“Harder to love football with dark side now crystal clear”, The Toronto Star
NFL and CFL aren’t alone when it comes to risk of brain injuries in sports, but a mountain of recent evidence raises tough questions about football’s future at all levels.
By Damien Cox, sports Columnist, September 22, 2107
Football is a sport under attack.
Those who love and support the game would argue it is impregnable, and that the strong and growing connection between football and brain injuries won’t slow down the roaring locomotive that is the NFL, not to mention U.S. college football and other leagues such as the Canadian Football League.
Others, however, wonder if the growing awareness of football’s inherent dangers means it’s a sport that simply won’t be played 25 years from now. Or it will be like boxing, a sport no longer in the mainstream.
Those are the extreme viewpoints, and the reality is undoubtedly somewhere in the middle. But nearer to which extreme?
The past two weeks have delivered a number of sobering news stories which, to some, create the impression that the walls are closing in on football from a number of different angles:
- Last week, the CFL and CFL Players Association agreed that there will no longer be any full-contact practices allowed during the season. The hope is that eliminating up to 17 full-contact practices will reduce injuries in general. But the unspoken truth is that reducing the number of times pro football players hit heads with other players is the goal.
In essence, this suggests the sport is too dangerous to practise, even for pros. What does this say about the nature of the sport itself?
- This week, a study published by the Boston University School of Medicine said if children play football before they are 12 and continue to play in high school they may be putting their brains at significant risk. Playing football before the age of 12, the study says, doubles the risk of behavioural problems and triples the risk of depression later in life. A 2016 Wake Forest study, meanwhile, said boys between the ages of 8 and 13 who play just one season of football had diminished function in parts of their brains
Football, it would appear, is now a sport that may only be safe to play between the ages of 16 and 30, and under increasingly restricted conditions.
- On Thursday, it was revealed the late Aaron Hernandez, a convicted murderer who committed suicide in prison, had severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Hernandez has often been dismissed as just a bad guy. But the open question now is whether in reality he was impacted by a serious brain injury from college and pro football that went undiagnosed.
The league recently paid $1 billion U.S. to former players who accused the NFL of misleading them about the dangers of playing football. Hernandez’s lawyers, meanwhile, never raised the issue of CTE to defend him against two murder charges.
“It’s something I deeply regret,” said his lawyer, Jose Baez.
Like climate change deniers, the anti-CTE crowd will dismiss all of these stories as proof of nothing and simply fear-mongering. But collectively, all these stories are having an undeniable impact.
There are any number of former pro football players who have gone on record as saying they would never let their children play. A prominent ESPN football analyst recently quit, saying he felt guilty about commentating on such a dangerous sport.
Some reports suggest youth football participation in the U.S. has undergone more than a 27-per-cent drop over the past decade. In Canada, football isn’t one of the top 10 participation sports for young people between the ages of 3 and 17.
Ratings for the NFL are down for the second consecutive fall, although there could be any number of reasons for that.
In Canada, the two largest markets, Toronto and Vancouver, have average CFL attendances of 13,621 and 20,451, both down from last season. Overall league attendance is down 14 per cent over the past decade.
Still, by many measures, pro football remains a robust sport, particularly the NFL, which collects more than $3 billion in national television dollars every year. Other leagues aren’t as healthy, and other sports, such as hockey and soccer, also are struggling with the issue of brain injuries.
But what we’re seeing does make you wonder where football will be in a generation. It seems unlikely the tide of this CTE-fuelled narrative will ever turn into a positive one. The best the football industry can probably hope for is that it remains a guilty pleasure for enough consumers and dedicated fans, or that expansion to international markets might generate a new legion of new patrons less squeamish about concussions and brain injuries. London may be home to an NFL team within five years.
People like me have been watching this sport for decades, but it has become harder and harder to justify being a fan. Even Thursday night, watching the 49ers and Rams in what turned out to be a wildly entertaining game, there was a ferocious head-on collision in the first quarter between 285-pound L.A. defensive lineman Aaron Donald and 235-pound San Francisco running back Carlos Hyde at the line of scrimmage. Their heads were the initial point of contact. Once I would have applauded. Now, I cringe.
You can love the game but lament the carnage, the growing casualty list of brain-injured players. People say football can change. You wonder if it can and still be what we’ve come to know as football.