My philosophy about football and CTE, stated here for the record.

• Individual choices matter, as long as they're informed.

• The NFL settlement of a suit regarding this issue suggests that for many players prior to the last couple of years, they were not adequately informed of the dangers.

• Nonetheless, let's say they're adequately informed now.

• The incentives to play football still make playing football an attractive prospect to many people, disproportionately poor.

• Those incentives are created by the large audience for football, one that generates money as eyeballs for advertising and spends a good deal of money on the game directly.

• When taken together with college football and high school football, the sport has disproportionate cultural power to the benefit it generates, which makes its costs worthy of extra attention.

• The potential costs of football are high enough, that the incentives to play it are, essentially, incentives for grown men to injure, occasionally maim, and outright harm each other.

• The benefit? We're entertained.

• That imbalance has more implications for people creating the incentives.

• That doesn't preclude free choice. It does mean that choices aren't made in a vacuum. And it does mean that the ramifications of choices aren't contained to that single individual.

• (Ask Jovan Belcher's girlfriend. You can't! She's dead. Ask Jovan Belcher's young daughter then. She didn't choose to have two dead parents.)

• Given that the imbalance in cost and benefit is disproportionate and that individual choices — while valid and free, and even if incentives are largely reduced there are many young men who might play football for the joy of it — the more implications for the people creating incentives become more fraught yet.

• If, as a result, fewer people create incentives, that would probably be a good thing.

• The reduction of those incentives will probably mean a reduction in the number of people of playing football.

• The reduction of those incentives will probably lead to less weirdly gross bulking out among young men playing football, meaning the sheer mass involved in the collisions going forward might be reduced and, who knows, reduce the incidents of CTE among players.

• All of this is done without banning anything at all. It simply confronts the costs of choice and asks people to examine those costs. If you do not choose to watch football, you're not really implicated. If you think other things matter more, you can move on to other arguments.

Wanted: Better Journalism About Football and CTE

A letter I just wrote to a McClatchy journalist:

Sir:

I just read your Cedric Benson story on the KC Star website, which concludes with this:

While Benson suffered from a variety of lower-body injuries in the NFL, there are no records of him ever suffering a concussion.

 

Perhaps your story was edited to exclude additional information. If not, let me suggest the line — as it stands — omits so much information that it's possibly misleading.

Simply put: One needn't experience concussions to experience head trauma as a football player. Here's what the CTE Center says about the issue:

How do you get CTE? Can I get CTE from one concussion/hit to the head?We believe CTE is caused by repetitive brain trauma. This trauma includes both concussions that cause symptoms and subconcussive hits to the head that cause no symptoms. At this time the number or type of hits to the head needed to trigger degenerative changes of the brain is unknown. 

I'd wager that Mr. Benson received a fair number of non-concussive hits to his head during his career, wouldn't you?

Additionally, it's well-known that NFL teams haven't always been attentive to concussions, or the reporting of them, until relatively recently. Just last month, McClatchy's Charlotte Observer reported on evidence that suggests concussions remain underreported in today's league. 

I do not know if Mr. Benson is truly impaired or if, as you suggest, he is "trying to use the sport as an excuse." I do know that there's reason to believe NFL players self-medicate with alcohol to dampen the effects of CTE in their lives. Your story, as published, seems not to consider these possibilities. That's too bad.

Thanks for hearing me out,
Joel Mathis

How to completely destroy Nebraska football in four easy steps.*

1. Be a nearly all-white state.

2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive.

3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players.

4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in!

* Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

George RR Martin predicted the end of football ... back in 1975.

I was trying to remember this afternoon, a story I read in sixth-grade English about how professional sports had declined because people had come to enjoy video simulations of them much more. It struck me as possibly prescient, so I plunged into Google.

Turns out the story, "The Last Superbowl," was written by none other than George RR Martin. *

The story is actually two tales, as he covers the last Superbowl which takes place in January 2016 and interjects the depiction of that Superbowl, between the Green Bay Packers and the Hoboken Jets, and the downfall of real sports. Real sports, in the 2016 of Martin’s fictional world, have been overtaken in popularity by simulated sports. 

Simulated sports are controlled by a computer that can put any team, from any era, against any other for the enjoyment of the spectators. The technology he describes in the computers that control the simulated sports may have been a thing of science fiction in 1974, when I assume he wrote the piece, but here in the real 2015, our computers are powerful enough to create those simulations. Just look at video games like Electronic Arts’ Madden and FIFA series.

The Super Bowl is still pretty popular, and doesn't look to be overtaken by video games this decade, at least. But with growing concerns about what CTE does to the brains of football players — and the dearth of injuries and suicides by digitized players — it's not difficult to see Martin's scenario, or a version of it, coming to pass.

* I thought it had a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity and sex for a story in a sixth-grade textbook.

Hey Bruce Arians: I'm a Dad Who Won't Let My Son Play Football

This guy:

Arians came to football’s defense yet again on Friday here at the Cardinals training facility. He delivered the keynote address to over 130 high school football coaches at the “Arizona Cardinals High School Football Coaches Clinic,” and, as always, Arians was full of passion and energy for the sport, and he didn’t hold back any punches when speaking on stage in front of the men. 

“We feel like this is our sport. It’s being attacked, and we got to stop it at the grass roots,” Arians said. “It’s the best game that’s ever been f—— invented, and we got to make sure that moms get the message; because that’s who’s afraid of our game right now. It’s not dads, it’s moms.”

Well. It's not just moms.

Football is Dying. Maybe It Deserves To.

The NFL has spent this week being shocked -- shocked! -- that the violent game it promotes is, well, violent. The league has spent this week levying fines against particularly egregious hits from last weekend's games, but as Pittsburgh Steeler lineback James Harrison and Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder have pointed out, in their various ways, football is game of hitting, and hitting hard: You're supposed to hit the ball-carrier as hard as you can to bring him down; the carrier tries to hit you as hard as he can so that he can stay on his feet and keep going. It's rough business, and there's growing evidence that it destroys the bodies and minds of the people who play the game.

I don't really watch games anymore -- it makes me a bit queasy to cheer on people in the process of hurting themselves and each other -- though I still check in from time to time on the progress of the Kansas City Chiefs: a lifetime of fandom is hard to put away. But today -- October 21 -- feels like it might be a quiet watershed day in the demise of football.

Today's New York Times:

Helmets both new and used are not — and have never been — formally tested against the forces believed to cause concussions. The industry, which receives no governmental or other independent oversight, requires helmets for players of all ages to withstand only the extremely high-level force that would otherwise fracture skulls.

Moreover, used helmets worn by the vast majority of young players encountered stark lapses in the industry’s few safety procedures. Some of the businesses that recondition helmets ignored testing rules, performed the tests incorrectly or returned helmets that were still in poor condition. More than 100,000 children are wearing helmets too old to provide adequate protection — and perhaps half a million more are wearing potentially unsafe helmets that require critical examination, according to interviews with experts and industry data.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

The risk of playing football at all levels was driven home over the weekend when a Rutgers University player was paralyzed from the neck down in a game Saturday. It's become clear the way the game is played and officiated must be altered. The unacceptable alternative is to be resigned to more and more players joining the casualty lists.

A recent Harris Interactive poll shows most Americans don't enjoy seeing football players get hurt. They want changes to helmets and other equipment to be made, and they believe players who cause head injuries should be hit with penalties, up to and including suspension.

Blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Samori (his son) didn't play football this year. He wants to go back. We can't, in any good conscience, send him back.

It is, simply, becoming less reputable to cheer on the sport that's literally killing and crippling players before their time. And parents like Coates are taking their kids out of the game. We've already determined that our son will never get our permission to play tackle football. Support for the game is slowly beginning to dry up, because it will never be possible to make the game safe enough without fundamentally altering its character.

That's not to say it will ever completely die. People love sports, and many people love violent sports. But it seems possible to me that the NFL and college football will begin to recede in popularity, something equivalent to the moneymaking-but-still-backwater provinces of pay-per-view (like boxing and ultimate fighting) or minor cable channels (like hockey). And that's fine by me.