Football is the most commonly watched and played sport in the United States, with its electric plays, mind-boggling comebacks and bone-crushing tackles, However, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a massive problem in football on the professional, collegiate and youth levels. CTE is a widespread result of the sport’s physical and head-based mentality and has crippling and potentially life-changing effects.
Much is already being done to combat this immense issue. A large sum of money has been put towards creating new rules and doing research on new helmet technology, aiming to dampen the impact of the large blows to the head that often cause concussions. In the past few years, the NFL has made multiple rule changes guided by player safety, including new kickoff and “use of the helmet” rules.
Specifically, this use of the helmet rule prevents a player from lowering his head to align with his neck and spine when making a tackle, an extremely vulnerable position. A separate rule has also made it illegal for a player to lead with their head at any time, attempting to accomplish the same thing. While these changes have made it harder to play the game and even upset players, the NFL sees them as vital for player safety.
Also recently, the league made both position-specific helmets and “guardian caps” legal for in- game play, if a player chooses to use them. These position-specific innovations provide extra protection in areas that are more sensitive for certain players. Guardian caps are for any player who wants them; a soft shell that goes over the preexisting helmet and reduces head acceleration in a collision by up to 40%, according to Guardian, the company that makes them. However, most players choose not to use them in-game, citing them as throwing their balance off and being visually unappealing.
Rules and helmets continue to evolve every year and are making the player experience much safer. “The rate of improvement of helmet models has continued at an accelerated pace, multiplying nine times since the start of the annual testing program,” leading to an “average sustained 25% reduction in concussions across the last five seasons,” according to the NFL.
All of this is being done to fight head injuries, but it’s still not enough. The Boston University CTE Center announced in 2023 that they have now diagnosed 345 former NFL players with CTE out of 376 former players studied (91.7 percent). For comparison, a similar 2018 study of 164 non-athlete brains found that only one of 164 (0.6 percent) had CTE, the lone case being a former college football player.
There is no way of knowing if this number is going up or down with new technologies, as CTE is only diagnosable via a post-mortem analysis of the brain. Concussion numbers have gone relatively down in the NFL, but that does not correlate with CTE numbers, as CTE is more often caused by repetitive small blows to the head rather than larger hits that cause concussions.
These rule changes and helmet innovations are only the start, as over half of players are still experiencing concussions and other head injuries. The permanent symptoms of CTE are terrifying, including a decline in memory and cognition, depression, poor impulse control, aggressiveness, parkinsonism and eventually dementia. Football fans saw these in action with the infamous decline of Antonio Brown, a former star player whose life was visibly derailed by brain declination.
Additionally, little is being done to protect the youth football players whom CTE is an even bigger problem for. These younger athletes have more time to accumulate these blows to the head from all of the same risks, without any of the new protection technology. According to Boston University, “the risk of developing CTE doubles for every 2.6 years of playing football,” meaning youth players are even more susceptible to developing the issue.
CTE has no cure and few options for treatment. The best way to stop it is to avoid it in the first place, and the football world must prioritize this over all else. Save players from themselves by requiring the newest helmet technology, invest more money in research on the disease and make safer equipment available for the lower levels of play. Without this, the data shows players will continue to get hurt and more lives will be ruined.
