Football has been taking over American culture and is becoming just as popular as our previously named, national pastime, 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 for, or to, someone.  It can teach a young male the art of working with a team, for a goal greater than any one person.  However, recently scientists have been looking at the post-career brain effects football can have on athletes and what has come out is very alarming.  Ex-athletes’ lives have been ruined because of the injuries that they have sustained through their years of playing 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 their brain that they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

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 is a great thing to be involved in such a sport.  In many movies the ‘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 the possibility of such 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 athletes are done living out their adult dream, they seem to get more than what they signed up for. 

With today’s technology, scientists have been investigating deeper into a trend regarding how ex-football players are behaving.  After further research they have found a build-up of tau, which is causing a disease call Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.  Tau is a type of protein that builds up in a brain after repeated trauma, and slowly kills brain cells.  This is a disease very much like Alzheimer’s, but it is developing in people far younger than the age that Alzheimer’s could be expected.  It is a disease that makes people have abrupt mood swings, memory loss, and also could develop into dementia (CNN).  This disease can, and has, gone 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 alive.  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 to diagnose this disease, which really shows how new this disease is to society as a whole.  Unfortunately, at that point it is obviously too late to mean anything since the patient already passed.  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.  Basic questions about this trend line could be if 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 as if 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.  Selection bias or not, these symptoms are not occurring to non-athletes, therefore doctors are forced to think that CTE has a direct correlation with violent sports, specifically football.

The traction that this disease has been grabbing has effectively found its way all the way down 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 children entering a game with such a dangerous 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 retired NFL stars.  Parents now have to make the decision of either letting their children play youth football and risking a serious injury that could affect every aspect of their life, or just hold their kids out of the sport.  In this case, a parent could be holding their child back on the opportunity of a lifetime to make long-time friends from such a young age.  This question is being raised by parents everywhere 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 personally, or just talking on the matter, they have made their point of view known.  First off, the biggest name to step back into the spotlight and talk about the new findings has been 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 his son play football (“Brett Favre Opens Up About Memory Loss, Football Fears”).  This is a very significant statement because of who it is coming from.  This man has 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.  Favre was a leader on the field and is a lock for the Hall of Fame, but he would never let his son strap on a pair of shoulder pads?  This could set a precedent for the NFL that it definitely does not want.  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 was able to juggle between two different professional sport careers at the same time.  He played in both the NFL and the 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 as possible.  These different stories are all significant because they help to create a bad reputation for the entire game of football.  Specifically, the NFL knows that their athletes were all youth football players at some point and if parents start a trend to not allow their kids to play football during their youth, the NFL will experience the effects soon after. 

A third NFL star that was severely affected by the symptoms of CTE was Junior Seau.  He was a great athlete that was very involved in his community, however CTE symptoms took over his life and eventually changed everything that he was about.  During his NFL career, Seau knew that his body was going to have physical damage from all of the hits.  In an interview he was quoted saying,  “You have to sacrifice your body.  When we are 50, 40 years-old we won’t be able to walk” (PBSFrontline).  However, there is no way that he could have predicted, or prepared for, for what actually happened to him.  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 so 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 his behavior scared them because it was as if 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 even drove his SUV off the side of a road at one point as well.  The severity of these changes in behavior are very intense and it is all because Seau first began to play football early in his life.  CTE clearly effected this ex-NFL star so much so that he didn’t even seem to be acting like himself at all and he just ended it all because of that.  These actions ripped through his family as he was a huge piece of all of their lives.  

On the other hand, not all ex-NFL players feel the same way 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 have to know that.  He even went so far to say that when his sons began playing football, he sat them down and told them what the odds they get hurt were (“Ray Lewis: ‘I’m Not Worried About Concussions’”).  This way of thinking is thought provoking because it questions the idea of the amount of liability the NFL must hold on player injury.  If there are legitimate statistics saying how high of a chance an athlete has to get hurt, and they still decide to play, how can the player feel as if they are not responsible for this happening?  Lewis’ perspective on allowing his kids to make the decision to play or not is definitely a different idea than most other parents.  Most parents should not put that amount of confidence in their child’s decision making skills at such a young age.  Many kids begin playing football at the age of eight or nine, and to let them make that drastic of a decision at such a young age is petrifying.  The amount of science that has circulated from these studies shows why Ray Lewis’ theory is wrong and very outdated.  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 tau, therefore they thought they could alter their perspective.  There are currently youth-aged football playing kids who are having their brains looked at by a group of scientists to test what a single season of football does at a time.  This research was started by Dr. Christopher Whitlow, who is with Wake Forest University.  The 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 competed in the NFL the more inflammation and the presence of tau (how doctors can diagnose 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 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 regarding 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.  It is clear that the steps to diagnosing and treating his concussions were not followed strictly enough (or were just not present).  Evidently, since the current systems are failing the athletes, many doctors and leagues are trying to figure out better treatment techniques (The Handbook of Sport Neuropsychology).  Although this has always been difficult because when an injury occurs during a game a player’s mindset is always to get back on the field as quickly as possible.      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 thousands of kids do every year.  This story should be enough in and 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, develop in their brain and change their personalities forever.  There have been countless more unfortunate stories that have come out of these studies.  Hopefully, for America’s sake, someone can find a way to make this beloved game much safer for everyone involved.
