The day the big announcement was made of the 2023 winner of college football’s most esteemed player award, the Heisman Trophy, as it was presented on live TV at prime time last Saturday, The Washington Post devoted the front page of is sports section to story by Kent Babb on the horrible, ravaging effects of what football does to so many of its biggest name stars: it destroys their brains.

The headline was “The Other Heisman Club,” about the wives of former Heisman Trophy winners, the biggest names in the sport, who described the cognitive decline that savaged their husbands after their playing days were over. It told the story, as the subheading read, of how these wives “Watched their husbands join college football’s most elite fraternity – then lost them to CTE” (chronic traumatic encephalopathy).

It was a bold and brave move by The Post, intervening as it did, right into the middle of the big Heisman party, gilded as it always has been by the presence of other famous award winners from past years, even if those who were the subject of the article were, of course, not present.

Of course, the massive football industry that is such a dominant force in the current American culture, met this unwelcome intervention with predictable silence.

But sadly there can no longer be any doubt about what repeated blows to the head, being the very essence of what football is about, does to the brains of a great majority of those who play, and not just veterans of the professional game, but to a vast preponderance of college, high school and younger players.

It is coming to the point that no one can claim to be unaware of this grim reality, as much as the National Football League continues to hush it up, along with millions of people, gleefully enjoying their fall weekends crammed into stadiums all across the land or watching on their TVs, in our culture who try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

As this writer reported last week covering the annual conference on the subject hosted by Boston University’s CTE Center, the only place in the country where this horror is studied, the evidence is only mounting of the terrible impacts of repeated blows to the head in contact sports, and especially football, that add up to “a scathing indictment of the impact of tackle football at all ages” (CTE Conference Focuses on Football,” Falls Church News-Press, Dec. 7, 2023).

So, bravo to The Post for tipping over the punch bowl at the Heisman party last week. How sad the accounts of so many of the sports’ most adored stars stumbling around now barely able to talk thanks not to blows that caused observable concussions but to repeated non-concussive blows to the head, the stuff of everyday play.

See, the brain is not tied down inside the cranium, but it floats. So any time a blow to the head occurs, with helmets or not, it causes the brain to slam against the inside of the extra-hard cranium, made that way to protect the brain. Every time the brain gets slammed like that, damage is inflicted from the collision of the floating brain with its own protective shell.

It is the cumulative effect of this that worsens the permanent damage to the brain. As yet, there is no way to measure this effect short of examining the brains of persons who are deceased, although the work of the Boston University CTE Center is focused on finding ways to diagnose CTE among living persons.

(Of the 1,035 brains of dead football players examined at the Center, 75 percent had CTE.)

On the level of the Heisman trophy winners, only the biggest names in the sport are listed, and surely they are tragic cases, the likes of Tony Dorsett, Roger Staubach, Jim Plunkett, Bo Jackson, Howard “Hopalong” Cassady, Paul Hornung and Charles White. How devastating to learn that by watching these greats, we all contributed to the horrible effects of their brain damage on their lives and those around them.

But how many thousands of non-stars that played the game have been, or will be savaged?