For decades in football, the athletes participating in the game and people everywhere were unaware of the massive destruction to the brain that football can place on an athlete. Players have been suffering concussions since the sport began but not until recently, now that players are dying from brain damage, has it directly impacted the NFL. The NFL acted to try to reduce the number of hits to the head therefore reducing the number of concussions suffered by players. While their effort did not reduce concussions like they had hoped it was a significant step in a positive direction. However, simple rule changes, to a naturally violent game, are not likely to be very effective. So if the NFL does not use its seemingly endless amount of money and resources to help solve the main issues with the concussion crisis it will eventually see concussions be the cause of its decline from America’s Sport. The NFL, when it comes to concussions and their effect on the league, has a few main aspects that are the most influential the NFL’s popularity and perception and could ultimately be the decline of the NFL. These aspects are the deaths of players caused by brain diseases, the reaction of the NFL to concussions and deaths, the reaction of the players to those and the way the NFL handles it, and lastly the reaction of parents of young children as well as the children’s reaction to concussions and what they can do to a person. The NFL, to prevent its own decline, will have to take serious action and use all available resources like new scientific advancements, coaches, families, money, etc. to help solve or at least greatly diminish the strong aspects of the crisis.

The NFL’s biggest problem when it comes to concussions on players and the brain damage they receive from so many hits to the head is brain disease called CTE. CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy and is a degenerative brain disease that has been linked to the NFL and their players because it is mostly caused by repetitive blows to the head over an extended period of time. Players who get this disease from those repetitive blows to the head do not typically see symptoms coming on until years after they have finished playing. However once the symptoms start to arise then the player’s brain and life will go downhill shortly thereafter. The symptoms of this disease begin with disorientation, dizziness and headaches then progresses to memory loss, erratic behavior, social instability, poor judgement, and after that it leads to progressive dementia and extreme feelings of suicide (“What is CTE”). This disease has been plaguing the NFL, players, and their families for decades and does not seem to be slowing down any time soon. Ken Stabler, a Hall of Fame quarterback in the NFL, is the latest fatality in the war against CTE, “ An analysis of his brain after his death by the Boston University of School of Medicine found that he had Stage 3 CTE. Boston University has found the disease in 7 NFL quarterbacks’ brains.”(Luckerson). Ken Stabler’s confirmed diagnosis of CTE thanks to the research done at the BU School of Medicine furthers the idea that the NFL, concussions, and CTE are linked. Stabler is now the seventh player at a position that takes few hits compared to the rest of the team to die from the brain disease, one can only imagine how many safeties or wide receivers have died from CTE.  Boston University also did research on other players brains as well, “Of the 94 former players' brains that BU has examined, 90 had some form of CTE”(Luckerson). It is results like this that seem to be bad omens for the NFL and their future. However, recently something extreme was discovered in the scientific part of the crisis that could mean preventing the decline of the NFL. This extreme discovery is that with using low amounts of radioactivity researchers and doctors are now able to identify signs of CTE in people while there are still breathing. A USA Today article talks about the discovery and with the neurosurgeon that discovered it and what it could mean, “‘The hope would be if you could identify them while they are in the early states that they could be treated,' said Bailes, who describes the search for a way to identify the disease in living people as the ‘Holy Grail’ of CTE research (Mihoces).”’

Another aspect of the concussion dilemma that the NFL must face thanks to concussions and CTE are the families of former players. The families, who had to watch them go from the person they knew and loved to the mentally uncontrollable person that CTE turned them in to. Dave Duerson, a former NFL great who was on the revered 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl team, died of CTE and his death sparked an NFLPA executive to talk about CTE and its effect on families, ‘“According to DeMaurice Smith,the executive director of the NFL Players Association, “Duerson’s having C.T.E. ‘makes it abundantly clear what the cost of football is for the men who played and the families.”’(Drysdale). What Smith is trying to say in this limited quote is that because of players like Dave Duerson, Junior Seau, Ken Stabler we are now able to empathize with what their families were going through while their loved one progresses through the stages of CTE. It is because of this that families of former NFL players in the past half-decade or so have been coming out in larger groups to sue the NFL and make them take accountability for what’s happening to their players. The Seau family is one of the families that has been leading this wave of players coming out and suing the NFL for neglecting the fact that the players are dying because of damage suffered during their career. Junior Seau is a Hall of Fame linebacker, who in 2012, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a shotgun. After the discovery that he was suffering from CTE as well his family went to work, “The Seau family alleges that the NFL intentionally hid the link between repeated blows to the head and long-term cognitive issues. the family hopes it will ‘send a message that the N.F.L. needs to care for its former players...and make the game safer for future generations.”’(Drysdale). This suit that the Seau family brought against the NFL is one of hundreds of other players that are taking the NFL to court alleging that they knowingly were not doing enough to protect their players. Now although doctors have been given the ability to identify CTE in people while they are still living, the NFL still must deal with the implications of the lack of steps effort to make the game safer like suits from players’ families like the Seau family. The NFL should have some of the least trouble with this aspect of the concussion crisis because although it keeps getting sued, as long as the season is still on the NFL will be able to compensate former players families with ease.  

With all this criticism that the NFL faces about how it does not do anything to protect its players they decided to make some rule changes they believed would make the game safer and reduce the amount of head injuries. This brings us to the next aspect of the NFL’s fight against concussions to stay atop the American Sports spectrum, the changes the NFL makes to the game because of concussions. Because of the criticism the NFL faces from the families of former players, fans, and people everywhere about the lack of care for player safety the NFL tried to make its stand against concussions with rule changes, “Since 2010, alone, the NFL…has imposed new rules to limit head and neck contact with defenseless players…in an attempt to reduce the number of head injuries…Despite the NFL’s best efforts, however, football is an extremely physical and violent game, in which concussions and head injuries are inevitable.”(Drysdale).  This and the part of the crisis that follows is where things get tricky for the NFL. The NFL continued to make rule changes following 2010 and still makes changes quite often, if not every year. While these rule changes could have serious influence on the NFL’s crisis they will need to the cooperation of the players who cause these violent hits to decrease the number of concussions. 

Another aspect of the NFL’s fight against concussions to stay on top the sports world is one that the NFL is concerned about the most because it is the one they have the least control over, the players. The NFL can do all it wants to make the game safer if the players are going to play the way they want then it is going to be extremely difficult for the NFL to prevent head injuries. In order for the NFL’s rule changes and initiatives to make the game safer to work the players have to buy in too,  “Players continue to hide concussion symptoms from coaches and trainers to avoid being taken out of a highly contested game and possibly even losing their starting positions permanently.”(Drysdale).  This is where this concussion situation starts to get a little ironic. Although the NFL made these rule changes to make the game safer for the players, the players do not see it that way. During their careers players make money off the games that they play in, so if someone’s about to miss a game because of a concussion they might try to hide symptoms so they can play. However, this defeats the purpose of having the rule changes to make the game safer for the players if the player are not even going to protect themselves. Like it is for the NFL, the one thing that will allow concussions to continue to a negative effect on players is if they deny that there is something wrong, “Some players openly admit that they will continue to play violently despite the new rules, while others still deny that the NFL even has a concussion problem” (Drysdale). This aspect is the one that is the most difficult for the NFL to find a solution because even with all these players dying from head injuries, most players in the current era do not want to play in a way that deviates from what they were taught as a kid playing Pop-Warner, which most of the time in this era, is to hit the guy with the ball as hard as they can. To help incentivize players to follow the rule changes the NFL used multi-game suspensions and significant fines to punish players who deviated from the new rules. They also took it out of their hands with trainers and doctors on scene and in the booths for every game (Drysdale).

The final aspect in the NFL’s fight against concussions to keep itself thriving and prevent its downfall is that of concussions at the youth level. If there are kids that are playing high school, middle school, and even pee-wee football that are getting concussions and facing brain damage at that early of an age the NFL is losing its future due to concussions before these players even make it to the college ranks. While the brain injuries are the most important part of this when it comes the NFL’s future, the most influential aspect, that is when it comes to youth football are the parents. It is clear that the NFL’s concussion crisis has spread concern all over the country from household to household because more and more parents are seeing other people’s children getting severe head trauma from playing. There is this statistic on pee-wee football that represents this perfectly, “The decline in youth football participation has in recent years been stark — enrollment in Pop Warner leagues alone dropped 9.5 percent between 2010 and 2012 — and it's a change that experts say is clearly linked to the NFL's high-profile concussion problem”(Drummond).  This sharp decline clearly conveys the thought that an increasing amount of mothers and fathers every year are not letting their children play Pop Warner football because of the concussion epidemic that is plaguing the NFL and now football in general at all levels. The solution that the NFL has come up with and implemented for this aspect is to change the way that coaches teach their youth players to tackle using their Heads-Up Football initiative. This program, is designed to first teach the coaches of these Pop-Warner teams the correct way that they should teach their players how to tackle and then move the way up to all levels so eventually players entering the NFL in the future will only know how to play “Heads-Up” football (Health and Safety: Heads Up Football).

While the football is the nation’s most popular sport where people watch at all levels religiously it has become increasingly difficult for people to follow it because its participants are dying from injuries they sustained while playing. The concussion epidemic since the beginning of the century has spiked and will continue to grow as players and families decide not to play because they fear the dangers of the game and what it could do to themselves or to their child. For this epidemic to be dissolved there is going to have to be serious changes that not only the NFL has to make but its players do as well. To help solve this crisis the NFL should and needs to use its available resources to fight off the concussion epidemic. It should use the new advancements in technology like being able to identify CTE in a living person, use rule changes to help make the game safer for the players even if it is not the way that they were taught or how they would like to play, use the endless amount of money it earns to settle with the former players’ families, and lastly use the programs, like Heads Up Football, that they have implemented to make the game safer starting at Pop-Warner and working its way up eventually to reach all levels of football, even the NFL itself.
