It won't actually come as a surprise to, well, anyone, but the revelation from one NFL executive that football does, in fact, cause concussions was a welcome and eye-opening admission nonetheless. The NFL's senior vice president of health and safety, Jeff Miller, made the big reveal Monday during a Congressional roundtable.
Links have long been assumed - for very good reason, of course - between the NFL, a sport and a league based on constant, violent contact, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease, which results from constant, violent contact to the head and brain. But it wasn't until Miller's comments Monday that any member of the NFL brotherhood had been willing to admit freely that there is a direct connection between the game of football and concussions.
Posed a question regarding by U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky whether a link between football and CTE exists, Miller answered thusly:
"The answer to that question, is certainly yes."
It's an intriguing and unexpected change from the NFL's prior stance, which had been something along the lines of, "nah."
It was only last month, in fact, that Dr. Mitch Berger, a man who fits almost perfectly into the NFL's oversized, money-filled pockets - he's also a neurosurgeon who heads an NFL subcommittee whose sole focus is studying the long-term effects of brain injuries on former players - told reporters at Super Bowl 50 that a link between football and concussions/CTE had not yet been discovered.
Berger's assertion, of course, flies in the face of just about every shred of meaningful evidence, circumstantial or otherwise. Of the 94 former players whose brains were studied post-mortem, all but four showed signs of CTE. An alarming number of former NFL players, from Hall of Famers like Junior Seau to Dave Duerson to relative unknowns like Adrian Robinson Jr., who was in the league for just three seasons, have committed suicide. Many others have suffered or still suffer to this day from issues of dementia and memory loss.
For too long, the NFL has stuck by the party line that they and the game are innocent until proven guilty. So for Miller to come right out and answer in the affirmative to a direct question like that, was indeed, extremely shocking.
The reasoning for Miller's move is hard to fathom. But one thing is for certain - the evidence linking football to concussions and the health issues that follow continues to mount.
The woman leading Boston University's program examining the effects of CTE, Ann McKee, testified on Monday that she found CTE in the brains of 45 of the 55 college player's brains she studied. Of the 26 high schoolers she also studied, six showed signs of CTE.
And while the NFL continues to rake in massive amounts of revenue on an annual basis while make minute alterations to improve the safety of the game, more fundamental changes at the lower levels of the sport have already begun. Pee wee football has adopted rules that limit full speed and head-on tackling, as well as the amount of contact during a normal practice. And just last month, Ivy League football coaches banded together in an effort to outlaw full-contact practices during the regular season.
As Dr. Arthur Caplan of New York University's Division of Bioethics put it then, it's an ill omen for the sport of football that the only way we've been able to make the game safer, is to play less of it.
Even athletes in other, less violent sports, like former World Cup star Brandi Chastain, have come out in support of concussion research. Chastain, who has championed a movement to keep heading out of youth soccer, announced that she would be donating her brain to CTE researchers.
Miller's admission, at least in terms of NFL fan engagement and/or the league's revenue (though it could have far-reaching effects on the NFL's concussion settlement), is unlikely to result in immediate consequences. But someday, in the not-too-distant future, it's entirely possible that the game of football will look very different from the one we know - and that so many of us love - today.
Or, should the suicides and heartbreaking stories of former players, our once proud athletic heros turned to cripples and invalids, continue without resulting in fundamental changes to the manner in which those players are protected, football very well may be gone altogether.
