Every athlete always wonders about injuries and what could happen to their career if the game they love is taken away by an injury. These career ending injuries happen more often than you would think and a lot have been seen over the years in the NFL. The most common type of injury throughout sports is a concussion which can lead to larger problems down the road. A concussion is a common head injury, also known as a mild Traumatic Brain Injury. It is an injury that results from a direct or indirect blow to the head, face or jaw causing an alteration of brain function (Stopconcussions). The brain is thrown around inside the skull and eventually crashes into the skull causing bruising and swelling. Concussions can have a severe impact on someone’s life and wellbeing making simple tasks difficult. In some cases of concussions, the brain never fully heals back to what it used to be. Brain trauma can cause a build-up of an abnormal type of a protein called tau, which slowly kills brain cells. When this happens a person’s wellbeing slowly deteriorates and never recovers. In professional football, the NFL is supposed to protect the players in every way they can whether that be through the rules, equipment, or treatment after games. Player safety should be a number one concern for the NFL and sometimes it seems like this is on the bottom of the list. All of these facts bring up the question: What is the NFL doing to protect players and are they successful?  In this argument, some people believe that the NFL is doing their job and protecting the players in every way that they can while others believe that the NFL is doing the bare minimum for players and could be doing more for their safety. The NFL could and should be doing more to protect the players that they are using for their business. The NFL has yet to do vital things that could help protect players for many years to come.

If you have ever been an athlete and gone through the troubles of having a concussion or been with a teammate who has, you know that concussions can change your life. A concussion can change how you view a sport, before having a concussion you could be in love with the sport and go and play whenever you wanted without thinking twice, but after having a concussion you may have second thoughts about this sport that you love. You may begin to play the game too careful and begin overthinking things, but this can be the least of your problems with a concussion. Injuries such as concussions can lead to severe head damage that could even ruin your chances of ever being able to play sports again. Because of research done on concussions such as the injury report that the NFL releases every year along with studies such as the ones Bennet Omalu has conducted, many schools, leagues, and programs have made safety a number one priority to protect players against harm like this. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist, discovered that NFL players can develop a condition known as CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) from multiple head injuries because of the current rules and equipment being used. New equipment and rules are being designed each day to find the perfect way to keep players safe without changing how the game is played. Currently no one has created this perfect product or the perfect set of rules for each sport, but most are working hard to. There are products that do a better job than others but currently in the NFL there is no way to enforce players to wear a specific brand or model of equipment. This one simple change to the game, having a rule that allows the NFL to issue out a reliable brand of equipment that they know will protect the players, would protect athletes in a whole new way and could decrease the amount of head injuries resulting from the sport each year. The NFL also has players who’s brains are technically still developing since some of them are coming without finishing all four years of college football. Having these hard-hitting plays and such a contact heavy sport damages their brain severely and cannot not be undone (Belson). The NFL could consider a rule to set an age requirement for players to make sure that their brain has fully developed before allowing players to continue playing the sport at a professional level. Another problem with one of the rules in the NFL is that there is no rule such as the targeting call in college football to protect players. This rule in college football protects players from an intentional helmet to helmet hit and if a player is called for targeting, they are ejected from the game and cannot return. It seems like it should be common sense to put this rule into the NFL “at a time when the NFL prides itself on safety advances that trickle down, it’s odd to see the league resist a safety rule that should be trickling up” (Florio). One last rule change that was made in younger football leagues was changing the starting lineup position from a three-point stance to a crouch so that their bodies are higher up and its less likely for helmet to helmet contact (Belson). Changes to rules this simple in the NFL make it seem like the NFL doesn’t do their job because these rules would be easy to implement and would take huge strides towards player safety.

Many believe that the NFL has many changes that they need to undergo to protect players to the best of their ability. Some of these people believe that the NFL doesn’t have player safety at the top of their priorities, but rather have money as their main concern. Jeremy Gove, a senior managing editor for the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, says that “an implied admission by the NFL that injuries occur as a direct result of impact to the head, and the NFL’s reluctance to institute penalties during the game reflects that it did not take these injuries seriously for many years, and still fails to do so” (Gove 658). This statement made by Gove shows that the NFL not only knows about the problem, but is not doing anything to fix it. This is a clear red flag when it comes to player safety; the NFL is aware that players are becoming hurt through the way the game is currently played and they are failing to act to put the players’ safety in their best interests. The NFL has been made aware of the fact that players are still having career ending head injuries multiple times through many ways such as studies, news reports, and player testimonies and over the years there has been little to know change in the number of players who are effected by head injuries throughout the NFL. The NFL is not only not doing anything to decrease the amount of these injuries occurring but they are also taking unnecessary risk when it comes to player safety (Gove). Athletes in the NFL are carelessly being thrown into harm’s way with the current rules the NFL is using. In the NFL, currently players can determine if they want to go back on the field or not after being taken of for an apparent injury. These athletes are playing in the NFL for the live of the game and this most of the time clouds their judgement so of course they will want to return to the game and try and help their team win. The NFL should know that players are going to do this and put in place a rule where athletic trainers determine if the athlete is fit to go back on the field and return to play or not. Another rule that’s in place is the fact that referees in the NFL don’t have to stop play and call on a trainer when someone has possibly injured their head or neck. This player can get up and walk themselves off the field, if possible, without the game being stopped for an injury timeout and an athletic trainer being forced to come onto the field. What’s wrong with this is that someone with a head or neck injury can strain and potentially injure themselves more by attempting to move or carry out normal actions after a big collusion.

Some of these injuries have gone unnoticed through the NFL and seem to be getting more relevant each and every day as more research is being done. To date, 87 of 91 former NFL players whose brains were studied at the VA-BU-CLF Brain bank have been diagnosed with CTE (Concussion Legacy Foundation). CTE is Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy which is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain caused by multiple concussions. Bennet Omalu discovered this in 2002 while performing an autopsy on former NFL player and Pittsburgh Steelers legend Mike Webster. This autopsy led to the fact that “the human brain cannot withstand an unlimited number of traumatic impacts [which] presented a profoundly inconvenient truth for America’s game”, something needs to change to protect players (Lartey). The autopsy of Mike Webster was a huge milestone towards better protection of athletes. This autopsy showed how a players brain can truly deteriorate and change after multiple head injuries. Mike Webster was said to have changed as a person mentally and friends wouldn’t recognize him by the way he acted. Mike Webster went from a star in Pittsburgh to a homeless man living in his car and forging prescriptions. Mike Webster’s forehead began to build up scar tissue from the amount of impacts he received from playing the game. The equipment that Mike Webster, and the rest of the NFL was using at the time, obviously was not doing the job. In David Camarillo’s TED Talk, “Why helmets don’t prevent concussions – and what might” after realizing how many athletes are being affected by head injuries because of the equipment they are using he began researching what could truly protect athletes. Camarillo is a professor at Stanford who is now researching traumatic injuries and how to protect athletes. He has realized through his research that “today’s helmets are not designed or tested to prevent head injuries, but rather to prevent skull fractures” (Camarillo). This new “equipment” that he has discovered is a mouth guard with sensors that relay information back to a database to report on how the skull moves after a big hit. With this information, Camarillo tends to create equipment that actually protects players from head injuries, unlike the products on the market today that athletes in the NFL are using. Even if this new equipment is created, the NFL still doesn’t have a way to force players to use it in its current set of rules. 

On the opposite side of this argument, people believe that the NFL is doing enough to protect players. People believe that the rules the NFL is currently using are safe how they are and the equipment players are using are the best they are going to get. Lorenzo Reyes of USA Today says that “Head injuries and player injuries overall seem to be decreasing at a steady rate in NFL games since 2012”, but since players have the option to decide if they want to continue playing or be evaluated for a concussion these statistics are invalid (Reyes). This statement also only refers to games, which are not the only places these injuries occur. Players are getting injured at the same rate in games as in practice which is not taken into account for these statistics. Reyes is attempting to appeal to fans of the NFL who just want to see the game continue. This argument brings up the question if the NFL will ever be the same if they were to change the game to make it safer? By releasing these statistics, it makes it seem that the newer rules the NFL have attempted to revise are working and making the game safer without a huge impact on how the game is played. Without doing your own research this side of the argument seems to be legitimate and make sense, but when you dig deeper you realize this is false. Without knowing that players do not have to report head injuries you would be lead to believe that the NFL is making vast improvements. 

In some cases, it looks like the problem of safety is out of reach for the NFL and comes down to the actual players. Players are expected to play by the rules and play safe, but players do break rules and the NFL attempts to punish them for this. The commissioner of the NFL has come out and made a statement on player safety saying, “The NFL has been a leader on health and safety in many ways, and we’ve made some real strides in recent years. But when it comes to addressing head injuries in our game, I’m not satisfied” (Stites). During a football game if a defenseless player is hit during play, which is a leading cause of concussions in the NFL, the player receives a penalty. This penalty doesn’t kick the player out of the game like college football would, but instead the players are sometimes fined by the NFL after the game and must pay money to the NFL. Addressing the players this way doesn’t seem to affect how they play and they can continue to receive penalties and fines such as these because of their high-paying salaries. This also creates a problem where the NFL is relying on players to protect each other by playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played, but this isn’t how athletes play in the heat of the moment and the NFL should know this, there has to be a better way for the NFL to address situations such as these and kicking players out of games and suspending them may be the way to help reduce hits that result in head injuries. 

In conclusion, the NFL has yet to do vital things that could help protect players for many years to come. The current set of rules and equipment make it impossible to keep players in the NFL safe from head injuries that can lead to brain problems down the road. For some fans, it seems that how the NFL is structured right now is not a concern and they are just worried about the game of football being completely reconstructed into a new game for safety reasons. This would never happen in the NFL since all they have to do is build on current rules and equipment to make the game truly safe for players. After these problems are addressed and fixed, this will lead to other sports following the changes of the NFL to make their games safer and players will not have to worry about one of the biggest concerns in sports anymore.
