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.<p>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 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.
I grew up in Texas when football was basically religion. My parents flatly forbid me from playing. Any other sport was fine, no football. Every single person I knew on the team ended up with at least some kind of minimal, permanent injury. This was a decade before there were publications about CTE.<p>I'm quite thankful that I never ended up on the team, and think the entire concept of high school football is incredibly stupid given what we know about CTE.
When I played little league and high school football we had this one activity we did called "The Door". Essentially, it was a piece of plywood stuck in the ground so that you could not see who was on the other side of it. We broke into two lines and you just ran full speed around the door not knowing who you were about to smash into. The teams and coaches essentially cheered when someone got a "stinger". That was when you got hit so hard that your head felt like it was getting stung by a bee...I often wonder what effects that kind of stuff has had on my life.
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.<p>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.
> Same here. When did Boston University start publishing about the CTE/football connection? 10 or 15 years ago?<p>Our science writers at BU have been writing about CTE research for at least that long. Oldest I could find was 2010. We've published a lot on the topic on our main news site and our science publication:<p>Brink CTE stories: <a href="https://www.bu.edu/brink/tag/cte/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bu.edu/brink/tag/cte/</a><p>BU Today CTE stories going back to 2010: <a href="https://www.bu.edu/today/tag/cte/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bu.edu/today/tag/cte/</a><p>Some favorites:<p>This 5 part series: <a href="https://www.bu.edu/brink/series/cte-how-bu-is-changing-the-game/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bu.edu/brink/series/cte-how-bu-is-changing-the-g...</a><p>This story about Youth Football: <a href="https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/youth-football-linked-to-earlier-brain-problems/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/youth-football-linked-to-ea...</a><p>And this video from the Director of the CTE research center talking about how these discoveries impacted her as a huge football fan: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsDvKyhtA4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsDvKyhtA4</a><p>I'm a creative director @ BU and our designers have occasionally helped our editorial teams with story designs for these types of research stories. It's been interesting watching the progression of the research over the years and as a parent as well I would not let my kids play football based on the research. There are other, less risky sports they can enjoy. Skiing, Martial Arts, etc. I don't believe we can or should protect them from all risk, but this CTE research has been a clear enough signal in how football is played for me to be wary of letting them play.
Tbf, IIUC, hockey's not much better. Same issue: high speed collisions in padding that makes high speed collisions seem less damaging than they actually are. Boxing, too. Most field sports aren't much better.<p>Lift weights and play tennis or baseball.
Baseball and Tennis are really gruesome on tendons, joints and ankles. Apart from colliding with a second baseman while trying to get there is also a potential concussion risk, not even talking about getting hit in the head with a wild ball or any other abstruse risk. I guess in terms of longterm damages with irreparable damages basketball might seem the safest unless you are a high-flying guard thats 6"1 and dunking over people 15 inches taller.<p>sure you tear an ACL here and there, but thats nothing modern surgery cant fix.
The adult culture around high school football in the US is creepy to me. All these grown men pushing and promoting and getting excited (and aggressive) about it, with stadiums and equipment and media that would put most professional leagues overseas to shame.
I've so far seen 3 ambulances at high school soccer games, and one at a football game. (the football player was fine, and back to school the next day, just being SUPER cautious about his neck after a tackle).. the soccer players, 1 concussion, and 2 broken bones.
It is somewhat common to break bones in soccer, but bones heal. Soccer is not like football. Football is a sport where you’re <i>supposed</i> to run into other people, often head first.<p>Of course people get hurt in soccer, but that’s out of the ordinary. For football, getting hurt is the ordinary. Most likely people aren’t calling ambulances because getting shaken up and a bit nauseated is par for the course for football.
> Soccer is not like football<p>True, but soccer is also susceptible to CTE. It is becoming increasingly apparent that soccer, particularly headers and on field collisions, also yields plenty of CTE cases. So much so that some soccer organizations are introducing protocols, such as no headers for youth soccer.
I think we had an ambulance on-site for all our high-school football games.
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.
Still doesn’t mean you can’t look at those people as foolish, no different than if they handed a cigarette to their teen or let their kid get obese.
I think both of those are overtly addictive, pointless, and negligent examples. What about encouraging them to get their driver's license, try alcohol or weed, or skateboard? What about trying to isolate them from the world on the deep suburbs?<p>I think it's more destructive to control and remove your child from the possibility of risk at the cost of preventing them from learning to navigate the world with the information at hand to do so in way they can manage.
Football was most definitely a net-negative for my life. All I learned is how to be homophobic, how to be hateful, and how to get hurt.<p>There is something to be said about the socialization of sports. But there is such a thing as negative socialization, regression even. I would say football consistently has one of the most toxic cultures of any sport. It’s improving, very slowly. But there’s more to gain than just lower head injury risk by switching to a different sport.
> Football was most definitely a net-negative for my life. All I learned is how to be homophobic, how to be hateful, and how to get hurt.<p>I played football and yet never drink, have never done drugs, am not and was never homophobic, never got into trouble etc.<p>Would I let a kid play football now, with all the knowledge of CTE? No. I absolutely even worry about it for myself. But it's a bit odd, to me, to say "football made me a bad person".
I mean I’ve of course unlearned the regressive social circumstances of football, nor is it unique to football. It’s fairly common in many male-dominated spaces, particularly ones which tend to cater to toxic ideals of masculinity or, as it is sometimes euphemized, comradery.<p>I think basically all people who were socialized male have had these experiences at one point or another, whether it be in football, in class, in the military, at sleepovers, in the locker room.<p>My point is more so that football has a particular “culture”, or it did when I was a kid. And that culture was not necessarily socially productive at a young and impressionable age. When we see certain behaviors in particularly young men, we have to wonder where they come from, and what we are doing to cultivate that.
There's a dozen alternative sports they can play with far lower injury rates.<p>Encouraging them to get a drivers license is fine (run cross-country), but getting them a driver's license and buying your 16-year old a sports car with bald tires and no seatbelts (football) is negligent.
I think it's far more destructive to allow a child to play a sport that basically guarantees that they'll end up with massive brain damage.<p>If cars, alcohol or weed caused 75%+ of the people who used them to have massive brain damage then it'd be unreasonable to allow people to use those too.
"Preventing them from learning to navigate the world"? We're talking about football.
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.
"I xed and I was fine," is pretty much it. Why beat your kids? Why let them go into large amounts of debt for college? Why circumcise your boys? No real thought of if circumstances have changed or if the original assumptions/data were flawed.
There is something to be said for optimizing a life for safety, which just ends up being a milquetoast life. Male culture for a very long time has been about cheering on so-called “stupid” behavior, and honestly, it’s the most beautiful thing about masculine culture. It values courage and breaking away from the group. It’s not something we should lose. I’m gonna go as far as to say it’s probably the whole reason we have civilization.<p>Yes, you’re optimizing for your kids individual life but nothing we Americans do anymore is holistic. It’s all short-term thinking.
Following the group in hurting yourself is not courageous, nor is it “breaking away”. Quite the opposite.<p>Masculine culture has traditionally, and currently, favored conformance and lack of individuality over basically everything else. It’s one of the more toxic parts of masculinity as portrayed by the patriarchy.<p>There are many ways to be a woman. There are many ways to be a gay man. There’s really only one way to be a straight man, if you want to be valuable in the eyes of the patriarchy. It’s all about conformity, conformity, conformity. No deviancy, no thoughts, just a blank slate of a man ready for work, family, and an early death, be it at war or doing stupid things.
It does not value breaking away from group. It values conformity with the group. And the test of conformity is willingness to do stupid damaging things.<p>And they are not courageous. They are so scared they will be seen as unmanly or outsiders, that they will do, enable and tolerate pretty much anything.
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?<p>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.<p>But maybe you’re okay with that.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I guess you missed the point so why don’t I spell it out to you.<p>The correct thing to do is to ban tackle football below a certain age. Probably college. That levels the playing field.
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.<p>Sorry about the misread!
I'm down with banning tackle football for kids, but "the people who play as kids have an unfair advantage in going pro" is an <i>incredibly</i> weird reason to think it should be banned.
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 <i>brain damage</i> at the cost of forcing my child into a group they're virtually certain to be in anyway seems totally fine.
Gotta stick to the crowd at all costs, its <i>so</i> uncomfortable outside of it right
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.
Play flag football. It's a great sport without the terrible risks. It's also being played by girls too.<p>I coach middle school girls. It's a blast. It has by far the most strategy of any youth sport.<p>If I had sons, I wouldn't let them play tackle football before high school, and I would have to think long and hard about that even.<p>I enjoyed flag football as a coach so much that I built my own play creation and team management software (<a href="https://getplaylook.com" rel="nofollow">https://getplaylook.com</a>). One of the things that you get with flag at an early age because you aren't so focused on the physical side of the game is a higher emphasis on technique, particularly route running, and play design. Good play design can scheme people open, even if your team isn't very fast.
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.<p>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).<p>With every activity there's a tradeoff with risk.<p>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]<p>Okay, but then do we also ban woman's soccer?<p>It's the second highest, at 2.65 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions and 6.11 concussions per 10,000.<p>Or why let our children take <i>any</i> risk?<p>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.<p>As for CTE specifically, I am <i>very</i> 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.<p>But the athletes in the NFL are <i>not</i> 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.<p>[1] <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11113040" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11113040</a>
Yes, we take tackle football off the table for HS athletes and below. And then replace it with flag football. It's cheaper for the school, safer for the kids and has the benefit of being more coed friendly (a necessity for small schools that struggle to find enough players).<p>Soccer is addressing the concussion issue by banning headers. I think the current rule is no headers for U12s and below. That will probably be adjusted upwards to U14s at some point.
Notice that you don't really do a lot of headers if you consider the course of a full game: the main risk does not come from the ball on your head, but from some other player's body who's also trying to get to the ball.
there isn't much need for headers in soccer. I think inevitably it will be banned across the entire game in due time
Headers are an enormous part of the game, they are their own discreet skillset. I expect rugby-style headgear to become the norm starting in youth leagues though.
There is at the elite level.† Kids games, not so much.<p>† <a href="https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/07/12/world-cup-headers-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/07/12/world-cup-headers-2...</a>
Lower levels of football are the safer ones though. In terms of reducing CTE it would be better to remove NFL then College. Pee wee football is the safest level of football.<p>Additionally, people in college and NFL have played waaay more football which increases the chance of CTE. 95% of HS football players will not play beyond HS.<p>Removing HS football and lower wouldn’t make a big difference and would negatively impact the most people.
Tell that to all of the HS players who have gotten concussions playing football. I struggle to think of anyone I know who <i>didn't</i> get at least one concussion playing HS football.
This is nonsense, the numbers of people involved in these are orders of magnitude different
> Respectfully, did you ever play tackle football?<p>I did for eight years, from 5th grade through 12th grade. There was a lot of value in learning aspects of teamwork, comradery, and working towards a common goal. However, given the hard data we have on the potential dangers, I am not letting either of my sons play. There are plenty of other ways (and sports) to get those lessons with much lower risks to their developing brains.<p>I think we can all agree that injuries to the brain are especially worrisome for children, especially when compared to common baseball injuries (hamstring, elbow, rotator cuff, etc.)
Speaking of teamwork, comradery, and working towards a common goal, could you imagine if highschool engineering clubs were funded as well as the football teams?
Do you think overall injury rates tell the whole picture when some of them are CTE? It would be more convincing if you were showing data about CTE.<p>I'd rather my child accept a high risk of sprain, than even a low change of CTE.<p>I know a ex-professional football player that doesn't let his children play football.
I was a kid with a father deeply invested in football who wanted me to play. I never really felt I had the option to quit until the day he told me it was okay my junior year of high school. I was a child and though I never experienced an injury, tackle practice often pitted me against older, much larger kids. I took a lot of big hits that I just walked off but left me shaken.<p>I fear I have some mild anger problems. I can't tell you if any of it is even related to football, but if I could go back and stop myself from playing football in middle and high school, I would in a heartbeat. I hated the sport and felt trapped. I imagine I'm not the only kid with a similar story. And just because I never had an official injury doesn't mean the sport had no effect on my developing brain.<p>Kids don't always have the autonomy to make decisions for themselves; we don't let them use cigarettes or alcohol, get tattoos, etc. The sport has the ability to leave lasting damage on those playing it unlike other sports because impacts are intrinsic to the game as it's currently played. Other sports like soccer can and have banned headers.<p>I think it's reprehensible to continue allowing children to continue playing contact football.
The injury data for football you cite are not relevant because they do not include CTE related findings. CTE itself can be caused even if no recorded injuries take place, it is the repeated pounding to the head that doesn't necessarily have to cause a concussion.
<i>Respectfully, did you ever play tackle football?</i><p>I did, and I agree with the comment you responded to.<p>Pretty much all my worst injuries are related to football, sprains, hip issues, knee issues, and a concussion that took me out of a game in college.<p><i>Or why let our children take any risk?</i><p>Why let our children take all risks?
I played tackle football, and while I agree my worst acute injuries were in other sports, you do just get a lot of head jarring hits in football. It's the nature of the game. You get these hits when everything goes right. That's what people are talking about with tackle football.
> But I also got hurt in other sports<p>In other sports it's called an accident. In football it's called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The equivalent in baseball would be if the rules/style of the game required to batter the bat ball by smashing it on their head every single time.<p>The article also explains how it works, and while someone that stops playing football after high school stops the increase of the "cumulative blows to the head" counter, it still leaves a trace.<p>Considering that by 50 you'd have the brain of an 80 year old, I don't see why expose myself to that risk in the first place.
Replace every reference to “tackle football” in this comment with a sport we haven’t traditionally let kids participate in—like full-contact MMA—and you’ll realize how ridiculous it sounds.
> Okay, but then do we also ban woman's soccer?<p>It's fairly likely they'll change the rules to reduce injuries. In the US, they already banned kids under 10 from deliberately heading, with some practice rules after that.<p>And ultimately, changing the rules is sort of like a ban. You can't (competitively) play the original sport.
My friend played varsity in HS and swears he'd never let his kids play it. He's a hardcore runner and endurance athlete today (did his first 100 miler).
Those statistics are a good starting point, but if you were to measure concussion versus minutes played, and ranked by severity of concussion, you may find the numbers underrepresented football's risk.<p>Most of a football game is spent waiting for resumption of play, while girls soccer is continuous.<p>Football also introduces a different type of collision than those experienced on a soccer field (conceding girls soccer can be pretty intense). Dangerous football plays are by design, often straight ahead collisions, while contact in soccer is often incidental.<p>We are finding lifelong debilitating disease in football players, at rates far exceeding other sports, so I think it's fair to scrutinize the risk. Entering a profession that promises a 75% likelihood of degenerate brain injury is a sobering thought. Then consider high school and college football players are exposing themselves to the risk of developing some form of this disease before they're old enough to understand the risk, and without a luxury lifestyle to show for it.<p>FWIW, I played American football for 10 years and I relished contact, but older and wiser now I think I could have scratched that itch in a safer way.
> Or why let our children take any risk?<p>My daughter does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu since a few years already now: her uncle is a black belt. She skateboards too. Those aren't "safe" sports. BTW she already dislocated someone else's arm (nothing serious but the other person wanted to "see if BJJ works": she got her answer).<p>And yet there are sports I won't let her do, like proximity flying or basejumping for example.<p>Saying: <i>"All sports have risks, so all sports are equally risky"</i> is a logical fallacy.
Seriously, the athletes who get hurt in the NFL are the ones that "made it" as well. No one even cares about the hordes of players who suffer a career ending injury in college or high school.
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.<p>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.<p>Combat sports like judo or fencing are much safer than American football.
It shocking how different Olympic boxing is from pro boxing. Almost all Olympic style bouts finish and are decided on points, whereas pro boxing is primarily about inflicting damage, most often to the head to score a KO.
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 (ETA: and even saw another commenter here post) that this makes them play safer (which might be true, but not to a meaningful degree; they still are not "safe").<p>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.<p>0 - <a href="https://apnews.com/article/cte-australia-rugby-league-035e2409955cb074ac54ff13f21ffcdc#" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/article/cte-australia-rugby-league-035e24...</a>
"Safe" is a strawman, and "not to a meaningful degree" is simply a lie. Fewer serious injuries is meaningful.<p>That being said, rugby is a different game. Football for the most effected players is one crushing impact per down, and a lot of waiting around and planning. Without helmets, half of the players would be knocked out cold. Rugby is not like that.<p>Every down in football is basically like a sumo tachi-ai (initial charge.) It's absurdly stressful without a helmet to do it even once a day between professionals. People would have to stop leading with their heads.<p>> If people just liked the violence<p>This is irrelevant. I love gridiron football, I think it's the best team sport ever invented, especially for spectators. I don't <i>just</i> like the violence, I like the violence. I have to accept the fact that I might not like it as much if people <i>weren't</i> leading with their heads. It's also the <i>smartest</i> game in my opinion, and I'm amused by upper middle-class people in the US thinking that "soccer" is classy (because Europe) when all the players are so much dumber (let's talk about heading; that ball is soft, too.)<p>American football is an atrocity, though. Even at the professional level, it doesn't pay enough for how bad it hurts you (and careers are shortest for the people who see the most impacts.) At the college level, forget it.
Boxing is far worse than other combat sports because of the thick gloves, and plenty of combat sports don't involve significant head impacts at all.<p>The equipment to make it safe is the problem - it allows you to take orders of magnitude more blows to the head. There were many people saying that to improve the safety of football, you should get rid of helmets entirely.<p>Padded helmets in football and padded gloves in boxing serve the same purpose as having filters on cigarettes. Filters on cigarettes allow you to smoke a lot more, and a lot of the stuff that is worst for you is not filtered out.
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...<p>To the NFL's credit, they have made rules and equipment changes to address this.
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.
Football, boxing... seem the top two to cross off. I think skiing is perhaps the third to cross off.
Skiing is pretty awesome and IMO risk of concussion or serious injury is very low if you are not a freestyle or extremely aggressive/risky skier.<p>Football and boxing involve guaranteed sub-concussion head impacts every session and likely full concussions at least a few times a year.
At least with skiing, getting hit in the head isn't the point.
Skiiing? Please do explain
I take it means downhill. Not cross country which to me seems safe, apart from causing asthma in Norwegians for some reason... But downhill version involves going relatively fast or really fast with some small change for sudden stop, which in very few cases is safe.
The downhill version may involve going very fast, for the people who choose this (and who are thus likely to be involved in accidents).<p>People who do not like unnecessary risks can go downhill as slow as they choose. Skiing speed is controllable, unless you are an inexperienced beginner, in which case you should not attempt to go downhill where that is too steep.
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.<p>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.
ah okay, yea makes a lot of sense... I would add that motocross is probably also in that camp. Lots of people ride as kids, stop, and then start again later in life. Its a very dangerous sport with lots of significant hard falls.<p>But its also a lot of fun. Its crazy how much we crave excitement in life but that excitement often carries enormous risks.
Wait until you hear about shinty.<p>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.
Field hockey, yeah, I've heard of it. And there's no way a field hockey player is going to run as fast as an ice hockey player skates.
No, field hockey is a totally different thing. Like ice hockey, field hockey is non-contact, and very slow, and you're not allowed to lift your stick off the surface.
Ice hockey is a full-contact sport so I don't know what sport you think it is.
To follow up, my guess is that it's "Bandy" which is a predecessor of ice hockey with sticks and skates, sometimes called ice hockey, but with a much larger rink and less contact:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandy#Bandy_and_ice_hockey" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandy#Bandy_and_ice_hockey</a><p>Ice hockey is generally used to mean the specific Olympic sport invented in Canada and played professionally in the NHL at the same level as the NFL.
No, it really isn't. You're not allowed hit other players.<p>In shinty a perfectly acceptable tackle is to hook someone's legs out from under them and then hit them as they go over to make sure they stay down for a bit.
You've never actually watched an ice hockey game, have you?
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).
soccer headers are ok? (clearly they're not.)
The US Soccer Federation has proactively banned headers at the U11 level. It's not really a good example.
The concussion rate in American football (especially pre-NFL) is significantly higher than soccer’s and as the other commenter said, soccer orgs have been addressing it (way better than the NFL has) for a long time. It’s also more preventable in a way it simply isn’t in American football.<p>They don’t even compare tbh
If you're worried about head trauma, just consider that football is being widely studied & reported upon right now. Look at the stats of basically any contact sport: wrestling, soccer, hockey, etc. You'll probably have to dig deeper to find the the studies, but they all show that the athletes are significantly more likely to develop these types of brain disorders.
[dead]
Football is obviously a problem? Boxing and UFC are literally sports where the goal is to pummel someone's head.
playing at nfl level and kid level is something very different
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.<p>Requiring a child to play football should be actual child abuse, and even <i>allowing</i> it should be frowned upon the way that letting a child play with a blowtorch is.
> playing at nfl level and kid level is something very different<p>Correct. NFL payers are better paid, get better medical care, have better training and equipment, and their brains are more developed.
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.
The average weight of the front line NFL player is over 310 lbs.<p>At that size ratio from kids to pro, they should be rivaling Dark Helmet from Space Balls.
did you enjoy it at the time?
Yes, and?<p>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.<p>From the article:
<i>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.</i>
Yes! A child with a developing brain, and no medical staff on the sidelines is potentially in a worse situation.
did you even read? the bulk happened at collegiate level<p>also there are studies on this<p>McKee et al. (2023) – Neuropathologic and Clinical Findings in Young Contact Sport Athletes Exposed to Repetitive Head Impacts (JAMA Neurology)
[<a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2808954" rel="nofollow">https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...</a>]<p>Alosco et al. (2017) – Age of First Exposure to Tackle Football and Later-Life Cognitive Impairment and Neuropsychiatric Symptoms (Translational Psychiatry)
[<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.197" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.197</a>]<p>even intl football headers have concerns
As mentioned elsewhere here the damage is cumulative and started in their youth
From an injury perspective: What are they? Let's assume we're talking MS/HS football where the mass of the players is enough to really do some damage.<p>Provide your data Mr. Thrwaway, if that even is your real name.
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.<p>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.<p>1. <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2855918" rel="nofollow">https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...</a>
This is good analysis. My only contribution is kickers CTE rates are likely correlated to CTE rates for soccer players. A lot of youth kickers are soccer players that decide to kick.<p>While soccer doesn’t tend to have as many concussion level impacts, there’s a lot of evidence that repeated sub-concussive impacts are just as bad.
I'd guess that CTE rates for football kickers are lower than for professional soccer players, as the rules forbid tackling or even running into them. A soccer player who becomes a football kicker will probably transition in high school at the latest. The total number of times they hit the ball with their head will be much lower than a career soccer player, and they'll stop doing it before players get stronger and kick the ball harder.<p>Kickers do kickoffs, extra points, and field goals. Besides that they're not on the field. The only time hitting a kicker is allowed is if it's some sort of fake play where the kicker ends up running with the ball. Even then, there tends to be a gentleman's agreement where teams won't rough up the opposing kicker, as doing so means their own kicker is fair game.<p>I knew one guy who was a kicker for a PAC-12 team (back when it was the PAC-10). He said he was hit only once in 4 years. Earlier in the game he'd insulted someone on the other team, and the next time they were both on the field, the guy hit him from behind long after the whistle blew. That's not really a football injury as much as it's a violent crime.<p>As far as I'm aware, no kicker has ever been found to have CTE (though the sample size for them is very small), and their concussion rates are much lower than average. I think the studies on kicker concussion rates overestimate how often they sustain head injuries, as they likely incorporate data from less competitive colleges and high schools where kickers also play other positions.
Don't forget the hearing loss and tinnitus, too. Boxers and footballers tend to go deaf.<p><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140707134223.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140707134223.h...</a><p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
John Urschel cited the CTE risk when he decided to quit the NFL and pursue his math PhD. He just published <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06785" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06785</a> 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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel</a><p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/legitimate-liability-ex-ravens-star-161307667.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANWp-PL3X-1hNY5mupIkBWYsMupPSNddvJjocbVAlqKesIh7chKqL5Z1kD9ew-1tzdCUps6xYaZ4KkbvU1Qh86-sJujkyNUy3W1S7WlEK9Xaf80U2quFiSIQ3hWUd6_0leTy50wc6ZB8aqcOi_m3G8D8HjWAeC8DX8l7yGDazl5V" rel="nofollow">https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/legitimate-liability-ex-ra...</a>
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.
I agree with you and what baffles me even more is MMA. This just seems insane to me and I can't imagine that <i>every</i> MMA fighter doesn't have CTE.
Like any sport where hitting the head is a winning move, MMA is bad. Nonetheless it is much less dangerous than boxing.<p>In MMA there are alternative winning methods which decide a large fraction of the matches, even if hitting the head still remains the most frequent method for winning a match before the time limit (strangling is the 2nd most frequent, and unlike head knockouts it does not have persistent effects even when the loser fails to accept defeat, strikes to the liver are the 3rd, then joint locks and strikes to the legs).<p>Moreover, a MMA fighter has much more effective defense methods than a boxer, so a much lower percentage of the attempts to hit the head of the opponent are successful, in comparison with a boxing match. Also, the lighter MMA gloves do not allow strikes to the head as powerful as in boxing, because those would result in hand injuries.<p>MMA matches look more gory, because of frequent skin cuts, which result in bleeding, but those pose very little danger in comparison with the strikes to the head given with heavy boxing gloves, which do not produce visible external bleeding but they produce much more harmful internal damage to the brain.<p>In any case, sports like boxing or MMA are unsuitable for amateurs. They are acceptable only for professionals who are willing to accept the risk of health damage in exchange for a sum of money big enough to allow them an early retirement, hopefully before accumulating too much damage.
i think no one cares. it’s a “you know what you’re signing up for” sort of thing akin to the military, oh and you’re compensated hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so
I’m sure my values are just different, but it is hard to hear people complain about sports CTEs. I can’t get this itch out of my brain that it’s more about signaling that you yourself aren’t the brutish sort that would approve of such violence.<p>But then again I’m generally suspicious of people strongly condemning the free, legal, and informed choices of others.
*millions<p>And yet, when I watch videos of these guys at 50 barely able to speak, it makes me sad, so I support changes that reduce the likelihood of CTE without sacrificing the nature of the sport. Which yes, is inherently violent.
> Redesign the line of scrimmage.<p>What are your thoughts on how to redesign the line of scrimmage?
CTE is not just about concussions but any amount of damage consistently over time that accrues.<p>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.<p>1) Neutral zone at the line, they start 2 yards away from each other.<p>2) Have to start from standing position, and/or:<p>3) First contact has to be arms<p>It would be a bit of an adjustment like it was for dynamic kickoff. 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.
What about the ball? Would the offense effectively lose a yard every play?<p>Or would the center be at the ball and do a short long snap to the backfield?<p>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.
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.<p>There are some side effects (goodbye tush push) but it drastically reduces helmet contact for those 8-10 players every down.<p>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.
Surprised that Guardian helmets are still optional. Seems like the least they could do
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://nfl.palaich.net/" rel="nofollow">https://nfl.palaich.net/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oPU3ZuynIo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oPU3ZuynIo</a> those 1979 hits are just jarring!<p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Christie" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Christie</a>
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).<p>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).
75% is an estimate. Of the 396 brains actually examined, 93% had CTE, though donors skew heavily toward players with symptoms.
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.)<p>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.<p>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)
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.<p>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.
Yeah the spread is everyone who plays contact football pretty much. Linemen are basically there to absorb and make leverage though - hands up to the head, neck strains, etc. Its a pretty brutal sport for what it does to people's bodies. Any sport has injuries, and paradoxically all the armor can make the impacts even more powerful and frequent.
Football will eventually have to move to rugby style tackles to survive as a sport.<p>- No collisions, no shoulder checking. Tackling should be done by wrapping your arms around another player.<p>- No contact above the shoulders.<p>- Only allowed to tackle players who have the ball.<p>IMO it keeps the athleticism and strategy of the sport largely intact.
Not a chance. This would no longer be football.<p>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.<p>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.
At that point might as well take off the pads and play rugby union with everyone else
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?<p>I think even professional Rugby players have marginal incidence of CTE compared to American Football.<p>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.<p>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.
American football is studied, while the others havr loss money and in turn less studies. The correct answer is good question but we don't really know.<p>Even these studies are heavily weighted to those with suspected injuries and so not a good sample.
Ice hockey may actually be higher than NFL:<p>> They found 96% (27 of 28) of professional players had CTE pathology (18 of 19 NHL, 9 of 9 non-NHL professionals), 46% of college, juniors and semi-professional players (13 of 28) and 10% (2 of 21) youth and high school players.<p><a href="https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/news-events/articles/2024/largest-study-of-cte-in-male-ice-hockey-players-finds-odds-increased-34-with-each-year-played/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/news-events/articles/2024/larg...</a>
Holy buried lede, Batman:<p>>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.<p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nfl-cte-players-study-one-in-four-rcna594276" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/nfl-cte-players-s...</a>
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.<p>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.
This is actually worse for the NFL, as it shows the cumulative impact is more dangerous than players who stop playing at high school
Great news for the NFL.
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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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.<p>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.
Leather helmets are unconditionally worse for neck injuries and skull fractures, and if you manage to survive those, your concussion is worse than if you had been wearing a modern helmet.<p>We know that players would not be "far more cautious," because they were not more cautious in the era of leather helmets.
Move it out from being publicly funded and into private leagues like so many other sports, then let those leagues purchase insurance.
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 <i>usually</i> 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!
This is no surprise, it's been known for over a decade since that movie Concussion (2015) with Will Smith came out.<p>What is a surprise is that football is still celebrated as a great American pastime to this day and not much is being done to discourage playing it.<p>And on that same note, I bet boxing has a lot of CTE cases too. They just don't know it. Does anyone think it's a good idea to have your head repeatedly being hit?<p>Human heads were not designed to take hits like that. A woodpecker? Yes. A human? No.
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.<p>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.
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.
I stopped following football back when these studies started coming out and I realized it was a bloodsport, just slower.
What is the percent of the general population?
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.
Basically zero. It only happens if you keep getting hit in the head.
Google gives 3-6% in non-athletes
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.
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.
Why can't CTE be diagnosed until after death? Do the lesions not show up in scans?
Aside from technical improvements to helmets etc (which are good but really only help the margins) I wonder what you can even do to fix this?<p>Boxing/MMA has the same problem, no matter what rules or gear exist at the end of the day getting hit in the head multiple times consistently for years is going to cause problems.<p>An obvious choice is to ban the sport but
1. Realistically that won't happen
2. If its consenting adults that know the risks I'm not sure it'd be morally correct to ban it.
Continually amazed by how enthusiastic people are about getting the head bashed
Glad this is being talked about.
Do professional rugby players also suffer from CTE?
Yes: <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/search?query=CTE" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/search?query=CTE</a><p>I have no idea whether it is as prevalent. That would be very interesting data.
Maybe confirmation bias but I’ve seen a number of ex rugby players diagnosed with early onset dementia
I wonder if contact sports like these will be seen as similarly brutal and exploitative as gladiator matches or ōllamalīztli by future anthropologists, and if people will see them as similarly pacifying forces for the masses to channel their energy and fervor into instead of organizing against the ruling class.
The game should be changed. It’s very clear.<p>People will adapt.
Classic faafo
Only the ones with CTE are going to let their brains be studied.
The guys do it because they love playing football and its a chance to make millions of dollars rather than working minimum wage or blue collar jobs for far less fame. Its a trade-off and gamble.
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.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/V7MOK-F8o5I?si=ClJcs-vYmSWv_Ph8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/V7MOK-F8o5I?si=ClJcs-vYmSWv_Ph8</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I still think it's dangerous and changes are needed, but today's players are safer.
There are plenty of more recent cases than those that played in the 60s. For example, Demarius Thomas played in the NFL 2010-2019 and died in 2021 at 33.<p>It wouldn't be shocking if the rates of players from longer ago were higher but I don't think we can necessarily conclude that, there isn't enough data. The big factor seems to be number of head impacts over time. It could be the case that more recently than the 60s that kids started earlier and played more games, then we might see more CTE even if the total number of savage hits is less.
You don't even have to go that far back. ESPN used to have the Jacked Up segment, but quietly stopped doing it after all the negative press around CTE/concussions in the late 00s. Here (in Nnamdi Asomugha's hit) we hear a commentator talking about a player in the fencing response saying, "You see the arms up, you know that he got... JACKED UP!" Leading with the helmet like this would be an obvious personal foul today. I love a big hit as much as the next guy, but when I see someone go into the fencing response, it really bums me out.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ELj-79jbqA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ELj-79jbqA</a>
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