>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because other sports still don't have (from the article) an almost guaranteed chance of brain damage long-term. That's what we can literally see from differences in the brain tissue, not even considering what we can't see and don't know.
It's singled out because it's the single sport that appears to lead to life-altering effects from invisible injuries, rather than an acceptable cost/risk of accidental injury or increased chance of extremely rare events in other sports. They are open for debate just the same if evidence comes to light.
The real question is why you believe your personal experience has any bearing on the facts presented, to the point of farcical argument. It's a shame that anything we enjoy may later turn out to be harmful, but you are arguing the equivalent of: "I smoked all my life and I'm fine", "but red meat gives you cancer too", "why are you targeting smoking when people drink", "people have died choking on air".
Of course. But we’re talking about children. And children playing is vital to any high level sport. Nobody starts playing anything at the age of 18 and goes on to become a top player.
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.
> Same here. When did Boston University start publishing about the CTE/football connection? 10 or 15 years ago?
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:
And this video from the Director of the CTE research center talking about how these discoveries impacted her as a huge football fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsDvKyhtA4
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.
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.
sure you tear an ACL here and there, but thats nothing modern surgery cant fix.
Basketball's a bit fraught since the NBA does their best to memoryhole Muggsy Bogues. God forbid the meta shift to making having a manlet or two on the roster advantageous. Wemby can't even bend that low!
Somewhere, there's a dude in spandex and legwarmers muttering to himself, "It's my time." [Maniac fades in]
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.
There's a dozen alternative sports they can play with far lower injury rates.
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.
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.
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.
I played football and yet never drink, have never done drugs, am not and was never homophobic, never got into trouble etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Yes, you’re optimizing for your kids individual life but nothing we Americans do anymore is holistic. It’s all short-term thinking.
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.
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.
Following the group in hurting yourself is not courageous, nor is it “breaking away”. Quite the opposite.
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.
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.
Conformity on things that are hard and furthers the human race is my cup of tea. But I also don’t agree with your analysis, the conformity is primarily around not dabbling in anything that could be considered feminine that I whole heartedly support.
As I’ve said, there’s only one way to be a straight man. Masculinity encourages conformity in all aspects of life.
How you dress, how you speak, how you walk, who you are friends with, what shows you watch, who you respect, how you show that respect, what you do, how you earn a living, how you have sex, how you obtain relationships. Everything, from life until death.
The perfect man is the perfect cog. He works, he doesn’t think too much, he walks and talks right, he makes moral love to his wife, and he raises his kids in a standard American family hand-picked for him by his forefathers. Any deviance from that is marks-off.
I think a lot of men need to believe that their life just so happens to perfectly fit the mold, but you see, it’s by choice. If that’s what they need to believe to be happy, then okay. I’m fine with that.
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 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.
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.
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 supposed to run into other people, often head first.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
No, it really isn't. You're not allowed hit other players.
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.
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.
Presumably the risk of injuries during skiing is similar to the risk of car accidents when driving, i.e. very high for certain people, but negligible for most.
Anecdotally, I have many friends, of both sexes, who like to go skiing, and after many decades none of them has ever been injured. Some falls from time to time are unavoidable, but if the speed is not excessive for the terrain and the fall is managed correctly, most falls will not result in injuries.
agreed. seems the beginners get injured more. I was in a race league throughout school. no super g or downhill races so speeds were tame. I don't recall any major injuries, just scrapes and bruises. seemed pretty safe provided your gear is set up correctly (DINs were still at 10+ haha), and you spend time in the gym
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).
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.
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.
"This analysis revealed that risk ranged from a 5-fold increase in Alzheimer’s disease, through an approximately 4 fold increase in motor neurone disease, to a 2 fold Parkinson’s disease in former professional footballers compared to population controls."
"...the odds of having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) increased by 34% each year [of ice hockey] played, and 18 of 19 National Hockey League players had CTE."
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.
I tried contact football in 7th grade and only lasted 1 practice session. 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 heavily involved in other sports like baseball and basketball so I was used to competitiveness, but nothing on that level of disregard for safety.
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.
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.
"Safe" is a strawman, and "not to a meaningful degree" is simply a lie. Fewer serious injuries is meaningful.
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.
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.
> If people just liked the violence
This is irrelevant. I love gridiron football, I think it's the best team sport ever invented, especially for spectators. I don't just like the violence, I like the violence. I have to accept the fact that I might not like it as much if people weren't leading with their heads. It's also the smartest 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
To the NFL's credit, they have made rules and equipment changes to address this.
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. And I got a lot of value out of it.
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.
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.
And ultimately, changing the rules is sort of like a ban. You can't (competitively) play the original sport.
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).
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.
Tell that to all of the HS players who have gotten concussions playing football. I struggle to think of anyone I know who didn't get at least one concussion playing HS football.
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.
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).
And yet there are sports I won't let her do, like proximity flying or basejumping for example.
Saying: "All sports have risks, so all sports are equally risky" is a logical fallacy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) today.
> Respectfully, did you ever play tackle football?
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.
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?
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.
Most of a football game is spent waiting for resumption of play, while girls soccer is continuous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Play flag football. It's a great sport without the terrible risks. It's also being played by girls too.
I coach middle school girls. It's a blast. It has by far the most strategy of any youth sport.
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.
I enjoyed flag football as a coach so much that I built my own play creation and team management software (https://getplaylook.com). 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.
There is a difference between a 90lbs "tackle" and a 500lbs one. College, Highschool, maybe middleschool in some places might be dangerous, but for most middle and elementary this is as ridiculous as saying "I'd never drive my kids to school cos I might have to suddenly break".
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.
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'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 wonder if the US could learn to love rugby as well? A rather different game in a lot of ways, but it's definitely in the conversation for the most engaging team sport to watch in my opinion. While it has head injury issues of its own (it's still a full-contact football code at the end of the day), the sport has been a bit more open to changing things on this front.
Like any sport where hitting the head is a winning move, MMA is bad. Nonetheless it is much less dangerous than boxing.
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).
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.
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.
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.
But then again I’m generally suspicious of people strongly condemning the free, legal, and informed choices of others.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
We know that players would not be "far more cautious," because they were not more cautious in the era of leather helmets.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 soccer players, as the rules forbid tackling or even running into them. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I would also guess that goalkeepers in football has least amount of contact to other players. Those contact situations might be also causing some level damage. As it is as whole about certain threshold of head movements.
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.
Yep. Having gotten better-than-most-beginners at a few things in life, the most apparent thing is that there are levels to everything and your best competition is yourself yesterday, because someone's always naturally better at whatever you're working hard at.
Another one of these cats is Bettina "Betti" Hanlon who is working on her CS PhD and totals 572.5kg at 76kg in raw, drug-tested powerlifting with a lot of her career ahead of her in both CS and Powerlifting.
And here's the thing about both of them: they're mutants, they obviously work extremely hard, and they're not the best in their fields. Bettina was 53kg off of first place at IPF Classic Worlds this year. You can have a gift, work that gift extremely hard, and still be "only" in 8th place in the world. Hell, everyone who plays Nigel Richards says it's like playing tennis with a wall, and they're even beating him sometimes because there's a lot of luck in Scrabble. (He once successfully challenged "sulfidic" because that spelling is in one international dictionary, but not in the dictionary in the tournament he was playing in). There's levels to the levels, you know?
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[ 39.5 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] thread>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.
You can solve this by playing all the games on sand!
I've never seen this be analyzed formally, and I would be very interested to see that.
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.
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 different sports have different safety concerns.
Distance running is known to cause increase chance of cardiac arrest.
How about gymnastics, some of those dismounts are pretty dangeroud
Why single out one of them
It's singled out because it's the single sport that appears to lead to life-altering effects from invisible injuries, rather than an acceptable cost/risk of accidental injury or increased chance of extremely rare events in other sports. They are open for debate just the same if evidence comes to light.
The real question is why you believe your personal experience has any bearing on the facts presented, to the point of farcical argument. It's a shame that anything we enjoy may later turn out to be harmful, but you are arguing the equivalent of: "I smoked all my life and I'm fine", "but red meat gives you cancer too", "why are you targeting smoking when people drink", "people have died choking on air".
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.
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:
Brink CTE stories: https://www.bu.edu/brink/tag/cte/
BU Today CTE stories going back to 2010: https://www.bu.edu/today/tag/cte/
Some favorites:
This 5 part series: https://www.bu.edu/brink/series/cte-how-bu-is-changing-the-g...
This story about Youth Football: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/youth-football-linked-to-ea...
And this video from the Director of the CTE research center talking about how these discoveries impacted her as a huge football fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsDvKyhtA4
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.
Lift weights and play tennis or baseball.
sure you tear an ACL here and there, but thats nothing modern surgery cant fix.
Somewhere, there's a dude in spandex and legwarmers muttering to himself, "It's my time." [Maniac fades in]
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.
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.
I played football and yet never drink, have never done drugs, am not and was never homophobic, never got into trouble etc.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes, you’re optimizing for your kids individual life but nothing we Americans do anymore is holistic. It’s all short-term thinking.
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.
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.
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.
How you dress, how you speak, how you walk, who you are friends with, what shows you watch, who you respect, how you show that respect, what you do, how you earn a living, how you have sex, how you obtain relationships. Everything, from life until death.
The perfect man is the perfect cog. He works, he doesn’t think too much, he walks and talks right, he makes moral love to his wife, and he raises his kids in a standard American family hand-picked for him by his forefathers. Any deviance from that is marks-off.
I think a lot of men need to believe that their life just so happens to perfectly fit the mold, but you see, it’s by choice. If that’s what they need to believe to be happy, then okay. I’m fine with that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ice hockey is a really boring sport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandy#Bandy_and_ice_hockey
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.
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.
Uh, what? Do you know what a body check is ?
Football and boxing involve guaranteed sub-concussion head impacts every session and likely full concussions at least a few times a year.
Anecdotally, I have many friends, of both sexes, who like to go skiing, and after many decades none of them has ever been injured. Some falls from time to time are unavoidable, but if the speed is not excessive for the terrain and the fall is managed correctly, most falls will not result in injuries.
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.
"This analysis revealed that risk ranged from a 5-fold increase in Alzheimer’s disease, through an approximately 4 fold increase in motor neurone disease, to a 2 fold Parkinson’s disease in former professional footballers compared to population controls."
https://www.thepfa.com/news/2019/10/21/field-study-increased...
"...the odds of having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) increased by 34% each year [of ice hockey] played, and 18 of 19 National Hockey League players had CTE."
https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/news-events/articles/2024/larg...
They don’t even compare tbh
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...
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.
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.
> If people just liked the violence
This is irrelevant. I love gridiron football, I think it's the best team sport ever invented, especially for spectators. I don't just like the violence, I like the violence. I have to accept the fact that I might not like it as much if people weren't leading with their heads. It's also the smartest 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.)
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 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.
Combat sports like judo or fencing are much safer than American football.
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.
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.
To the NFL's credit, they have made rules and equipment changes to address this.
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. And I got a lot of value out of it.
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
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.
And ultimately, changing the rules is sort of like a ban. You can't (competitively) play the original sport.
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.
† https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/07/12/world-cup-headers-2...
I'd rather my child accept a high risk of sprain, than even a low change of CTE.
I know a ex-professional football player that doesn't let his children play football.
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).
And yet there are sports I won't let her do, like proximity flying or basejumping for example.
Saying: "All sports have risks, so all sports are equally risky" is a logical fallacy.
I did, and I agree with the comment you responded to.
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.
Or why let our children take any risk?
Why let our children take all risks?
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.
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.
I think it's reprehensible to continue allowing children to continue playing contact football.
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.
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.)
Most of a football game is spent waiting for resumption of play, while girls soccer is continuous.
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.
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.
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.
I coach middle school girls. It's a blast. It has by far the most strategy of any youth sport.
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.
I enjoyed flag football as a coach so much that I built my own play creation and team management software (https://getplaylook.com). 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.
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).
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.
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.
But then again I’m generally suspicious of people strongly condemning the free, legal, and informed choices of others.
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.
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.
People will adapt.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
We know that players would not be "far more cautious," because they were not more cautious in the era of leather helmets.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
https://youtu.be/V7MOK-F8o5I?si=ClJcs-vYmSWv_Ph8
I still think it's dangerous and changes are needed, but today's players are safer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ELj-79jbqA
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.
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...
Another one of these cats is Bettina "Betti" Hanlon who is working on her CS PhD and totals 572.5kg at 76kg in raw, drug-tested powerlifting with a lot of her career ahead of her in both CS and Powerlifting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01855
https://www.openpowerlifting.org/u/bettinahanlon
https://goodlift.info/lifter.php?lid=19928
And here's the thing about both of them: they're mutants, they obviously work extremely hard, and they're not the best in their fields. Bettina was 53kg off of first place at IPF Classic Worlds this year. You can have a gift, work that gift extremely hard, and still be "only" in 8th place in the world. Hell, everyone who plays Nigel Richards says it's like playing tennis with a wall, and they're even beating him sometimes because there's a lot of luck in Scrabble. (He once successfully challenged "sulfidic" because that spelling is in one international dictionary, but not in the dictionary in the tournament he was playing in). There's levels to the levels, you know?