Does football have a future? The answer is likely to come not on the gridiron but in laboratories and courtrooms.
In June, lawyers for approximately 2,400 former National Football League players — more than one of every six retirees — asked the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia to consolidate their 90 lawsuits against the league. The NFL has until Ag. 9 to move for dismissal.
One of those suits was filed last summer by former Atlanta Falcon Ray Easterling and six other former players. They charged the league with having failed to properly treat athletes who had sustained concussions and trying to conceal any link between the game and brain injuries.
In April, Easterling, 62, shot himself to death. He reportedly suffered from insomnia, depression and dementia. His wife said he started showing signs of brain damage about 20 years ago.
In May, former San Diego Charger great Junior Seau killed himself. One of his teammates, Gary Plummer, estimated that, from briefly “seeing stars” to being knocked out of a game, Seau, 43, probably had endured 1,500 concussions in his 20-year career.
Seau and Easterling followed Dave Duerson, 50, a four-time Chicago Bear Pro Bowl selection, who shot himself last year.
Seau’s memorial service had barely finished when Washington Redskins Hall of Famer Art Monk became lead plaintiff in a case with 62 other former players in a suit against the NFL and helmet manufacturer Riddell.
The example of Andre Waters shadows them all. After the former Philadelphia Eagle and St. Louis Cardinals’ defensive back committed suicide in 2006 at age 44, a forensic pathologist said tissue deterioration in Waters’ brain resembled what you would normally see in an 85-year-old with early Alzheimer’s disease.
Cincinnati Bengal Jason Bell, 31, an eight-year league veteran, took notice of what physicians call chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, and, after Seau’s death, announced his retirement. “If they tell you we’re going to take your brain and whack it with a baseball bat, but we’ll give you a couple million bucks, how many people would really do that? … I compare us to modern-day gladiators. We’re giving our lives to the game of football for a price.”
The football industry can afford to pay a high price. The NFL signed new nine-year contracts with Fox, CBS and NBC television last December estimated to yield $3.1 billion annually.
Major college conferences have or are negotiating similar TV deals. Big-time university coaches run what amount to the NFL’s minor leagues. They make millions, literally. At least 64 coaches cracked the seven-figure barrier last season, often far outearning their university presidents.
But what if the source of players begins to shrivel? Officials in Montgomery County public schools said they are “weighing efforts to screen high school athletes for concussions and similar head injuries linked to Alzheimer’s-like disease and suicide.” The average high school player reportedly sustains 350 “subconcussive blows” by graduation.
Previous NFL studies of concussions and helmets have been criticized as insufficiently scientific, so a new inquiry is under way. Suppose the game as it is now — progressively bigger, stronger athletes at all levels colliding with each other and the laws of physics — cannot be played in reasonable safety? Many NFL retirees hobble through middle age as a result of permanent damage to ankles, knees, hips, spines and necks, regardless of CTE.
Several years ago, Charles Yesalis, a professor emeritus of health policy and sports science at Penn State University, said he thought football ought to have a 275-pound limit for safety’s sake. If so, the Redskins would have to drop 25 of the 89 men on their current roster.
Football is America’s brutal ballet, an aggressive art form practiced and followed with religious intensity. Yet better helmets alone may not be able to save it from a collapse like that of boxing. The sport faces its most serious challenge since President Theodore Roosevelt told college presidents more than a century ago to regulate the then-anarchic game or abolish it.
Eric Rozenman is a Washington-based media analyst for a nonprofit organization.
