I would never let my child play contact football. The data is beyond clear that this sport causes irreparable life altering damage to the brain.
A lot of football players also suffer from mental health issues which, not to state the obvious, is likely not helped by banging your head all the time.
Respectfully, did you ever play tackle football? I ask because it's easy to look at something you're not familiar with & not see the value.
I played football in high school & college. Did I get hurt? Yes. But I also got hurt in other sports. My worst injury by far was in baseball (it required ~22 stitches & I couldn't see out of one eye for a while).
With every activity there's a tradeoff with risk.
Let's say we take tackle football off the table. We ban it from high schools, justifying it based on a study showing it produced 3.96 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions & 8.22 concussions per 10,000 (the highest for both).[1]
Okay, but then do we also ban woman's soccer?
It's the second highest, at 2.65 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions and 6.11 concussions per 10,000.
Or why let our children take any risk?
As a parent, I know I can't shelter my children. They have to take some risk. I let my children ride a bike, knowing full well there is a non-zero chance he could get by a car. We live in a big city & I let my pre-teen walk to meet a friend at a local burger joint for lunch, knowing full well there are bad people in the world who might do something untoward to him.
As for CTE specifically, I am very concerned about in the NFL. I have mixed feelings if I'm complicit in things by watching. As a diehard Bears fan, I found Dave Duerson's story heartbreaking. I'm supportive of the guardian helmets and hope the league starts to mandate them.
But the athletes in the NFL are not like amateurs. They are far bigger, far stronger, far faster. You can't take the CTE data from professional & extrapolate it to high school, etc.
I am surprised by the otherwise intelligent and caring parents I have met who had their elementary schoolers playing tackle football. I don't understand that decision at all.
Same here. When did Boston University start publishing about the CTE/football connection? 10 or 15 years ago? A couple I know, one with a public health degree from an Ivy, still let one of her kids play through all of that, and he played at the college level, too.
At the same time, a lot of parents (myself included) steered kids to other sports. That had another effect: there was even more pressure on parents who didn't care about CTE (and their kids) to get into football because kiddie leagues and especially high school teams were short of players. This happened to a friend whose two boys were strong hockey players, the coach at their school pushed them to try out for football the following season.
It's a deeply ingrained cultural tradition in a lot of places. It's an extremely hard sell to tell people to reject their traditions because of a relatively nebulous and uncertain danger. "I played football and I was fine" is a powerful argument.
CTE is not nebulous and uncertain. If it were not for "tradition", it would be considered child abuse to let them repeatedly slam their brains into their skulls.
It absolutely is when we're talking about humans evaluating risk in the context of an important part of their culture. The consequences come decades later and are far from certain.
Unless it’s actually banned below a certain age, what are you going to do if that’s what they want to do with their life?
If they don’t play and everyone else does, their development will be many years behind their peers which makes it unlikely they could play at a high level.
Yes, I think parents who see tackle football as an unsafe sport for their children are okay with not setting up their kids to play it at a high level.
And like any responsible parents, they presumably also don't just defer to what they're elementary aged children "want to do with their life" nor feed into the exaggeration that "everybody else" does anything at all, let alone play tackle football.
If you disagree with the dangers of the sport or are afraid of shaping your children's life choices for their own benefit, that's fine for you, but the rhetorical and snide way you presume others should share that view seems strange.
>And like any responsible parents, they presumably also don't just defer to what their elementary aged children "want to do with their life" nor feed into the exaggeration that "everybody else" does anything at all, let alone play tackle football.
This is the only wise position. Despite the common and misleading film tropes, children do not know themselves perfectly. Often the adults "holding them back" are doing those children a great favor.
Ah. Yes, I didn't pick that up in what you wrote. The seeming fatalism about how there's not much to do until or unless that happens eclipsed it. That seemed to be the focus of your comment and I could only re-contextualize it once you made it more clear her.
If they don't play a game which damages their brain when they are children, they won't be able to go into a career which damages their brain as an adult. Hmmm.
99.9% of high school football players aren't good enough to make a career out of it no matter what they do. Avoiding literal brain damage at the cost of forcing my child into a group they're virtually certain to be in anyway seems totally fine.
I tried contact football in 7th grade and only lasted a few practice sessions. I was shocked by what I saw; other kids throwing their bodies into each other as if they were just bags of meat, sometimes colliding head-on. The ferocity with which they did it seemed like a source of pride for them and there was this sense of one-upmanship on who could tackle the best. The whole thing felt insane to me and I backed out immediately. I was involved in other sports like baseball and basketball so I was used to competitiveness, but nothing on that level of disregard for safety.
I see you emphasize "this" sport. I think it is important to understand that American football happens to be studied & reported very rigorously at this point in time. I hope you recognize that players of many other contact sports suffer higher rates of neurodegenerative disease that the average person, like all sorts of combat sports, association football, hockey, etc...
To the NFL's credit, they have made rules and equipment changes to address this.
Equivalent of boxing and other combat sports, I suppose. Equipment that makes a sport almost requiring high speed collisions on every play safe doesn’t exist.
Not combat sports in general, but the combat sports where hitting the head of the opponent is a valid method for winning.
Boxing is by far the worst from this point of view, much worse than the combat sports that allow knock-outs but also have other alternatives, like MMA.
They should remove all padding and safety equipment, and institute severe penalties for any contact that could cause injury. The sport would probably become sane, but people like the violence, so this isn't going to happen.
~60% of rugby league players in one study were found to have CTE [0]. I bring this up because they don't wear pads, and I often hear that this makes them play safer (which might be true, but not to a meaningful degree; they still are not "safe").
FWIW, the NFL seemingly increasingly penalizes and expands the definition of unsafe hits every year. If people just liked the violence, BKB or power slap would be much more popular than they are.
Tackle football is basically the only sport my kids are not allowed to play. I don’t talk about it because I don’t want it to become something forbidden and therefore cool, but if they naturally find their way there and start getting pushy about it, it’s one of the few things I’m prepared to put my foot down about with no compromise.
If you're worried about head trauma, just consider that football is being widely studied right now. Look at the stats of basically any contact sport: wrestling, soccer, hockey, etc. There might be fewer studies, but they all show that the athletes are significantly more likely to develop these types of brain disorders.
A few years ago in my team of 12 -- we had 4 people in knee braces due to injuries from skiing. Given how little people actually ski, it seems like the sport with the highest injury rate (injuries per minute) -- at least based on my anecdotal data.
Skiing becomes incredibly dangerous once you get into like…your 40s and beyond unless you have been doing it pretty consistently your whole life. And even then it’s still very dangerous. High speeds, downhill, crashes are serious.
It’s a sport many people step away from for long periods of time (I.e. the muscles aren’t in shape and they're rusty) and it demands a lot unless you’re sticking to bunny slopes.
I'm interested and after work will look for video to better understand game action. But there's no way that shinty is "really fast" compared to ice hockey. Ice hockey players routinely move 15-20mph (~24-32km/h) and occasionally sprint upwards of 25mph (40km/h).
As someone who has had multiple concussions in other sports, the impacts in youth football are absolutely sufficient to cause concussions and more minor (but still cumulatively damaging) trauma. The fact that they're a repeated part of the game and not occasional incidents is very, very bad.
Requiring a child to play football should be actual child abuse, and even allowing it should be frowned upon the way that letting a child play with a blowtorch is.
So why ignore the part of their comment that answers your question:
The fact that they're a repeated part of the game and not occasional incidents is very, very bad.
I've gotten a concussion falling off an electric scooter. But slamming my head on the pavement isn't the point of riding an electric scooter, and if you're doing it regularly, you're doing something wrong. Unlike contact football.
Certainly, football isn't the only thing people do that leads to head injuries.
But if it is significantly worse than other sports, why not single it out as the worst thing ever?
Several sports increase the risk of CTE, but football has been more studied, I think because the incidence of obviously impared former players is higher than in other sports.
Because football is the most studied and has one of the highest (if not the actual highest) rates of head trauma per time played.
Rugby and ice hockey are certainly bad, but at least the impacts are generally limited to play near the ball/puck, whereas with American football, essentially every player has an impact on every play (WR blocking on rush plays, etc).
Due to the number of concussions per minute played. It could be worse (boxing), but it's not difficult to see how some sports are far riskier than others
Sure but the quality of gear you get in the NFL is much higher than what your typical kid gets. I regret the two years of football I played in high school.
It's well established that the effects of repeated head trauma are cumulative, with progressively longer healing periods, worse symptoms, etc. And that sub-concussive impacts also accumulate along with the concussive impacts.
From the article:
The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.
Alosco et al. (2017) – Age of First Exposure to Tackle Football and Later-Life Cognitive Impairment and Neuropsychiatric Symptoms (Translational Psychiatry)
[https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.197]
From the article: The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.
The real comparison study here would be to measure the other football codes (soccer, rugby, canadian, aussie rules, gaelic, etc) and see how that compares.
Especially recently, international contact sports have become quite aware of the brain issue and have moved a lot to change things. Even as an avid NFL fan [0], I am shocked at how violent things in rugby used to be [1]. Aussie rules hits are similarly gruesome.
But in the last few decades, the big hits are much more severely punished. If you watch any international events then you'll see just how seriously they take head trauma now. Red cards are being pulled for things that even 20 years ago would not be considered a highlight, just part of the game.
NZ is in quite the crisis these days over their All Blacks [2] and the near death of the rugby pipeline from schools to the professional level. Over there the cause is simply that mothers aren't allowing their children to play for fear of the head trauma.
If you could get studies for these other codes, then you could, I imagine, get a nice neat graph illustrating the relationship between head trauma and CTE, using the many codes as 'trials' in a way.
Here's a link to the study.[1] Since CTE can only be diagnosed by slicing up the brain, and former NFL players only tend to donate their brains to study if they're experiencing cognitive issues, there's obviously a bias in the sample. They tried to adjust for this by looking at rates of cognitive impairment in NFL players who donated their brains versus those who didn't. The ratio varied from 1.8x to 4x depending on age at death.
Unfortunately the number of brains studied isn't large enough to determine whether different positions have different levels of CTE. I'd guess that kickers would have very low risk compared to other positions, as they are rarely involved in collisions. Their stats hint that is the case, but the p-values are ridiculously high due to the small sample size.
> Leonetti recently spoke to retired players alongside EarQ at a meeting of the Chicago chapter of the NFL Players Association. When Leonetti asked how many players had experienced concussions during their career, they all raised their hands. When Leonetti asked how many have experienced hearing loss approximately 25 percent raised their hands. When he asked how many have tinnitus approximately 50 percent raised their hands.
I haven't watched an NFL game in years. I can no longer enjoy seeing people trade their brain function and lifespan for money that way. For that matter I recently revisited an extreme skiing video I bought long ago. Several of the people in the credits are dead now.
All sports carry some risk. I ride a road bike. I wouldn't tell others how to weigh the risks of their sports of choice. I just wouldn't pay to watch someone fly a wing suit, knowing how some of those people have died.
> For that matter I recently revisited an extreme skiing video I bought long ago. Several of the people in the credits are dead now.
As someone who has been doing backcountry snowboarding for a long time all I can say that adrenaline is a hell of a drug and in general it’s not that hard to guess which of your friends will die (have died) doing this stuff. Avalanches just don’t care about how cool your line is.
Though nowhere near as bad as my friend who also does parachuting (wingsuits mainly these days). Once people get into base jumps and/or proximity flying end never seems to be that far away.
It's the money factor where I draw the line. It's a kind of perverse selection that the best of these athletes in extreme sports are the ones who get paid to do it, though probably just enough to scrape out a living until they age out, or die.
I'm sure there's some obscure spelunker who died in a cave, unknown to anyone but their friends. It's the commercialization of risk for entertainment that makes it icky. At some point along that curve it's OK for a civilized society to just say no, to boxing, for example.
I also stopped watching football several years ago, for various reasons including excessive violence. Occasionally I miss the sport's competition and rivalries and excitement but I went deeper on satisfying alternatives, For example, I watch and travel to see pro and college basketball and women's professional golf.
There are even studies linking soccer ("football") to an increased risk of dementia. One large study found that the risk was highest among defenders (who tend to head the ball most frequently) and lowest among goalkeepers (who rarely do.)
That study stopped short of establishing a link to CTE specifically, which can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem. But smaller autopsy studies have found CTE in former soccer players.
We focus a lot on Boxing and American football, but I suspect the risk of CTE is far more widespread across sports than is talked about (every concussion, hard contact, head impact, etc all add up)
John Urschel cited the CTE risk when he decided to quit the NFL and pursue his math PhD. He just published https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06785 which seems to be a significant result from where I'm standing, but I can't really tell what's what with math at that level.
> In August 2015, an incident gave him a taste of what a prolonged NFL career could mean. Urschel suffered a helmet-to-helmet collision with Ravens safety Terrence Brooks during an open-field drill in practice. The impact knocked the OL unconscious.
> While recovering, Urschel realized that he could not solve high-level mathematical proofs and noticed a drop in his cognitive abilities and sharpness. It took almost a month for his mental clarity to return, giving him a firsthand glimpse of brain trauma's dangers.
> Subsequently, in spring 2016, he secretly enrolled in MIT's applied mathematics doctoral program. He juggled MIT coursework during the week with Ravens games on Sundays, staying up late to balance both commitments.
> Since his early NFL retirement, Urschel completed his PhD in 2021, served as a member at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and returned to MIT as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2023.
Contact really needs to be banned at least below the college level, and it probably needs to be banned in most practice for everyone. You could eliminate so much of the collision volume without even touching what people are seeing on TV.
Is there evidence of widespread CTE in other contact sports?
I think even professional Rugby players have marginal incidence of CTE compared to American Football.
I agree with you on combat sports with head strikes. But Looking at kids activities it's hard to imagine that rugby, handball, lacrosse, etc would be CTE inducing as a pre college sport activity.
Without much evidence my intuition is that this is much more specific to American Football where players are effectively using what is meant to be protection gear and using it as a weapon to strike other players.
I love football, but it's insane that we allow this for entertainment. Guardian helmets are insufficient. They need to commit to big changes, some of which will alter the game. No head in practice whatsoever. Redesign the line of scrimmage. Mandatory month out for concussions. I'll still enjoy whatever it becomes.
So CTE is not just about concussions but any amount of damage consistently over time that accrues.
Current line of scrimmage situation is the worst case scenario. Linemen are a couple feet away from each other and they start from a crouched position. They explode up and hit the opposing line, very often with their helmet/crown, down after down, 60-70 times a game. You could not plan a better way to get CTE.
1) Neutral zone at the line, they start 2 yards away from each other.
2) Have to start from standing position, and/or:
3) First contact has to be arms
It would be a bit of an adjustment like it was for dynamic kickoff. But the juice would be worth the squeeze. You're never going to stop all head trauma in a contact sport but the mechanics of the line positions are basically designed for it.
Similar to the CFL. Offense lines up per usual with the ball. Defense is pushed back 1 or 1.5 yards (2 is probably excessive) and can enter the zone the second ball is snapped.
There are some side effects (goodbye tush push) but it drastically reduces helmet contact for those 8-10 players every down.
And indeed, disallowing brace against ground is all you'd need to get the standing result.
Not the OP but I don't think you can. The issue is you're stopping a moving object with your body. That is always going to cause damage. I think the armor itself also promotes big hits. I truly think that's the reason Rugby is a safer game; the hits are more painful, and you're not hitting each other with a carbon fiber helmet.
I'd get some hate for this on football forums, but targeting needs to be enforced a lot more strictly than it is. The NFL also did a good job reforming kickoffs, they're much safer now than they were, but we need to do something about punts.
I remember in an eight grade game coming back to the huddle and the lineman who played next to me was talking about his sister's homework. He clearly had a concussion and we (the players) sent him to the sideline where the coaches berated him for coming out of the game and sent him back (this was in the 80s).
Already at the JV level I saw multiple concussions in games. Not kos but guys woozy liked they'd been punched. Nobody cared back then (US south).
It adds a sort of tragic element to the game. Growing up I used to cheer for big hits now there's a recognition you are often watching someone lose several years off of their life.
There's also these guardian caps to reduce some of the shock, but they're not very effective - they absorb like 10% of the blow, and you don't see very many players wearing them in-game.
The main issue seems to be shock to the brain being sloshed around inside the skull, even neck-snapping type impacts without any contact to the head itself can cause brain injury. The extra helmet padding doesn't do anything to reduce that. Plenty of linemen have been diagnosed with CTE even though their play doesn't involve as much helmet contact or high speed collision.
I think it more likely they will get better helmet tech which is already happening. Some players even where extra padding on the outside of their helmet now.
The game will change somewhat, like it has for kickoffs and protecting the QB, to minimize injury. But fundamentally anything that trends towards "no collisions" will, I think, be a non starter.
People also said it would “no longer be football” if forward passes were allowed, or when “downs” were added, or teams were allowed different lineups for offense and defense, or QBs were better protected in the pocket, or when pass interference became illegal. Rules change all the time. The sport adapts.
The number one change they could make to the game to make it safer is going back to leather helmets. Players would be far more cautious.
Or with technology we have today, not allow any helmet contact to any part of the body. You could outfit the helmets with a sensor and a light so the refs know it happened.
Yes, this would drastically change the game and how it is played. But it would probably still be entertaining enough to draw in the crowds they hope to draw in.
>The number one change they could make to the game to make it safer is going back to leather helmets. Players would be far more cautious.
I wonder about that. In theory it seems like it should help, but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.
Honestly, the simplest solution to me seems to be switching to flag football or something similar.
They've been doing flag football for the Pro Bowl for a few years now to avoid injury, and the overwhelming feedback is that it is boring.
They either need to make it safer or stop the sport altogether. Or at least stop letting kids play tackle. If an adult wants to make that choice, maybe we let them, but don't let adults make that choice for kids.
> but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.
This is a good point. We'd need to know if that was because medical science was worse or if it was actually less safe.
Alternatively, sensors could track/tally some metric, at which above a certain limit players are out. Could really change the incentives for how schemes/positions are deployed on both sides of the ball.
... or just play flag football.
Played for four years ... my conclusion: regular, calm, ordinary people don't usually excel at american football. Aggressive, intense, competitive folk have a great time tho' ... it's not safe at all. Every last one of the starters self-identify as: a headbuster!
Is this magnified that NFL selects for big men hitting extra hard due to body size physics. Impact force / wear and tear / fatigue doesn't scale linearly to body mass receiving. Like if there was weight class / height class american football, where with BMI/FFMI cap, would smaller bodies beat the shit out of each other on the regular with less accumulated effects.
The lifetime risks and dangers involved in many of these sports is my main counterargument to those I encounter that oppose the NIL money flowing into collegiate sports for removing the amateurism feel of it.
The young men and women are putting their health and safety on the line potentially with life altering injuries, they should be compensated for it. Doubly so since beforehand the universities were more than happy to profit solely from their work.
This is such a brutal sport. For reasons outside my control (see: partner), NFL games are on in my house every weekend—and therefore in my peripheral vision. It seems like every game a 20 something in their prime is being carted off for a season ending injury. Unacceptable costs. Tennis is the way. Boxing without contact.
>The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.
Yeah. The rules need to change substantially at all levels. I can't see another way out, without just banning the sport outright. In soccer, they've already done it at the kid's level. My kids' teams don't allow heading the ball at all. That's such an obvious win. It changes soccer pretty substantially, but it's still a lot of fun, and much safer with that rule in place. Football has enough money that I'm sure someone can solve this by adjusting the rules towards safety without completely changing what makes the game fun.
That said, it may not be solvable. It's not just helmet-to-helmet collisions that are the problem. You often see players make a diving grab, and their head slams into the ground when they land. That's micro-concussion territory that may be unavoidable. But, my guess is it's an 80/20 rule. If you somehow eliminate player-to-helmet hits altogether, you'd probably end up in a good enough place.
As a youth football from 5 years old in the 90s to high school in 00s in the Midwest, this is not surprising at all. Things are competitive from a young age. We more recently know much better, but this knowledge. The taught knowledge was protecting one’s neck from injury with “proper” form. From my lived experience at those times, there was 0 mention of head injuries, and blacking out and dizziness after hits were ignored by all if you were able to stand or walk within a short period of time.
The percent of the general population that gets Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy? This isn't a naturally occurring phenomena. It's the cumulative result of repetitive skull impacts and concussions.
A recent prior study - I think one of those mentioned in the article - said other studies found very little, maybe one or two brains in the samples. And that included a study of military veterans.
Note that ex-players dying last decade played ~50 years prior, in the ~1960s. It was a significantly more violent game than it is today. Look up Chuck Bednarik's famous hit on Frank Gifford, and Bednarik's reaction after - that was a highlight.
I still think it's dangerous and changes are needed, but today's players are safer.
I know the millennial urge is to have everything condensed down to a one minute video that knocks down orthodox thinking and presents a bold new idea that magically no one has ever thought of before. It's never as simple as they make it seem. However, that's actually the case here - the solution seems to boil down to banning tackles in practice until HS or college outside of gamedays and acknowledging that five-year-olds can still sustain CTE.
I wonder if it's possible to take the head out of American football, and use helmets as just extra protection in accidents - like helmets in almost every other endeavor (climbing, construction, bicycling, etc.). Make it a game played from the neck down.
You can count on people saying it's impossible, 'this isn't football', players saying 'I can't play this way; I'll retire', etc. That happens with every change, including the ones that all the players accept and play with now, and which are part of the most popular sport in the U.S. Not unlike responses to changes in technology.
Already, things like helmet-to-helmet hits, spearing helmet-first, etc. are against the rules (I don't know the exact rules). Players can control what body parts make contact with what on the opposing player - obviously: in other things in life, including other sports, you don't instinctively lead with your skull.
I would guess that blocking between the offensive and defensive lines would be the biggest change. They begin inches apart and slam into each other at the start of each play, and generally whoever gets leverage lower will win. I think it would just look different, more arms and less body-to-body.
Also, are there sensors for helmets that would pickup impacts? I think sensing the accoustics / vibrations might be sufficient.
This isn't an NFL problem, it's the very nature of the game. The lifelong damage is done by the time they reach that point. Average NFL tenure is less than 4 years, but anyone who reaches that level has been playing since they were 8.
I'm kinda surprised its that low. Football, especially at the pro and college levels, has players (especially linemen) taking car crash level hits every single play.
A lot of football players also suffer from mental health issues which, not to state the obvious, is likely not helped by banging your head all the time.
I played football in high school & college. Did I get hurt? Yes. But I also got hurt in other sports. My worst injury by far was in baseball (it required ~22 stitches & I couldn't see out of one eye for a while).
With every activity there's a tradeoff with risk.
Let's say we take tackle football off the table. We ban it from high schools, justifying it based on a study showing it produced 3.96 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions & 8.22 concussions per 10,000 (the highest for both).[1]
Okay, but then do we also ban woman's soccer?
It's the second highest, at 2.65 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions and 6.11 concussions per 10,000.
Or why let our children take any risk?
As a parent, I know I can't shelter my children. They have to take some risk. I let my children ride a bike, knowing full well there is a non-zero chance he could get by a car. We live in a big city & I let my pre-teen walk to meet a friend at a local burger joint for lunch, knowing full well there are bad people in the world who might do something untoward to him.
As for CTE specifically, I am very concerned about in the NFL. I have mixed feelings if I'm complicit in things by watching. As a diehard Bears fan, I found Dave Duerson's story heartbreaking. I'm supportive of the guardian helmets and hope the league starts to mandate them.
But the athletes in the NFL are not like amateurs. They are far bigger, far stronger, far faster. You can't take the CTE data from professional & extrapolate it to high school, etc.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11113040
At the same time, a lot of parents (myself included) steered kids to other sports. That had another effect: there was even more pressure on parents who didn't care about CTE (and their kids) to get into football because kiddie leagues and especially high school teams were short of players. This happened to a friend whose two boys were strong hockey players, the coach at their school pushed them to try out for football the following season.
If they don’t play and everyone else does, their development will be many years behind their peers which makes it unlikely they could play at a high level.
But maybe you’re okay with that.
And like any responsible parents, they presumably also don't just defer to what they're elementary aged children "want to do with their life" nor feed into the exaggeration that "everybody else" does anything at all, let alone play tackle football.
If you disagree with the dangers of the sport or are afraid of shaping your children's life choices for their own benefit, that's fine for you, but the rhetorical and snide way you presume others should share that view seems strange.
This is the only wise position. Despite the common and misleading film tropes, children do not know themselves perfectly. Often the adults "holding them back" are doing those children a great favor.
The correct thing to do is to ban tackle football below a certain age. Probably college. That levels the playing field.
Sorry about the misread!
To the NFL's credit, they have made rules and equipment changes to address this.
Boxing is by far the worst from this point of view, much worse than the combat sports that allow knock-outs but also have other alternatives, like MMA.
FWIW, the NFL seemingly increasingly penalizes and expands the definition of unsafe hits every year. If people just liked the violence, BKB or power slap would be much more popular than they are.
0 - https://apnews.com/article/cte-australia-rugby-league-035e24...
Football and boxing involve guaranteed sub-concussion head impacts every session and likely full concussions at least a few times a year.
It’s a sport many people step away from for long periods of time (I.e. the muscles aren’t in shape and they're rusty) and it demands a lot unless you’re sticking to bunny slopes.
Have you ever seen ice hockey? Okay well imagine that if it was on a field and if you made it into a really fast and violent contact sport.
Requiring a child to play football should be actual child abuse, and even allowing it should be frowned upon the way that letting a child play with a blowtorch is.
The fact that they're a repeated part of the game and not occasional incidents is very, very bad.
I've gotten a concussion falling off an electric scooter. But slamming my head on the pavement isn't the point of riding an electric scooter, and if you're doing it regularly, you're doing something wrong. Unlike contact football.
But if it is significantly worse than other sports, why not single it out as the worst thing ever?
Several sports increase the risk of CTE, but football has been more studied, I think because the incidence of obviously impared former players is higher than in other sports.
Rugby and ice hockey are certainly bad, but at least the impacts are generally limited to play near the ball/puck, whereas with American football, essentially every player has an impact on every play (WR blocking on rush plays, etc).
Correct. NFL payers are better paid, get better medical care, have better training and equipment, and their brains are more developed.
At that size ratio from kids to pro, they should be rivaling Dark Helmet from Space Balls.
It's well established that the effects of repeated head trauma are cumulative, with progressively longer healing periods, worse symptoms, etc. And that sub-concussive impacts also accumulate along with the concussive impacts.
From the article: The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.
also there are studies on this
McKee et al. (2023) – Neuropathologic and Clinical Findings in Young Contact Sport Athletes Exposed to Repetitive Head Impacts (JAMA Neurology) [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...]
Alosco et al. (2017) – Age of First Exposure to Tackle Football and Later-Life Cognitive Impairment and Neuropsychiatric Symptoms (Translational Psychiatry) [https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.197]
even intl football headers have concerns
Provide your data Mr. Thrwaway, if that even is your real name.
Especially recently, international contact sports have become quite aware of the brain issue and have moved a lot to change things. Even as an avid NFL fan [0], I am shocked at how violent things in rugby used to be [1]. Aussie rules hits are similarly gruesome.
But in the last few decades, the big hits are much more severely punished. If you watch any international events then you'll see just how seriously they take head trauma now. Red cards are being pulled for things that even 20 years ago would not be considered a highlight, just part of the game.
NZ is in quite the crisis these days over their All Blacks [2] and the near death of the rugby pipeline from schools to the professional level. Over there the cause is simply that mothers aren't allowing their children to play for fear of the head trauma.
If you could get studies for these other codes, then you could, I imagine, get a nice neat graph illustrating the relationship between head trauma and CTE, using the many codes as 'trials' in a way.
[0] https://nfl.palaich.net/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oPU3ZuynIo those 1979 hits are just jarring!
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Christie
Unfortunately the number of brains studied isn't large enough to determine whether different positions have different levels of CTE. I'd guess that kickers would have very low risk compared to other positions, as they are rarely involved in collisions. Their stats hint that is the case, but the p-values are ridiculously high due to the small sample size.
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140707134223.h...
> Leonetti recently spoke to retired players alongside EarQ at a meeting of the Chicago chapter of the NFL Players Association. When Leonetti asked how many players had experienced concussions during their career, they all raised their hands. When Leonetti asked how many have experienced hearing loss approximately 25 percent raised their hands. When he asked how many have tinnitus approximately 50 percent raised their hands.
All sports carry some risk. I ride a road bike. I wouldn't tell others how to weigh the risks of their sports of choice. I just wouldn't pay to watch someone fly a wing suit, knowing how some of those people have died.
As someone who has been doing backcountry snowboarding for a long time all I can say that adrenaline is a hell of a drug and in general it’s not that hard to guess which of your friends will die (have died) doing this stuff. Avalanches just don’t care about how cool your line is.
Though nowhere near as bad as my friend who also does parachuting (wingsuits mainly these days). Once people get into base jumps and/or proximity flying end never seems to be that far away.
I'm sure there's some obscure spelunker who died in a cave, unknown to anyone but their friends. It's the commercialization of risk for entertainment that makes it icky. At some point along that curve it's OK for a civilized society to just say no, to boxing, for example.
That study stopped short of establishing a link to CTE specifically, which can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem. But smaller autopsy studies have found CTE in former soccer players.
We focus a lot on Boxing and American football, but I suspect the risk of CTE is far more widespread across sports than is talked about (every concussion, hard contact, head impact, etc all add up)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel
> In August 2015, an incident gave him a taste of what a prolonged NFL career could mean. Urschel suffered a helmet-to-helmet collision with Ravens safety Terrence Brooks during an open-field drill in practice. The impact knocked the OL unconscious.
> While recovering, Urschel realized that he could not solve high-level mathematical proofs and noticed a drop in his cognitive abilities and sharpness. It took almost a month for his mental clarity to return, giving him a firsthand glimpse of brain trauma's dangers.
> Subsequently, in spring 2016, he secretly enrolled in MIT's applied mathematics doctoral program. He juggled MIT coursework during the week with Ravens games on Sundays, staying up late to balance both commitments.
> Since his early NFL retirement, Urschel completed his PhD in 2021, served as a member at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and returned to MIT as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2023.
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/legitimate-liability-ex-ra...
I think even professional Rugby players have marginal incidence of CTE compared to American Football.
I agree with you on combat sports with head strikes. But Looking at kids activities it's hard to imagine that rugby, handball, lacrosse, etc would be CTE inducing as a pre college sport activity.
Without much evidence my intuition is that this is much more specific to American Football where players are effectively using what is meant to be protection gear and using it as a weapon to strike other players.
What are your thoughts on how to redesign the line of scrimmage?
Current line of scrimmage situation is the worst case scenario. Linemen are a couple feet away from each other and they start from a crouched position. They explode up and hit the opposing line, very often with their helmet/crown, down after down, 60-70 times a game. You could not plan a better way to get CTE.
1) Neutral zone at the line, they start 2 yards away from each other.
2) Have to start from standing position, and/or:
3) First contact has to be arms
It would be a bit of an adjustment like it was for dynamic kickoff. But the juice would be worth the squeeze. You're never going to stop all head trauma in a contact sport but the mechanics of the line positions are basically designed for it.
Or would the center be at the ball and do a short long snap to the backfield?
What would be considered a "standing position"? I guess both feet on the ground, can't use hands or arms to brace against the ground or self.
There are some side effects (goodbye tush push) but it drastically reduces helmet contact for those 8-10 players every down.
And indeed, disallowing brace against ground is all you'd need to get the standing result.
Already at the JV level I saw multiple concussions in games. Not kos but guys woozy liked they'd been punched. Nobody cared back then (US south).
There's also these guardian caps to reduce some of the shock, but they're not very effective - they absorb like 10% of the blow, and you don't see very many players wearing them in-game.
- No collisions, no shoulder checking. Tackling should be done by wrapping your arms around another player.
- No contact above the shoulders.
- Only allowed to tackle players who have the ball.
IMO it keeps the athleticism and strategy of the sport largely intact.
I think it more likely they will get better helmet tech which is already happening. Some players even where extra padding on the outside of their helmet now.
The game will change somewhat, like it has for kickoffs and protecting the QB, to minimize injury. But fundamentally anything that trends towards "no collisions" will, I think, be a non starter.
Or with technology we have today, not allow any helmet contact to any part of the body. You could outfit the helmets with a sensor and a light so the refs know it happened.
Yes, this would drastically change the game and how it is played. But it would probably still be entertaining enough to draw in the crowds they hope to draw in.
I wonder about that. In theory it seems like it should help, but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.
Honestly, the simplest solution to me seems to be switching to flag football or something similar.
They either need to make it safer or stop the sport altogether. Or at least stop letting kids play tackle. If an adult wants to make that choice, maybe we let them, but don't let adults make that choice for kids.
> but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.
This is a good point. We'd need to know if that was because medical science was worse or if it was actually less safe.
The young men and women are putting their health and safety on the line potentially with life altering injuries, they should be compensated for it. Doubly so since beforehand the universities were more than happy to profit solely from their work.
>The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nfl-cte-players-s...
That said, it may not be solvable. It's not just helmet-to-helmet collisions that are the problem. You often see players make a diving grab, and their head slams into the ground when they land. That's micro-concussion territory that may be unavoidable. But, my guess is it's an 80/20 rule. If you somehow eliminate player-to-helmet hits altogether, you'd probably end up in a good enough place.
People will adapt.
I still think it's dangerous and changes are needed, but today's players are safer.
https://youtu.be/V7MOK-F8o5I?si=ClJcs-vYmSWv_Ph8
You can count on people saying it's impossible, 'this isn't football', players saying 'I can't play this way; I'll retire', etc. That happens with every change, including the ones that all the players accept and play with now, and which are part of the most popular sport in the U.S. Not unlike responses to changes in technology.
Already, things like helmet-to-helmet hits, spearing helmet-first, etc. are against the rules (I don't know the exact rules). Players can control what body parts make contact with what on the opposing player - obviously: in other things in life, including other sports, you don't instinctively lead with your skull.
I would guess that blocking between the offensive and defensive lines would be the biggest change. They begin inches apart and slam into each other at the start of each play, and generally whoever gets leverage lower will win. I think it would just look different, more arms and less body-to-body.
Also, are there sensors for helmets that would pickup impacts? I think sensing the accoustics / vibrations might be sufficient.