the press to have it all end so
suddenly.
For every contender at The
Combine there are countless others who would sacrifice anything to be in the
position of being evaluated by the NFL teams.
Money is a huge determining factor in this equation; the average NFL
player lasts just under six years with some not able to make the squad after
just three campaigns. If one were to
take a poll among miners, truckers, fishermen, loggers or any of the other
hazardous jobs in America what they would or would not do for a few million
dollars with a large chunk of it up front, there would likely not be a man who’d
turn down the chance for a big payday.
Given all these variables it
is safe to surmise that the NFL and junior league, high school and college are
not going anywhere soon. They are here
to stay. No other organization worth an
annual revenue of 9 billion dollars is going to close their doors. The League has been tweaking and tuning some
of the rules of the game in order to reduce the risks to a vulnerable player
such as a QB or a receiver going across the middle defenselessly. Some of the rules have helped but the game
will not be the same if too many rules are established and enforced. This past season most of the most severe
collisions where a players head contacted another player’s thigh or knee, or a
tackler moving so quickly that he was unable to come to a full stop before he
leveled someone were incidental; they were not on purpose, they were the result
of very fast, big powerful men moving at a high rate of speed doing his job.
CURIOUS
It was curious to see a law
firm advertising on TV during the Super Bowl broadcasting the message that
anyone who has ever played
NCAA
football and suffered some head trauma to phone their 800 number.
This was just a matter of time.
With the ultra-powerful NFL trying to fight
off the various legal dogs nipping at their heels it was inevitable that some
law firm would not take the initiative to bring some of those same legal
mongrels to begin the pursuit of the NCAA.
Even at the big universities with successful football programs money, a
great deal of money is involved.
There
have been enough scandals over the last two decades to attest to this
fact.
Certainly the matter of
financially compensating college football players has been debated long and
hard with no signs of abating.
As unpaid
students not members of a labor union as the NFL players are, the legal path
ahead will be sloppy and slick.
Simply
the sheer numbers of former NCAA football players is orders of magnitude larger
than the entirety of current and retired NFLers. Having that particular commercial
air during the single greatest sporting event of the year was odd.
Perhaps the network opted to take the money
for a 30 second TV ad without the NFL being aware.
Anything is possible.
THE WAY FORWARD
President Barack Obama when
asked if he had a son would he allow him to play football, unlike most politicians,
gave an unambiguous answer stating that he would not allow his son to play
football. Parents all over the country
are asking this same question to themselves, discussions among spouses and
their potential football player have already shrunken the number of young boys
playing Pop Warner football. Some of
these discussions are not just general airings of the issue; many parents are
simply unsure how old their son should be before they allow him to participate.
Just as the growing juvenile musculoskeletal
system remains in the developmental phase for much of the teen years, the young
brain is still in the process of developing the full complement of neurons and axons,
dendrites and synapses, the intricate neural networking of the central nervous
system, well into the teen years.
Given
all the publicity these issues have attracted it is not a surprise that
enrollment
in Pop Warner leagues has dropped but that does not concern the NCAA or NFL
in any real way.
There is certainly no
paucity of willing youngsters to put on the pads and buckle their chinstrap and
entertain dreams of glory on the gridiron.
For their part, the NCAA and
NFL have funded initiatives aimed at teaching young boys the fundamentals of
the game in the manner most conducive to injury, especially head trauma. Coaches at all levels are being required by
their employers be they big time universities or high schools to instruct their
student athletes that the game of football itself can be played safely and need
not be about causing injury to the opponents.
This is well and good in theory but it remains to be seen how it
translates onto practice fields all across America this summer.
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Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
