Touchdown Tom Brady! The Patriots win again! The Lombardi Trophy returns to Foxborough! These exciting phrases and similar remarks are commonly heard in living rooms across the United States on Sunday afternoons, with the third exclamation being a staple of Sunday nights in early February. These, of course, are phrases stemming from the game of football. Football is America’s game, it started in America and continues to be the most viewed sport in the nation. Viewership for football continues to triumph over any other professional sport in the United States by massive quantities, and it remains America's favorite sport to watch (Norman, 2018). Even with all the love for the game, rising concerns over its safety have put American football in great danger. However, much of the concern for the safety of the game does not come from sound science or research. It comes instead from the media and its need for more views, clicks, and readers. The headline-hungry media has led to a decline in the game’s participation in youth. The media misinterprets injuries in the game of football, thus unjustly reducing its youth participation.
The biggest threat to the game of football happens to be the biggest negative storyline associated with the game: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. CTE is a disease only diagnosed after death, and it is linked to repeated blows to the head during the lifetime of the individual. The development of dementia and loss of cognitive abilities are common symptoms of CTE, along with depression, aggression, and mood swings among other problems years after impacts to the brain have occured (Alzheimer’s Association, 2019). The Boston University CTE Center is not only the leading center for CTE research in the world but one of the only places in the world that researches CTE. The majority of what is known about the disease is from research done by Dr. Ann McKee at the Boston University CTE Center. Dr. McKee labels CTE as the build-up of a protein called Tau in the brain. Tau is a protein unique to blows to the head and is only linked with CTE. This means that CTE diagnosis depends solely on Tau in the brain, and Tau in the brain leads to the diagnosis of no other disease besides CTE (Concussion Legacy Foundation, 2019). Not much else is known about the disease at this time, and an enormous amount of research must still be done to have an understanding of the disease at levels anywhere near that of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Questions such as why some people who have never played contact sports have been found with Tau in the brain after death while others who have played football for over twenty years are found with no Tau highlighting just how little is known about the disease.
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With research on CTE still in its infancy and so many questions related to the disease still unanswered, it is shocking that the disease has been so prevalent in the media’s coverage of football. Likewise, it is equally shocking that talk of the disease has led so many parents to take their young children out of football with so little known about the disease in the first place. The media is to blame. Kevin Guskiewicz, coordinator of the Matthew Gfellar Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, explains that there have been 333 articles on CTE in the New York Times alone, while there have only been 300 cases of CTE ever diagnosed (Hoge, 2018, pg. 89). This is a prime example of the media’s misinterpretation of CTE. The media (New York Times in this example) interprets CTE as an epidemic affecting every football player, thus creating a 333:300 ratio of CTE articles in the New York Times to CTE diagnosis. With a ratio so skewed, this is an obvious and embarrassing misinterpretation. This misinterpretation is not done by accident either. The media, such as the New York Times, is a result of industry. The New York Times must produce results to continue paying journalists to write stories. The New York Times must produce results for companies to purchase ad space in their articles. Just like any other business in the cutthroat and ever-diminishing industry of journalism and traditional news media, the New York Times knows that it must sell as many papers and garnish as many clicks as possible to stay relevant. Many people and groups are affected by the media’s growing concern over revenue that has blanketed honest reporting. Football is no exception, as the media’s focus on producing highly viewed and highly profitable articles over deciphering and understanding the science behind CTE has produced a devastating effect on the sport. Having thirty-three more articles on CTE than the diagnosis of CTE is a blatant showing of the media’s true agenda on the purposeful misinterpretation of a disease that has put America’s favorite sport sliding on thin ice.
The New York Times is one of many media outlets doing an unjust disservice to the game of football. American Broadcast Company News, Columbia Broadcasting System Sports, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and columnist George Will among others have all been found to spread stories on the short lifespan of National Football League players, stories that proved to be fallacies and unrepresentative of the ex-NFL population (Flynn, 2014). When citizens read information from an entire variety of well-known sources such as those listed above, they come to believe that the game is barbaric and inhumane. Readers would then begin to take their children out of football, and who can blame them after reading so many articles proclaiming that football players are suffering and dying young? It is what any good parent would do: protect their children based on the information they are given. It is disheartening when the information given is inaccurate and part of a hidden agenda focused on selling papers and ad space over being correct on facts and figures.
The information from the sources above stating that former NFL players have shorter, less productive, and less healthy lives is false. Multiple studies have found that former NFL players are healthier mentally and physically compared to the general population. The National Football League Mortality Study conducted by the coalition of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was published in the Health Hazard Evaluation Report in January 1994. It was a comprehensive study of 3,439 former NFL players. Statistics show that if the researchers were to take a sample of 3,439 people from the general population at the age group being studied, over 620 would be dead. Only 334 players were found to have perished. Researchers also found former players to be:
Forty-two percent are less likely to develop cancer and twenty percent are less likely to die of respiratory diseases. Thirty-two percent fewer players had died of cardiovascular disease than the general population, and former players had a forty-six percent lower overall mortality rate than the general U.S. male population (Baron, 1994).
What makes this research especially noteworthy is that it was done in 1994. This means that the players being studied performed in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. This was a time when equipment in the game of football was much less advanced and safe, and the information and protocols now being used for head injuries were not even in existence when these men were playing. Even with lower-quality equipment, medical knowledge, and medical treatment, the former NFL players studied were doing significantly better physically than the general population. The media completely ignores this when spreading information suggesting that life after football for NFL players is short and brutal based on a few isolated incidents, a fallacy known as a hasty generalization. The media is willing to interpret these incidents as the facts of life for former NFL players because they know that is what makes the money and keeps food on the table. The players of today have better safety equipment and medical protocols and procedures than ever before, so no one should be fooled by the headlines of short lifespans for NFL athletes.
Not only are former NFL players doing better physically than the general population, contrary to what major news outlets have reported, they are doing better mentally as well. A study of former NFL players done by the University of Michigan Ann Arbor proves this. It studied a random sample of over one thousand former NFL players and found them having the same odds of developing depression-related symptoms as the general population. The study also found twenty-nine percent of participants to have had periods of poor anger management and control, in contrast to forty-seven percent of men in the general population aged over fifty (Weir, 2009). Another study, conducted by board-certified anatomic pathologist, neuropathologist, and forensic pathologist Dr. Peter Cummings found that “NFL players were less likely than the general population to be investigated for homicide” (Cummings, 2018). These studies make clear that those who have played the game at the highest level and for the longest time are leading healthy and productive lives after football. If those who have played for so long and have been exposed to hits in the head for so long are generally healthier than those who have not, then the media should not be releasing story after story attacking the game of football. Their purposeful misinterpretation of the facts is unfairly hurting those who love the game the most.
The media acts as if the science of CTE is set in stone, and its articles attack the game of football as if it is the culprit, thus leading to an unjust decline in participation from fear given to parents throughout the nation. All that is known about CTE is that it is a build-up of Tau proteins in the brain. It has been found in people who have never set foot on an athletic field just as it has been found in people who have. With such little known about the disease, and with, “More kids and teenagers suffering concussions and head injuries in automobiles, falls of all kinds (including playgrounds), bicycles, and self-propelled scooters” (Maroon, 2018), it is not right that the media attempts to speak bans on youth football into existence. The media does not suggest the banning of playground usage, scooters, or cars although they have proven to cause more head trauma than football. The media focuses on football as it is a massive industry, it is easy money.
A common theme in this media misinterpretation is that because they are reporting CTE in rare cases of former NFL athletes, the reader’s child who will not go on to play farther than high school will also develop the disease. This is wildly untrue. An Annals of Neurology report found no evidence of CTE in anybody who did not play past high school football (Alosco, 2017). To put the significance of this finding in perspective, one must take into account that only six percent of those at the high school level will play the game in college, and less than one percent of high school players will make it to the NFL (Hoge, 2018). With such as small pool of players even at the slightest risk of CTE, the brutal attack that the media has launched and is carrying out on football at the lowest levels is completely inexcusable. The game has so many benefits for youth. In an era where so many children spend their time sitting on the couch playing video games while eating unhealthy foods, football should not be on the media’s hit list. Children need sports like football to keep them active and healthy. How come the media does not attack TV and video games for creating lazy and unhealthy kids in the way it attacks football for a disease that has not even appeared in those who do not go past the high school level? It is this misinterpretation and failure to recognize that facts that has led to so much frustration in the football community.
The media does so much nonsense reporting on CTE and has falsely placed it in the youth game, while at the same time, it has failed to recognize that football is getting safer every year and is safer now than ever before. The few cases of CTE that the media pounces on come from those who played in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the game is so much safer today. Studies by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. R. Dawn Cornstock, director of the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance System and associate professor of epidemiology at Colorado Children’s Hospital have found a dramatic decrease in football-related head trauma (Porter, 2016). This further proves that football is becoming safer at all levels. The game continues to advance in every facet, from having better technology to detect concussions in the game, to improved helmet design and structures.
Some may say that the violent nature of the sport, bringing the ball carrier to the ground to end the play, creates a game that is simply too dangerous for kids to play. They may say that the media is advocating for the safety of children when it publishes its misinterpretations of the game. However, football has the necessary safety equipment in place to account for this added aggression. The game is more physical than basketball, for example, but there are no helmets and shoulder pads in basketball, and basketball is a sport filled with physicality as well. For those saying that the media is advocating for the safety of children: there is danger to any sport or any activity (such as riding a bike or driving a car) that a child or teen will take part in. For example, there are more concussions in soccer than in football (Hoge, 2018). The fact of the matter is that kids are much better off competing, training, exercising, working as a team, and learning the values of teamwork and hard work than they are sitting on the couch not doing any of these things because the media scares them away from it.
All in all, the media commits a sinful act to the game of football in the way it interprets and presents its view of the game. With studies showing former players from decades past be healthier and happier than the general population, it is painstakingly obvious that the players of today will experience nothing close to the pain and suffering that the media paints post-football life to be. With no evidence of CTE in youth football, it becomes easy to see that the media has created a cash cow by squeezing out the clicks of many fearful parents when there is truly nothing to fear at all. With only a miniscule portion of a miniscule portion of football players ever developing CTE, and with such little known about CTE in the first place, it should be known that the media has overstayed their visit. It is time for the media to get back to reporting the facts: the game is safer, rules are better, concussions are down, etc. over the fiction: one player developing CTE after seventeen years in the NFL means that kids playing Pop Warner and high school football should quit. As long as people continue to hold the media accountable, the game of football, America’s game, is here to stay for a very long time.
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