Football and Brain Health
I grew up in a football family. Some of my earliest memories are watching NFL games on TV with my dad. As soon as I was old enough, I suited up and learned to deliver hits of my own in peewee football.
As a diminutive linebacker, I grew to enjoy the pain of delivering and taking punishing tackles. I wanted to be like my NFL football heroes. And I wanted to impress my dad with my toughness.
Football gave me an identity as a child and it helped connect me with my father as an adult. Growing up in the 1980s and early ’90s, I watched with awe as Joe Montana threw touchdown passes to Jerry Rice and dominated the gridiron of the day. I bonded with my dad over these heroics. Decades later, Dad and I still enjoy catching up about football in our regular phone calls.
But my feelings about the sport have changed.
During my doctoral studies in education at Johns Hopkins University, I encountered studies on the harmful effects of football and how it can damage a student’s most important asset: the brain. I discovered that football can lead to the kinds of traumatic brain injuries, including the mild concussions, that can result in long-lasting and sometimes permanent harm to children’s cognition.
Now, as an educator, I find the evidence for the deep and pernicious harm of football to players of all levels — from youth Pop Warner leagues to the NFL — has grown too uncomfortable for me to ignore. This is why it pains me to say that I won’t be watching the 49ers play on Sunday. Or in the Super Bowl, either, should they make it that far.
An important study from Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center examined the brains of 202 deceased former football players and found pervasive evidence of the disease among deceased players of all ages. The researchers determined that 87% of all players exhibited evidence of CTE , while an astounding 99% of all NFL players showed evidence of the disease.
While an argument can be made that adult NFL and college players consent to this harm when they play football, such harm is not limited to these consenting adults. That same Boston University study found that 21% of high school players also showed early signs of CTE.
Children often start playing football young; I was only 8. And kids model their play on the college and NFL heroes that they idolize. The culture of football is pervasive in the U.S. It is by far the most popular sport — ingrained in many of our national rituals. This cultural normalization contributes to the willingness of parents to let their kids play this violent sport.
Harm is not just a risk with football, it is a necessity. The game itself is predicated on violence; simply tackling an opponent is insufficient. The goal when I was playing was always to hit the opponent so hard that they cowered and thought twice about coming in your direction. Inflicting pain, fear and hesitation in your opponent is an advantage in a sport where a single play can determine the winner of a game.
Harm is an unavoidable characteristic that cannot be effectively mitigated. This harm leads to debilitating chronic problems later in life associated with CTE, such as depression, aggression, memory loss and motor impairment.
Much of the harm of football is nonconsensual or it involves problematic consent. Children cannot understand or consent to the potential long-term harm they are inflicting on their bodies or others. Consent also is compromised for the many young adults who view college and professional football as their only way out of poverty. In essence, many of these young players have been socially coerced into a deeply damaging form of labor.
Evidence for the physical harm that football can inflict on even young kids is startling. For instance, in one study of high school football players, the researchers found that repeated sub-concussive hits altered the normal brain connectivity for otherwise healthy teenagers. Another study of high school players found evidence that non-concussive hits can lead to increases in biomarkers for the tau protein, which is the protein that clogs brain networks in CTE victims and Alzheimer’s disease patients.
By allowing kids to play contact football, parents are failing in their most basic duty to protect their children from harm. These children are incapable of consent, and they depend on the adults in their lives to make informed decisions that protect them. In the absence of bans on children playing football, we have a strong moral imperative to protect their children by preventing them from playing football.