by Glenn Stout
Thing is, the actual sport is completely different. Uncontrolled chaos. Players of varying sizes and strength run at full speed. They trip and shove and hit and fall, pinballing around at ever-changing heights and angles. When I showed a “Heads Up” tackling video to a pair of college football players, both shook their heads. When I asked former NFL player Nate Jackson about it, he laughed. Knocking someone else to the ground, he explained, means getting leverage on them. Which means getting low. Which means dropping your shoulders. Drop your shoulders, and your head will follow.
I also asked longtime Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist and former All–Big Ten defensive back Rick Telander about “Heads Up.” His reply was dryly incredulous: “Does the ball carrier cooperate with you?”
“Have I seen behavior modification not work?” Guskiewicz says. “Absolutely. It doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. But I’ve seen it work.”
In fairness to Guskiewicz, his program is far more involved than the NFL’s youth tackling clinics. This season, players at nearby Chapel Hill High School have been outfitted with special helmets that measure the location and intensity of hits to the head. When a player suffers a series of what Guskiewicz calls “bad hits”—that is, head hits that are too hard, too frequent, or too often on the crown of the helmet, based on deviations from previously established positional averages—trainers and coaches will study video with the player and attempt to make changes to their collision technique.
“During the first half of the season, we identify who has a bad hit profile,” he says. “We put them into a coaching intervention that links video footage and data from accelerometers in their helmets. Then we study them for the second half of the season to see if we can reduce those bad hit numbers and put them into safer play.”
One problem: the force threshold for “bad hits” is largely a matter of guesswork—while some studies suggest that hits over 60 to 80 g’s significantly increase the likelihood of concussion, there is no hard-and-fast rule. One player can absorb a 100 g blow and appear perfectly fine; another can take a 30 g hit and be knocked out cold. No hits are good hits. Moreover, basing the “bad hits” frequency threshold on positional averages seems odd. A defensive back who absorbs 250 hits to the head during the first half of a season might be in line for an intervention; a defensive lineman who absorbs the same total might not. Are their brains all that different?
More doubts. I express them to Guskiewicz. I tell him that both the “Heads Up” push and new rules across football penalizing certain types of helmet hits seem like a replay of the 1970s, when football responded to criticism from the American Medical Association by banning “butt-blocking” (blows delivered with the face mask or front and top of the helmet to an opponent in close line play) and “face-tackling” (driving the face mask or front and top of the helmet into a runner), all while calling on coaches to teach “correct, head-up blocking and tackling.”
Has anything really changed?
“We have a kid at the high school who I already know—based on watching video from last year on kickoffs—has a bad hits profile,” Guskiewicz says. “We’re already starting to work with him for this season. I can show you video footage of a guy who changed his behavior in three weeks. We’ve been working on this for eight years. We didn’t come up with it overnight.”
Suppose Guskiewicz is right. Suppose he’s on to something. Sensor-equipped helmets are expensive. Video intervention takes time. Guskiewicz’s lab is partially funded by the NFL, and staffed by paid research assistants. What about the typical Pop Warner squad? Or high schools that already are facing budget shortfalls? I’m reminded of something journalist Stefan Fatsis said at the Aspen Institute roundtable:
You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game in the country?
I’m also reminded of something else Guskiewicz told me, the first thing out of his mouth when I asked him if children should play the sport.
“It’s not for everyone,” he said.
Monet shakes her head. She knows it sounds ridiculous. Looking back, she really should have known better. After all, she once watched her brother Mike get knocked unconscious during a Lions game. Her mom ran down to the team’s bench. Monet stayed put and bawled. Sitting in the very same Pontiac Silverdome skybox, she also saw Detroit lineman Mike Utley taken off the field on a stretcher after suffering a 1991 spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Monet felt a chill, a queasy sensation in her stomach. But never mind that.
“I honestly didn’t realize that football was violent,” she says. “It was just football. Even now, with my [family member] suffering, when I watch a game and they’re trying to make calls about players hitting too hard, fining them, I don’t know if they should do that. It’s like, ‘That’s football!’”
On the same afternoon that Utley lost the use of his limbs, Mike Farr caught his first and only NFL touchdown pass. That’s football. Three years later, as paramedics treated Monet following a car accident, Mike saw his bloodied sister on a stretcher and cried. He immediately thought of Utley. That’s football.
Two summers ago, Monet was watching the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony with a relative. The one who suspects he has CTE. He recalled constant headaches, keeping Advil in his football pants, popping pills on the field; he remembered washing down caffeine pills with cola in the locker room after games, the better to not fall into a woozy sleep. He hardly knew what concussions were, let alone what they could do. He didn’t care. He just wanted to play the game.
That’s football too.
“I always say it’s like a drug or alcohol addiction,” Monet says. “Leaving the sport is like trying to quit cold turkey. It’s very difficult to lose it.”
Monet saw her relative’s life crumble. Weight loss. Erratic behavior. Bad decisions. Family problems. A short stint in a mental health facility. In public, he was charismatic and charming; in private, brooding and lethargic. He all but lived in a basement. No one in the family knew what was wrong. No one knew what to do about it. “At first it was just like, ‘What happened to you?’” Monet says. “‘Snap out of it. It’s not that big of a deal!’ But now we see that he can’t snap out of it.”
The family closed ranks. Wouldn’t let Monet’s relative be alone. They started reading. Talking. Reaching out. Monet contacted former NFL running back Dorsey Levens, who was producing a documentary film on football and brain damage. Mel Sr. found himself attending more and more funerals for men he played football with. Strong, proud men, like Hall of Famer John Mackey. Mackey was the first head of the players’ union. Monet’s father looked up to him. Calls him “a god.” He died at 69, after struggling with dementia. Mel Sr. started emailing articles to his daughter, stories about former players suffering from mental problems. Wow. Did you read about this guy?
Monet came across a story about the first concussion lawsuits filed against the NFL. She learned that former league commissioner Paul Tagliabue created a committee in the mid-1990s to study football-induced brain damage. That the committee put out a series of since-discredited scientific papers asserting that concussions posed neither short- nor long-term health risks, defying both independent research and common sense. That league doctors used those papers to justify and continue the longtime practice of clearing concussed players to return to action in the same games they were injured in, increasing the odds of lasting damage. That league scientists suggested in print that the same practice might be fine for college and high school players. She learned that the NFL had waged a scientific and public relations war to downplay and dismiss the link between football and brain damage, and that Goodell had presided over a pattern of ongoing denial—one that exten
ded all the way down to youth football, and by extension, her son Parker.
This was football? Monet was furious.
“I had no idea about the first NFL committee,” she says. “I had chill bumps when I read that. My eyes turned red. Nobody wants to admit the fact that their organization is costing lives and people having decent lives. Who wants to go to bed saying, ‘That was my fault’? It’s so much easier to say it’s not.”
Last year, former NFL linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. At the league’s direction, scientists from the National Institutes of Health subsequently examined his brain. They diagnosed him with CTE. Publicly, NIH doctors declined to speculate on the cause of Seau’s disease; privately, they reportedly told Seau’s family that football was responsible.
Monet’s brother Mel Jr. played football with Seau. Monet attended the grand opening of Seau’s San Diego restaurant. Both were watching television news coverage on the day of Seau’s death, along with Mike and their mother. During a live press conference outside Seau’s home, his mother, Luisa, stood at a podium. She broke down in grief.
Take me! she sobbed. Take me!
“My whole family was in tears, watching her crying,” Monet says. “As a parent, as a mom, that was the hardest thing to watch.”
Imagine this: A pharmaceutical company invents a new drug. A drug with many benefits. It increases cardiovascular fitness, facilitates friendship, creates feelings of excitement, euphoria, and community pride. As a side effect, however, the drug also produces varying degrees of acute and chronic brain damage in an indeterminate number of users, for reasons that are only crudely understood.
The drug, of course, is football. Which is why Lewis Margolis can’t help but ask: should anyone’s child play the sport?
“I’m not saying that everyone should be placed into bubbles,” he says. “But we have enough evidence now to know that there are harmful consequences from these traumatic brain injuries. We know that. And kids are exposed to this. To continue to allow children to participate [in football] in an unencumbered way, to me, is no different than exposing them to an untested medicine or medical device. Only it’s being done without the tools, procedures, and protections essential to medical research.”
A public health professor at the University of North Carolina, Margolis specializes in maternal and child health. His campus office is a 10-minute walk from Guskiewicz’s. His views on youth football might as well be from another planet. In an opinion article published on the website Inside Higher Ed, Margolis argued that allowing children to play tackle football is not only the equivalent of an uncontrolled, nationwide research project in concussion medicine and science, but also an unethical project that parallels the infamous Tuskegee Study—in which the U.S. Public Health Service monitored but did not treat a group of rural African Americans suffering from syphilis over a period of decades.
“That article raised the eyebrows of people around here,” Guskiewicz says. “The analogy is absurd and embarrassing.”
Guskiewicz has a point: likening football to venereal disease is pretty out there, even as a thought exercise. Margolis admits as much. He also notes that parents, coaches, school administrators, and concussion researchers all have the best interests of children at heart—unlike the Tuskegee scientists, who didn’t even tell their research subjects what was happening.
Still, Margolis maintains that the football-to-research comparison is apt. And he’s not alone. According to the book League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for the Truth, the NFL once contracted with a bioengineering firm to help run a first-of-its-kind epidemiological study of concussions in professional football. A memo from the firm read as follows:
A major obstacle to head injury research is the unavailability of willing test subjects. The NFL has graciously sponsored a research program offering its players as those living subjects.
“Just because you’re doing something with goodwill doesn’t make it ethical,” Margolis says. “If Kevin [Guskiewicz’s] research or my research generates a risk, then we have to ask, ‘Is that risk acceptable?’ Is an 80 percent increased risk of brain damage acceptable? Fifty percent? Ten percent? If football generates a risk, then we have to ask the same question. This is a discussion for public health. Not just coaches.”
Public health focuses on preventing predictable problems. On stopping harm before it happens. Last year, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the sale of Buckyballs, small magnetic toys that can pinch intestines and require surgery when swallowed by children. Federal regulators enacted the ban following 22 swallowing cases over a three-year span. By contrast, youth football has produced far more than 22 concussions among children over the last three years. Seven high school football players have died this year, five from brain injuries and two from spine and neck injuries.
Yet society’s response—from the NFL to Pop Warner—has been akin to running a yellow traffic light. Look into the problem, be more aware, spend some money on research, change a few rules. But keep driving. Margolis thinks it should be more like stopping on red: figure out the risks of football in a controlled setting under established clinical standards, and then decide if children should participate.
This goes double for schools.
Schools, Margolis says, have two primary duties. Nurture young minds. And protect the children in their care. Hence, homework. Study halls. Anti-bullying campaigns. Not allowing drugs or guns on campus. Schools receive public funds—and are tax-exempt institutions—to help carry out these duties. No high school would start and sponsor an official mixed martial arts team. Not without provoking parent outrage.
What makes football—a known vector of student brain damage—so different?
“I’m not saying sports don’t belong on campuses,” he says. “But take UNC. How do they tolerate that they are knowingly sending kids out there [to play football] with some risk—and we can disagree on the level—when it’s not consistent with the mission of the institution?”
In medical research, children cannot legally agree to participate in studies. Their parents or guardians have to give permission—and even then, the consent has to be informed. Participants have to know what they’re getting into. How much do most families know about brain damage and football? How much can they know, given both scientific uncertainty about the sport’s risks and the football industry’s concerted, ongoing effort to downplay those risks, particularly to children?
Last year, Goodell gave a speech on football safety at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. He cited a recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), debunking the notion that NFL players had shorter life spans than the general population. He did not mention a second NIOSH study suggesting that pro football players were four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. During an appearance on Face the Nation last February, he was asked to acknowledge the link between football and brain damage—and promptly ducked the question, stating that “we’re going to let the medical individuals make those points.”
About those medical individuals: sports concussion expert Cantu is an adviser to the league’s health and safety committee. He recommends no tackle football for children under age 14. He was not present at a recent NFL-sponsored “Football Safety for Moms” clinic in Chicago. Instead, the league rolled out Chicago Bears neuropsychological consultant Elizabeth Pieroth, who, according to the Associated Press, “presented checklists for recognizing concussion symptoms and recommendations for treatment, but suggested on balance that ‘boys like to hit things’ and without proper channels for their aggression, they might do other things like drive too fast or drink too much.”
None of this should be surprising. In the mid-1990s, then NFL commissioner Tagliabue worried that football was losing cultural cachet. That the game wasn’t cool. The league hired top executives from MTV, who reportedly drew up a marketing plan entitled “Game Plan 1997.”
The document addressed Tagliabue’s concerns:
Nothing can be more important than how we manage young people (particularly ages 6–11 . . .) into our fan continuum and begin to migrate them toward becoming avid/committed fans . . . Critical action: Generate early interest and enthusiasm. Transform/convert their casual interest into commitment. Amplify to avidity.
As one of the former MTV executives explained to New Yorker writer John Seabrook, “It’s all about getting a football, this unusual-looking object, into a kid’s hands as soon as you can. Six years old, if possible. You want to get a football in their hands before someone puts a basketball in their hands, or a hockey stick or a tennis racquet or a golf club.”
Between 1998 and 2007, the NFL reportedly spent more than $100 million promoting youth football. Former league director of youth development Scott Lancaster said the league’s strategy was to “take out all the negatives and emphasize the positives” of the sport. At a 2005 youth marketing conference titled “Making Your Brand Cool and Mom Acceptable,” Lancaster also said that children were important to the NFL, because they would someday become adult football fans with discretionary income.
Four years later, Goodell was invited to a congressional hearing on brain trauma. He was scheduled to appear with the father of a Texas high school quarterback who had died after suffering a concussion. According to League of Denial, NFL lobbyist Jeff Miller was apoplectic. He demanded that Goodell be placed on a different panel. Congressional staffers acquiesced.
