America Loves Its Football Even If It Kills The Players

America Loves Its Football Even If It Kills The Players

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/nfl-cte-brain-disease.html

This article from The New York Times hit my inbox on August 25. Its contents were not surprising in the least. C.T.E. or chronic traumatic encephalopathy affects at least 25 % of NFL players. In summary, 215 of the 878 NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had C.T.E.  The actual incidence could be much higher as many of these dead players were not examined post-mortem and this diagnosis can only be definitively made at autopsy.

There is no doubt as to the cause of C.T.E. It’s there in the name. The etiology is the repeated trauma and concussions suffered by football players due to cumulative hits to their heads. It is to football what black lung disease is to mining, an occupational hazard, except the original damage occurs the players are even paid to play. C.T.E is a recreational hazard and it may be a hazard among hockey, rugby, and soccer players along with football players. It is most definitely a factor in the debilitation of boxers and probably explains Muhammed Ali’s neurologic decline before his death.

Let’s step back and view the breadth of the system promoting this disease in football players. Boys (and even some girls) start playing contact football as peewees and it goes on through junior high, high school, and college for the young men. The players get bigger and faster and the hits more traumatic. By the time a player gets to the NFL, he probably is halfway to degenerative brain disease before his first practice.

If 25% of the NFL players got colon cancer, I am sure someone would demand that the reason be identified. The reason for C.T.E. is known. No further study is needed.

The NFL leadership will say that it is constantly trying to make the game safer with new rules to minimize trauma and better equipment. But the same NFL hierarchy knows full well that it is the speed, power, and sheer athleticism of the players that both fill the seats and create the C.T.E. risk that fills the morgues. There simply is no way to make football safe unless the NFL becomes the National Flag Football League and I don’t think that would yield $5 million for a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl.

C.T.E. is a dangerous disease for the patient and for those around the patient. More than a few criminal actions, including murder, by former NFL players have been attributed to the psychological consequences of C.T.E. In 2017, an autopsy study of former players showed 110 out of 111 with C.T.E. It’s got to be more common than 25%.

So, given this latest finding (and there are even more statistics in the attached article by John Branch), there can be no confusion that the most popular sport in the United States is killing a large number of its players and that no one is likely to do anything about it because the only thing that can be done to stop the carnage is to stop full contact football. As far as I know, it is the only sport where it is considered a good play to hit an opponent when he is not looking, whether that is blind siding the quarterback or plowing into the back of a receiver just as the ball arrives.

Football cannot be made safe anymore than could gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Both forms of entertainment hinge on the audience’s vicarious thrills of the trauma and injury. Either we are going to have to admit that we are not a whole lot better than those barbarians who would watch gladiators spar with lions, let alone each other in fights to the death, or we are going to have to end NFL football. Since the latter will not happen given its huge popularity despite the attendant risks to the players, we will be judged by history as having embraced a form of entertainment not unlike that which pleased the Roman emperors and the citizens of the Empire. We have evolved very little from our ancestors.

I understand that many, many people love football, but perhaps they should all consider the fact that their Sunday (and Monday Night, and Thursday Night, and some Saturdays) pleasure is resulting in the degenerative death of many young men.  It is clearly the desire of the American public to ignore the cost of NFL football to the health of the players. And, of course, for many players, it is a way out of poverty and for all of the players football generates a fair amount of wealth. But what’s the cost? Is it worth it? Not to me, but to most of America, it’s the price the players pay for their salaries and the adoration of the fans. I have no idea if the players really know what they have gotten into when they first don the pads at age ten or so.

This seems like a bad deal to me, but I seriously doubt anything will change and the C.T.E. will just go on accumulating just as its cause is the cumulative trauma of 10 to 20 years of hits to the head.

My mother would not allow me to play football in high school. We would not allow our son Andrew to play either despite his baseball coach wanting him to play. (His baseball coach was a football coach, too.) Yet, I am aware of children who are playing tackle football in grade school. I am sure the brain trauma starts early.

On the surface, football appears to be a great game. I did play a whole lot of flag and touch football and loved it. Tackle football with pads, helmets, and cleats is a different game and it is a lethal one. I am quite sure my plea to end the NFL will go on deaf ears, but if even one mother decides that her son cannot play tackle football, that’s a start.

C.T.E. has to be considered an epidemic among NFL players. But, it is an epidemic making too many people too much money and entertaining millions more to ever be stopped. Ending the epidemic is up to the players, or their parents to stop it before it starts.