When Demar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest after a tackle during a recent NFL game, it shocked many people to realize that America’s current favorite pastime, football, is such a brutal game.
The injury rate is 100 percent for those who play in high school, college, and the National Football League. As a result, some people are calling for something to be done. However, three issues will limit any significant changes, even if someone could develop a remedy to curb the physical harm of the game.
First, football is America’s pastime, and the NFL advertises it as a violent and brutal game. Fans like it like that. Remember John Madden. NFL football accounted for 82 of the 100 most-watched programs on TV in 2022, up from 75 of 100 in 2021.
And the other two issues concern two of the most important things in the United States—money and race. Football makes wealthy team owners even richer. The average value of a team is currently over $4 billion, a number that increases substantially each year.
In 2021 the majority (58%) of the players in the NFL were Black. One could easily imagine that the League would pay more attention to safety issues if most players were White.
I have been giving up football, not attending in person, and watching only three to four games a year. This is a shift for me, as I have been involved in sports all my life, first as an athlete in high school and college and then in recreational leagues after college. And I have been following golf and playing my version of it ever since.
As an undergraduate, I was a sports reporter, and more recently, I was on the Executive Committee of the Athletic Board at the University of Tennessee. This was during the last years of the great Pat Summit as coach of the Lady Vols basketball team.
As a fan, I have been present at 14 amateur, collegiate, and professional national championship matches. And once I had four season seats for the NFL team in Washington. As you can see, I have been heavily involved in sporting contests. Further, I have written about and taught about sports. An occasional course I taught was about the African American experience through sports.
But as a fan, recently I have been letting go of football. The League’s blackballing of Colin Kaepernick and the continuing failure to hire more Black head coaches in a league where the majority of the players are Black were major factors in that decision. However, this move was aided and abetted over the years by my wife, who always called football savage and dangerous. And I called the players gladiators in the Roman sense of the term. With this attitude, we did not let either of our sons play the sport.
Now the verdict is evident. Football is savage and dangerous. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a study of the brains of 111 deceased NFL players, which found 110–all but one—had the degenerative brain disease CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). This same study examined the brains of 202 football players at different levels of the game, including high school and college. It found CTE in 87 percent of the players studied.
People who follow boxing have known about this brain injury for many years. Boxing people called this condition “being punch drunk” from having too many blows to the head. It may be just as bad—if not worse—in football.
But in football, the fans, the money, and race work against significant corrective action.