Football has been taking over American culture and is becoming just as popular, if not more popular, as baseball.  Nowadays one of the most celebrated American holidays, Thanksgiving, is considered to be the holiday of food, family, and football.  As more and more young people get involved with the game, there has been a growth in the knowledge of what the sport can do to, or for, someone.  It can teach a young male the art of working with a team greater than any one person.  However, recently scientists have been looking at the post-career brain effects football can have on people and it is very clear what has come out.  Ex-athletes’ lives have been ruined because of how much time they have dedicated to this game during their life.  Therefore, parents should not allow their children to play full-contact football in their youth years because of all of the damage that will be done to the brain at such a young age.

Football has been a game that many Americans have surrounded themselves by in the past 50 years.  This has made the general population believe it to be a great thing to be involved in such a sport.  In many movies, the “jocks” and “cool kids”, are all football players.  Then, the positives just keep coming from there.  In college, popularity and media attention grows; then, once an athlete reaches the professional level they get everything plus millions of dollars.  It’s the perfect life, right? So why wouldn’t someone sign their kid up for this possibility of a career at such a young age?  Well it’s not as simple as that.  Once someone makes it to the varsity level football really starts to pick up some speed, both on and off the field.  Athletes are expected to devote at least an hour of their day, every day, for the duration of the year.  In the offseason there’s lifting, in the summer it’s conditioning, and during the actual season it’s a combination of practice, film, and a game, every single day.  Then, at the end of high school only 6% of these athletes will continue onto the next level and represent their new school at the college level.  At the end of that stage, only 1.8% of college players will get drafted.  Therefore, a varsity football player only has about a 0.08% chance to make it to a professional roster after years devoted to the sport (Your Child’s Future in Sports: The Real Odds).  This goes to show how many kids are going out to play this sport and test their shot to live the ‘dream’.  However, recently it has surfaced that once these kids are done living out their adult dream it’s not all money and fame after their hard-fought playing years.

With today’s technology, scientists have been noticing and looking more in-depth to a trend about how ex-football players are acting.  After further investigation they have found a build-up of tau, which is causing a disease call Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.  This is a disease very much alike Alzheimer’s, but it is developing in people far before the age that Alzheimer’s could be expected.  It is a disease that makes people have abrupt mood swings, memory loss, and could develop into dementia (CNN).  This disease can, and has, go ahead to cause people to commit suicide in some extreme cases.  However, the scariest part of this disease is how little scientists actually know about the entire timeline of CTE.  They can’t even diagnose a patient while they’re still living yet.  A doctor has to wait for someone to pass away to be able to cut into the inside of the brain where the matter builds up and determine if it means that they have CTE or not.  Unfortunately, at that point it is obviously too late to mean anything since the patient is already gone.  Then, since there is no way to diagnose a living person, of course there is no known cure for CTE.  Another piece of this mystery is that doctors still haven’t seen much of a trend line of who will get CTE other than athletes who have received a multitude of head-to-head collisions throughout their career.  Some questions about this trend line could be if a gender or genetics play a role at all in different people getting this disease.  This is a question because really the only brains that doctors have looked at so far have been ex-NFL players who have obviously been showing the symptoms of the disease.  Therefore, this could be considered to be an example of selection bias.  In other words, it may seem like CTE is much more common than it is because not everybody that dies will get an autopsy and have doctors dig into their brain for no reason other than curiosity.  The traction that this disease has been grabbing has effectively found its way all the way down the food chain to youth football.  Since most of these NFL players have been playing since they were in grade school, parents have to stop to think if they really want their kids entering a game with such a bad history of violent collisions.  However, now it’s turning into a much bigger deal than before because of how many concrete examples are surfacing from old NFL stars.  Parents now have the decision to make of either letting their kid play and risking a serious injury that could affect every aspect of their life, or just hold their kid out of the sport and watch them miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime to make long-time friends from a young age.  This question is arising itself to every parent today, including those who are going through these symptoms from their own football career.  

To continue, many retired football players have re-entered the media recently because they are somehow connected to the new scientific findings with these cases.  Whether they are being affected by CTE, or just talking on the matter, they have made themselves known about how they stand.  First off, the biggest name to step back into to spotlight and talk about the new findings has to be Brett Favre.  He was the face of the NFL throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s and wanted to get his point of view across to anybody that would listen.  Favre has recently said that if he had had a son (he has two daughters), he would not ever let them play football (“Brett Favre Opens Up About Memory Loss, Football Fears”).  This is very significant because of who it is coming from.  This man had led the all-time lists in every passing category for almost a decade until a 40-year-old Peyton Manning surpassed his records in his last season.  He is a lock for the Hall of Fame and was a leader on the field, but he would never let his son strap on a pair of shoulder pads?  To continue, another football star that has recently spoke out on their regrets about their career choice is Bo Jackson.  Of course, Jackson is one of the few athletes that were able to juggle between two different professional sport careers at the same time.  He played in both the NFL and MLB at the same time.  Therefore, he is an iconic figure for both sports, which makes it that much more significant when he said he wishes he had never played football in his life (“Bo Jackson’s Startling Hindsight: ‘I Would Have Never Played Football’”).  This is because of the recent extensive research that scientists have been going through to learn as much about these brains.  It is not a good look for some of the NFL’s most beloved athletes to say they regret their career because of the memory loss and poor health benefits it caused him, and he’s only been retired for about six years.  

Another NFL star that was severely affected by the symptoms of CTE was Junior Seau.  He was a great personality that was a very involved athlete, however CTE hit him the hardest it has hit anybody else.  “You have to sacrifice your body.  When we are 50, 40 years-old we won’t be able to walk” (PBSFrontline).  Seau shot himself in the heart at the age of 43.  He was so particular about the shooting, that he shot his heart so as to leave the brain unaffected and able to be looked at by scientists.  His family said his behavior had changed dramatically from before the CTE became apparent.  His girlfriend said that he would randomly bark at them and have horrible mood swings so much that it just didn’t seem like himself anymore.  His kids went on to say that he wouldn’t talk to them for months on end and that behavior scared them because it was like he was slowly leaving their lives on purpose.  The other changes that happened to Seau were equally as scary.  He became addicted to alcohol and gambling and lost almost all of his money.  He drove has SUV off the side of a road at one point as well.  CTE clearly effected this ex-NFL philanthropist so far that he didn’t even seem to be acting like himself anymore and he just ended it all because of that.  

On the other hand, not all ex-NFL players feel the same as a Brett Favre or Bo Jackson about their NFL careers.  One player in particular, Ray Lewis, actually feels the complete opposite on what playing football really means.  As a player, Lewis was the most feared linebacker of his time.  He is known as one of the hardest hitting players in the history of the NFL, therefore he has had his fair share of concussions.  However, in a post-career interview Ray Lewis was very adamant on saying that he is not personally concerned with concussions.  He said that he doesn’t feel bad for players that get hurt because it is a naturally violent game, and when players walk onto the field they know that.  He even went as far to say that when his sons began playing football, he sat them down and told them what the odds they get hurt are (“Ray Lewis: ‘I’m Not Worried About Concussions’”).  This thought process is thought provoking because it questions the idea of the amount of liability the NFL must hold on player injury.  However, the public doesn’t care about who takes the actual liability because either way the reputation of the injury rate rising, the blame will always go on the NFL itself.  Lewis’ perspective on allowing his kids to make the decision to play or not is definitely a different idea than most other players.  Most parents, however, shouldn’t put that type of confidence in their child’s decision making skills at such a young age.  The drastic damage a child can do to themselves by beginning the game of football at such a young age is dramatic and has to be looked at in a more in-depth view.  

To continue, scientists now have begun looking at athletes’ brains that have not yet gone through the violent action that is the game of football.  They realized that they had only looked at a brain after it was both dead and full of CTE, therefore they thought they would flip the script.  There are currently youth-aged football playing kids who are have their brains looked at by a group of scientists to test what a single season of football does at a time.  This was started by Dr. Christopher Whitlow who is with Wake Forest University.  This study showed that after just one season of football, a child’s brain isn’t damaged enough to have a noticeable difference between the before and after examinations (“How One Season of Football Affects a Child’s Brain”).  This is significant because it could show a set of parents a positive piece of information that a small amount of football won’t really hurt their child’s health.  However, the more someone pushes their body through the brutality that is football, the more their head will take a beating.  This was exemplified in the main CTE study that came out of Boston University where doctors looked at 66 ex-NFL players brains, with a grand average of 7 years played in the league per player ("More Years Playing Football, Greater Risk of Brain Disease: Study”).  Their control group was a set of 16 non-athletes that were examined to find what no head-to-head contact would mean for a brain.  This study found that the more a singular player had played in the NFL the more inflammation and CTE was present in the autopsy.  This makes a clear trend line that the more someone puts their body through such a physical battle, the more they are risking for later in their post-football lives.  

According to those studies a simple argument a parent can put forth to say that it’s alright for a kid to play football just through their youth is to say stop after high school and never go back to the sport.  However, there is one recent story that has broken about an early onset of CTE.  A high school football star in Iowa named Zac Easter had just finished his varsity career and had no intentions to play on the next level.  Therefore, he had nothing to worry about CTE, right?  Wrong.  Zac ended up killing himself after secretly writing and leaving pages upon pages of his diary in his room.  He followed in Junior Seau’s steps and left his brain unharmed to ensure that it will be examined by doctors to see what was wrong with it.  He had collected three concussions within one season and was cut-off after the third one by his team doctor.  However, those three were enough for his head (“The CTE Diaries: The Life and Death of a High School Football Player Killed by Concussions | GQ”).  He kept all of his problems and issues close to himself so as to just get through his days as smoothly as possible.  Eventually, his parents found and read his journal and learned everything their son was hiding from them.  This unfortunate story is one of the scariest anecdotes in the conversation because it happened to such a young life, who had stepped away from the game at a very young age, just like millions upon millions of kids do every year.  This story should be enough in it of itself for parents not to allow their children to play this brutal sport.  

The recent studies being implemented by scientists to examine these damaged brains are publicizing the real effects that these collisions cause to the brain.  Never before has this been such a problem because these stories have never been in the headlines.  Parents should not allow their kids to start football because of the CTE that can, and will, build up in their brain and change the personalities of them forever.  There have been countless more unfortunate stories that have come out of these studies.  Hopefully, for Americas sake, someone can find a way to make this beloved game much safer for anyone involved.
