My Thoughts On the NFL

I have said and alluded to many times on my blog the fact that I think America's priorities generally are out of whack and I don't think it is more clear when we look at America's fixation/worship of football. Particularly when the glorification of it supersedes prioritizing academics time and again. And it's worsened by a corporation, the National Football League, who is at the center of it all and has an inordinate amount of power and influence in our country.

I think the place to start is the area that is most egregious and concerning, their handling of CTE amongst its players. CTE is a brain condition that results of repeated head injuries and concussions and it stands for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and unfortunately is all too common amongst football players and the condition was discovered by a gifted Nigerian forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu who was portrayed by Will Smith in the Hollywood movie Concussion in 2015. And he has always emphasized, much to the chagrin of those who profit of it, the dangers of this disease that can come for any athlete involved in contact sports such as football, wresting, boxing, etc.

And these findings largely came as a result of Dr. Omalu's decision to examine the brain of the recently deceased legendary NFL star "Iron Mike" Webster, and after he died (as this is the only way to examine the brain for this condition) and what he discovered was a game changer.

Webster who'd passed away at 50 had a great deal of neurological/cognitive troubles after his retirement from the league. He was absolutely dysfunctional: He could not eat, was generally lethargic, would wander around the city of Pittsburg sleeping in random places, would harass strangers by exclaiming "I'm gonna kill em," would often tase himself into unconsciousness amongst other outlandish behaviors and he was far from the only NFL retiree to develop serious issues with regards to brain health.

And after methodical dissection of the recently deceased's brain he found that there were tau proteins that harm moods and cognitive functioning which were also found in the brains of departed boxers leading him to submit a paper which eventually became a medical journal coining the term CTE.

And as you can imagine the NFL did not take this sitting down and proceeded to tear apart the lives and reputations of Dr. Omalu and other physicians and scientists who were studying this condition. They initially tried to force a retraction but Dr. Omalu and his counterparts prevailed. Additionally they continued to sow doubt about the greatly substantiated science as well as attempting to shun and disenfranchise him by barring him from participating in the summit where brain scientists were presenting their findings on contact in football brain injuries/conditions. And continued its harassment of him and others as his findings gained traction.

Furthermore they tried to bury the most damning evidence of all: there was a study of 202 deceased former football players' brains, 111 played in the NFL, but out of the 202 177 had CTE and out of the 111 that played in the league 110 were ridden with CTE which amounts to 99%. And CTE often comes with memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and progressive dementia. And its almost unanimously agreed upon that the policies and practices often times don't adhere to the advice/recommendations of the specialists.

So what on earth would make a young man willfully endure this and take this big of a risk now that CTE is public knowledge? Well perhaps this partly a cultural fixation on football as I mentioned earlier as well as the prospect of fame and fortune but its even more so that many young men view sports as the sole pathway to success and much like the military you tend to see a disproportionate population of people of color and economically underprivileged kids.

So much so that I would argue that the league exploits them. Black athletes constitute 70% of the league and the average player earns $2 million dollars a year and the owner's income ranges from $20-$500 million dollars yearly. And the heads of the NFL are naturally more concerned with profit over the safety and well being of their players, allowing them to suffer horrific injuries unlike that of virtually any other mainstream sport.

So one of the ways the league has chosen to remedy this is by awarding retirees with neurocognitive issues a cash settlement but there are serious allegations of racial discrimination including a practice called "race norming" to determine whether or not an ex athlete is eligible for compensation. And they use a baseline to determine cognitive damage from a person's time at the NFL and the baseline they begin with for black athletes are significantly lower than their white counterparts operating under the assumption that blacks inherently have a lower IQ and weaker baseline cognitive abilities. But they must have the same neurocognitive decline as white players in order to qualify. Despite what this debunked pseudoscience cognitive differences across racial lines has actually been attributed to the devastating mental health impacts of poverty not biology. So essentially black former players have to suffer greater brain damage than whites to get the same settlement.

Now for many this critique of an iconic piece of American culture maybe a difficult pill to swallow but I think its important to remind ourselves that the NFL is just a corporation. They largely don't have any regard for the well being of their players let alone our society as a whole, they are after profit and nothing more. And when corporations go unchecked they tank our economy, distort our values and destroy the environment. We, collectively have to redirect our priorities toward education, justice and peace not this illusion we've been so foolishly invested in.

Ott, Tim. "The Real Story Behind 'Concussion' Dr. Bennet Omalu and his battle to raise awareness about CTE is the inspiration behind the 2015 movie starring Will Smith."

Biography, June 2020, www.biography.com/news/concussion-movie-true-story.

"The NFL Tried to Intimidate Scientists Studying the Link between Pro Football and Traumatic Brain Injury." ucusa, Oct. 2017, www.ucsusa.org/resources/nfl-tried-intimidate-scientists-studying-link-between-pro-football-and-traumatic-brain.

Brown, Allie. "The NFL Is Racist." Michigan Daily, Nov. 2018, www.michigandaily.com/mic/nfl-racist/.

Natan, Ben. "The NFL is using racist pseudoscience to punish former players." Bleeding Green Nation , Mar. 2021, www.bleedinggreennation.com/2021/3/10/22323436/nfl-using-racist-pseudoscience-punish-former-players.