American football may never be the same again after this Super Bowl.
That isn’t because the New England Patriots’ star quarterback Tom Brady may retire soon (though that will be a significant moment in NFL history), nor the saga of kneeling during the national anthem, which permeated all major sports.
It is because this has been the most groundbreaking year to date in terms of research proving links between football tackles and neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia, ALS, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
As those studies have emerged, the rate of children playing American football has declined – a trend which threatens to shrink the next generation of fans and players if it continues.
Unsurprisingly, the top researchers investigating football-linked brain injuries cannot help but support that shift.
Dr Robert ‘Bob’ Stern, a once die-hard Patriots fan who is now head of Boston’s University’s CTE research team, has reached the conclusion that nobody should play the game given what we now know about its links with brain disease, especially children.
Speaking to Daily Mail Online, he warned youth football – even with measures to limit concussions – involves hundreds of sub-concussive hits every season, and he fears that the very nature of the sport is incompatible with cognitive health, no matter what we do to change it.
But one group of former players, who have all been diagnosed with football-linked brain diseases, are pushing another tact: banning tackles in favor of ‘flag football’ for under-14s in a desperate bid to save the sport.
The rate of kids played football has dropped in the last five years as evidence linking the sport to degenerative brain diseases has grown – and researchers can’t help but endorse the shift
THE LATEST RESEARCH: FOOTBALL-RELATED BRAIN INJURIES ARE WORSE IF YOU PLAYED AS A CHILD
Increasingly, research is showing that there is a window of time in which our brains’ neurological development is particularly vulnerable: under the age of 12.
In 2017, Dr Stern’s department – which is leading the vanguard of investigations into sport-linked brain diseases – produced concrete evidence that playing football from the age of 12 or younger is associated with cognitive and behavioral problems in later life.
Most importantly, they also showed that concussions and ‘big’ tackles are not the problem; any hit to the head is a problem if the player continues playing that day or the next day or even the next week, preventing the brain’s natural healing process.
‘Bigger hits that lead to people having significant symptoms, those are relatively rare, and at they are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath, you have the hundreds of hits per season that tackle football players receive,’ he explains.
‘People who play tackle football before the age of 12 had a much greater risk for having cognitive changes in mid-life as well as changes in mood and behavior.
‘That doesn’t mean that they have CTE, we don’t know how to diagnose it in life yet but there’s a strong connection between starting to play early and later in life problems.’
‘IT’S LIKE HITTING YOUR CHILD OVER THE HEAD 200 TIMES A SEASON’
Dr Stern does not mince his words when asked if football is damaging for children.
In a lengthy hypothetical scenario, the esteemed neurologist likens the sport to physical abuse.
Not for nothing do insiders say his strong stance may have been a key factor that drove the NFL to stop funding his research last August.
‘When I think about all of the incredible things we parents do to protect our kids from injuries, from illness, we do all kinds of crazy things,’ Dr Stern mused.
‘We go overboard to make sure that our kids have reached our best possible potential. That’s what our society has done. We do everything we can to make pain go away.
‘Then we drop, let’s say little Johnny, a five-year-old boy, at a field.
‘He puts on a helmet, this big plastic helmet with a face mask that makes him a bobble-head because his head is fully grown at that age but his body isn’t. The weight of that sized helmet compared to this body is so huge compared to a fully-developed Johnny, and his neck cannot possibly have such control over such a big thing on his head.
‘But then we say, ‘ok listen to your coach, we want you to play hard, this is tackle football, don’t be afraid’.
Aaron Hernandez started playing tackle football before the age of nine. After his death at 27, he was diagnosed with the worst case of CTE despite only having two concussions on record
‘Johnny hits his head against his opponent or the ground an average of 200 or 300 times that season, with adequate force to induce that his brain is likely jostling back and forth with quick movement.
‘Little Johnny doesn’t feel any of these hits because he’s wearing this big helmet and so there’s no pain and there’s no symptomatic concussion but little Johnny is being hit and his brain is being injured over and over and over again during a time of incredible maturation of the brain.
‘So, wearing my Bob hat and not my Dr Stern hat, I have to ask the question: does it make sense to subject our children to countless hits to the head during a period of time when their brain is actively developing?
‘It would be very similar to dropping Johnny off at the coach’s house and saying, ‘it’s ok Johnny, this man is going to hit you in the head a couple of hundred times over the next couple of months’.
‘That’s the common-sense part, regardless of the science.’
Last August, the NFL stopped funding Dr Stern’s team’s research into CTE, despite having pledged to spend another $12 million on the project.
The league dismissed reports that the divorce had anything to do with Boston University’s damning evidence on football-linked brain diseases, including a landmark study showing 110 of 111 former players’ brains in their lab had CTE, which was published days earlier.
Officials also denied reports of a ‘bitter feud’ with Dr Stern over his ‘unorthodox’ views on football.
But he is hardly the first researcher to posit such a scenario.
Dr Bennet Omalu, the researcher who is credited with discovering CTE, said youth football ‘is the definition of child abuse’.
‘If you play football, and if your child plays football, there is a 100 percent risk exposure. There is nothing like making football safer. That’s a misnomer,’ he added.
COULD ‘FLAG FOOTBALL’ FOR UNDER-14s MAKE IT BETTER?
Dr Stern and his team – who are leading the vanguard of investigations into football-linked brain diseases – work closely with various football organizations including the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF), which has a new campaign to switch from tackle football to flag football for under-14s.
The aim of that campaign, back by three dementia-suffering ex-NFL players, is to curb the rate of concussions and brain diseases in children at a pivotal time of their brain development.
Chris Nowinski, a former college player and wrestling champion turned researcher who founded CLF, insists this is the best strategy.
‘Playing youth tackle football increases your risk of developing CTE. Also, playing youth football before age 14 does not increase your chances of being an NFL legend,’ Nowinski said.
‘We’re simply seeing more and more evidence that supports what we’ve said for a long time, which is that we need to delay contact in young athletes.
‘It’s true that there’s a lot we don’t know about CTE and traumatic brain injury, but what we do know, for certain, is that limiting the number of hits a player takes is a proven way to protect him or her.’
The campaign is backed by Nick Buoniconti, former middle linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, who now has dementia and the symptoms of CTE.
‘I made a mistake starting tackle football at nine years old,’ he said last week.
‘Now, CTE has taken my life away. Youth tackle football is all risk with no reward.’
On paper, the flag football move could work. Football remains the most popular in America by far, easily eclipsing baseball, basketball and soccer.
If children stop enduring hundreds of head hits during that crucial window, it could be a game changer, allowing their brains to mature before they subject themselves to the trauma, marginally lowering their risk of later life problems.
However, Dr Stern warns he has yet to see a proposed change to youth football that would prevent all head hits, not just brutal concussion-inducing tackles.
‘Everything is focusing on concussion and is not addressing the bigger issue that our research and countless other research groups are demonstrating,’ Dr Stern warns.
‘Sub-concussive hits are incredibly common in youth football and result in changes in the brain structures after just one season’s play and affect cognitive function in later life, but are also associated with later life behavioral problems.’
He adds: ‘We human beings weren’t meant to expose ourselves to repetitive impacts where our brain is getting jostled back and forth.
‘There’s nothing in the history of humankind that involved these types of head impacts until the last 60 years or so, and in particular in terms of lots of people having this type of exposure.
‘American tackle football with helmets and face masks didn’t get used until the late 1950s. With the introduction of those helmets, there has been a likely sense of invincibility, leading to an increase in hits to the head, because before that it would hurt!’