KJS DC 10-26
I was a college football player. I have had four concussions — that I know of. The ones that are lights-out, the ones that sent me to the sideline, and the ones no one noticed. There were hits I don’t remember. There were mornings when something felt different and I moved on.
Today, Boston University published a study in JAMA Network Open. Among roughly 2,360 former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023, an estimated 75% had chronic traumatic encephalopathy — CTE — at death.
Three in four.
I want to put that number in context because I don’t think “three in four” lands the way it should. Let’s compare it to what we know about occupational disease.
The senior author of the study, Boston University biostatistics professor Yorghos Tripodis, said: “No other environmental or occupational exposure ever studied is known to have increased dementia risk at death by that amount.”
No other. In the history of occupational medicine.
Black lung — the disease that defined a century of industrial harm to coal miners — affects roughly 10% of underground miners with 25 or more years of exposure, rising to about 32% in the hardest-hit regions of central Appalachia. Long-term heavy smokers develop COPD at rates approaching 50%. These are the diseases we built regulatory frameworks around. These are the conditions that moved Congress to act.
CTE in NFL players: 75%.
The only conditions that come close are genetic — Huntington’s disease, which is nearly 100% in gene carriers, or Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s, which produces dementia in over 90% of cases by later life. Those are written into someone’s DNA. They are not something people chose, trained for, were recruited for, were paid for, and were celebrated for.
The sports industry has or has not been keeping this story at bay is the question your gut is asking.
Football is a choice that millions of American boys make — or more accurately, a choice that is made for them by parents, coaches, recruiters, and a culture that has treated the game as a civic religion for a hundred years.
The study looked at former players who died with an average of five years of NFL experience. Five years. That’s not a career defined by extreme longevity. That’s the ordinary professional football player. Researchers note that CTE is found in less than 1% of donors to community brain banks — the general population. The gap between 1% in the general population and 75% in NFL players is not a statistical nuance. It’s an indictment.
The NFL told CBS News it “continuously strives to make the game of football safer, including by implementing strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts.”
This is pretty much the tobacco industry’s format applied to brain disease. We are working on it. We take it seriously. As the product continues to be sold.
Experts can agree the results demonstrate the need to increase efforts to support families, diagnose CTE during life, and treat CTE-related symptoms. Band-aids and rhetoric. Shielding from liability will be the goal of the sports in all this.
As former players, we live with the impacts from the game. I am not calling for the end of football. What I am calling for is the end of the pretense that this is a sport with manageable risks that informed adults choose with clear eyes.
We need to talk about when children start playing. We need to talk about what the game does to developing brains in the years well before the NFL, when the hits are just as real and the protections are far less. We need to talk about what it means that the most popular sport in the country has an occupational brain disease rate that no other exposure in human history has ever produced.
I took the hits and I gave them and I loved it. But I don’t know yet what they cost me.
Three in four of the men who played professionally have paid with their brains.
That is not a footnote. It’s the game.
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