“The game is not safe” – Football, The NFL and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

When the NFL loses ESPN, you have to figure that they are around the bend. O’Connor: Stabler’s CTE diagnosis another reason football needs dramatic change

Ken Stabler (The Snake) was quarter back for the Oakland Raiders from 1970 to 1979. He played for other teams before and after that stint in Oakland. He died last year in Gulfport, Mississippi.

He is the latest former NFL player to be posthumously diagnosed as suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).

“The game is not safe,” Hall of Fame linebacker Harry Carson said by phone, “and there’s no way around it. You only have one brain. If you injure it, you can’t get replacement surgery for your brain like you can for your knee or shoulder.”

Carson already has informed his daughter and son-in-law that his six-year-old grandson is not allowed to play football. …

Carson was speaking before the Stabler news broke, and relaying the story that he practically jumped for joy when his younger son once failed a physical in his attempt to try out for the Auburn football team. There’s something terribly wrong when a Hall of Famer celebrates his son’s failed bid to play at the major college level and forbids his grandson from even trying to find a little joy on a Pop Warner field.

At this point, I have to question why any parent would let a child start playing football. Not everyone who has CTE spent 12 or more years playing professional football. Tyler Sash only played two years in the NFL – 27 games in total, and never as a starter. But he did play in middle school, high school, and college. He died with CTE.

The folks in charge of the NFL have a real problem, and they seem to be hoping that it will just go away, if they hide their heads in the sand. That didn’t work for Tobacco (and they did more than just ignore the issues they had). In the long-run, it won’t work for the NFL either.

When ESPN is running a major story about CTE the week before the Superbowl, when that story details how ex-NFL players are forbidding their family members to play the sport at the junior level, I would say that the NFL’s strategy to contain the CTE story and make it go away is failing miserably.