“It is clearly the duty of the colleges which have permitted these monstrous evils to grow up and become intense to purge themselves of such immoralities … Intercollegiate and interscholastic football ought to be prohibited until a reasonable game has been formulated.”
Those were the words of Harvard University president Charles W Eliot in 1906, a year after three college players died playing football, part of a spate of deaths that led many universities to abandon the sport and President Roosevelt to call for safety reforms in the game he loved. Sadly, Eliot’s words resonate as if written today: on 29 November, Alabama A&M linebacker Medrick Burnett Jr died from a head injury he had suffered in a game the previous month. He was just twenty years old.
Evidently, football remains the fundamentally unsafe enterprise Eliot saw it to be, and, as such, continues to have no place in institutions supposedly there to offer education, development and care. While the horrific death of a player like Burnett should be enough for us to reevaluate the place of this sport in schools – and we note that an additional eight K-12 aged players died in a single month from football earlier this year, and in the days since Burnett’s passing, two more high school players have been hospitalized after receiving brain surgery to address head injuries – we should not lose sight of the long-term costs head injury inflicts even on those who do survive.
World-renowned neurologist and neuropathologist Ann McKee has revealed that contact sport athletes under 30 have a significantly increased chance of contracting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain condition associated with head injuries – concussive and subconcussive. CTE has a range of harmful health consequences including “memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia.” McKee recently said, based on her Boston University lab’s research findings, that “the fact that over 40% of young contact and collision sport athletes in the UNITE brain bank have CTE is remarkable – considering that studies of community brain banks show that fewer than 1% of the general population has CTE.”
Boston University has also found that every 2.6 years of participation in football doubles the chances of contracting CTE and that the odds of developing parkinsonism are 61% higher for those who have played organized football, and three times higher than that for those who played at the college and NFL levels.
If the purpose of universities is to cultivate the mind, it is nearly impossible to deny that football, by degrading the brain, is antithetical to it.
This is the perspective of former University of Oregon and Angelo State football player Ben Thiel. He told us, in hearing of Burnett’s tragic death: “Football thrives on collisions and sacrifice, but at what cost? No helmet or rule change can erase the inherent dangers of a sport that leaves young athletes vulnerable to catastrophic injuries. How many more lives must we lose before we admit that college football’s risks far outweigh its rewards?”
In our new book The End of College Football, we spoke to 25 former college football players about their experiences in the sport. Again and again, what they told us was that head injury is an epidemic – and one university officials are taking no great pains to solve. (It is notable that the NCAA itself has received direct warnings from medical experts about the dangers of head injury in football since as early as 1973.)
One former player told us, “I played with guys in the NFL that took their own lives and then were diagnosed with CTE when they did the autopsy, so you think about that, like, ‘Boy, I hit my head against that guy’s head, so what’s going on with me if that was obviously was going on with him?’”
Another player said that today he suffers “from panic disorder related to probably all the subconcussive blows,” while a third said the scariest part for him is that he does not even “know [the] price that I paid in terms of cognitive ability, in terms of how many concussions did I play through, how many times did I have a concussion and didn’t report it?”
A fourth player demonstrated the extreme consequences of experiencing head injury by describing what happened during the play immediately after he had just experienced a concussion – and, let’s be clear, he was allowed to play – “And we ran a completely different play, and I ran the same play. It’s a play where I pull and I block the corner. So I’m pulling way out into the open field, and it looked absolutely ridiculous the second time I did it because it was a pass play, and I was pulling out, running into nothing … Later, when watching the film, and the coach is like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I don’t remember this at all.’”
While that coach may have downloaded responsibility on to his player, the truth is that it is coaches, preoccupied with winning at all costs and the lucrative pay cheques such triumph will earn them, who should shoulder most of the blame for the fact that young men are being put into the position to endure harm through head injury.
One player explained, “They scare you into not reporting your injuries, especially concussions, because they treat you even worse as a person, because they just think you’re faking it.”
As a consequence, players learn not to report concussions, which leads to rampant underreporting. Another player explained just how impossible it is to extricate head injury from the sport: “We had maybe 30-ish padded practices in 28 days … you hit your head in those four weeks thousands of times at a G-force of at least 20 Gs. You know it experientially, but you don’t know the science behind it … My teammate, sometimes, everything would go black when [he] hit. And I learned it practicing playing with him, like if he was on the ground, just to give him a beat, because everything would be black for a second. And he would say, ‘Wait, wait, wait’ and then [he’d nod] and be like, ‘OK’ and then I would help him up. So that’s [a] dramatic case. But … the gulf between what you can study in a lab and what’s actually happening on the field is so wide, and I think either willfully or genuinely, brain injury doctors are oblivious to the fact that [redacted teammate], everything was black on the field for him … because he’s a zero in that dataset. You know, he’s ‘never had a concussion.’ It’s absurd.”
The pervasiveness of head injury means that players need to find coping mechanisms: “Surprisingly, there was a lot of jokes about it. There was, you know, if you had like a spacey moment, like, ‘Oh it’s that CTE kicking in.’ Some dark humor, kinda.”
While the need for players to use this kind of jest to cope with the fear and risk that is their everyday reality is entirely understandable, there is nothing funny about the devastating consequences for victims of the sport like Burnett.
It is, we hope, clear that while potentially deniable, the harm experienced by college football players through head injury is also entirely foreseeable. Even with underreporting, we have all the data we need to understand the inherent dangers – and have, frankly, for 50, if not more than 100, years. This means that no matter how many self-absolving statements universities offer to bereaved families, the bottom line is that they bear responsibility.
Perhaps then it is finally time to heed the words of Eliot and accept that “football as now played is wholly unfit for colleges and schools” for “it is childish to suppose that the athletic authorities who have permitted football to become a brutal … [and] demoralizing game can be trusted to reform it.”
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, November 2024) and co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.
