Editorial: Superbowl’s Deadly Mania

This Sunday comes America’s new national holiday, Superbowl Sunday. All the hype is around the celebrities and the new TV ads. They tend to overlook the undeniable reality of that sport’s deadly impact, seriously, on its heroes and players of all shapes and sizes. The latest report of the NFL’s effective reneging on the deal it reached years ago to assist former players suffering the devastating effects of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalitis) is only one more case of sweeping under the rug things too many Americans just don’t want to know about this sport.

It is reminiscent of a lot of things, such as how President G.W. Bush tried to downplay and cover up the arrival of young American men in caskets as casualties from the Iraq invasion (something our current President Biden has assuredly not done). But at least in cases of nations at war, the argument can be made that there was an overriding necessity and purpose to people getting killed.

There can be no such excuse when it comes to tackle football. It is entertainment. It is the only sport that has as its fundamental premise, or raison d’etre, the violent collision of one human being against another. In our evolution as humans, because the brain is the most essential component of our being, craniums were evolved to be particularly hard and resistant to blows. Inside them, brains essentially float, so when a cranium is subjected to a hard blow, the brain slams up against it on the inside, causing often irreversible damage to the brain. There is no way to prevent that, no design or materials in helmets, for example, that can stop it from happening. Our only solution is to avoid and prevent such collisions. But such collisions are the very essence of what football is designed to be.

Now comes more devastating news, reported by Time magazine, that brain trauma may also affect much younger athletes. According to a new study reported in JAMA Network Open, high school football players can show alterations in brain tissue, too. An associate professor of clinical neuroscience is quoted, saying, “Among adolescent football players, we saw changes that it usually takes until middle age to exhibit.” The study involving 275 students, saw “disturbing changes across multiple regions of the brain. One of the most significant was in the so-called suical regions, or the bottoms of the multiple folds that give the brain its characteristic cauliflower-like look, in a number of areas” including “in the cingulate cortex, which helps govern decision-making, the precentral gyrus, which controls volitional muscle movements, and the frontotemporal regions, which are broadly associated with personality, behavior and language.”

MRIs detected atrophy of tissue elsewhere, as well, such as the thinning across much of the cerebral cortex, which has a range of functions including learning, reasoning, memory, decision-making, intelligence, personality and emotion.” Some studies, it is noted, show it takes 30 or 40 years before there is such a “cortical shrink.”