The NFL knows that concussions are a risk for its players – and it’s largely the players who carry the burden of protecting themselves. New York magazine features writer Reeves Wiedeman joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how the league’s approach to concussions has affected high-profile players like Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, why CTE is still a major concern and why the NFL is changing its positioning on the matter. His article is “The End of the NFL’s Concussion Crisis.”
The NFL’s history with concussions
By Madelyn Walton, Think Intern
Football is one of America’s favorite past times. But while the game serves as a form of entertainment for the fans, it presents an extreme danger for the players.
Reeves Weideman is a features writer at the New York Magazine. He joined host Krys Boyd to talk about these detrimental head injuries, the protocols put in place, and the future for NFL player’s health and safety. His article is “The End of the NFL’s Concussion Crisis.”
It was once assumed that a blow to the head causing a concussion could be treated by limiting screen time and sitting a dark room, but now it’s better understood that concussions have long-lasting effects.
“Beginning in the 2000s, a stream of retired NFL players suffering from dementia, depression, and other brain ailments had been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a disease that results from repeated blows to the head,” Weideman says.
In his piece, Weideman focused on Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.
At just 24 years old, Tagovailoa has experienced four concussions. He received one concussion in college, and the other three in his professional career.
“Because doctors can only diagnose CTE postmortem after cutting into someone’s brain, we still have no way of knowing for sure whether CTE is developing in Tagovailoa’s brain or anyone else’s,” says Weideman. “But researchers have now examined hundreds of brains of former players and found that the portion who had CTE has remained consistent at around 90 percent.”
Concussion concern and protocol didn’t take off until the 2010s. Fans enjoyed the games, and the NFL didn’t want to see their ratings plumet. However, when more brain injuries started to pop up and some players were making the decision to retire, the NFL gave in.
“The NFL settled a class-action suit in which it agreed to compensate former players who suffered from brain injuries,” he says.
In addition to this, various protocols were put into place to limit the amount of injury on the field. Defenders cannot use their heads for defensive measures, certified medics were put on standby, and new guidelines were put in place for concussed players returning to the field.
“Concussions were still happening every Sunday, but the league appeared to be trying to alleviate the problem, and it became easier for fans to watch with a cleaner conscience,” says Weideman.
In an October 2024 press release, the National Football League announced they have seen the fewest number of concussions in practices and games (44) since tracking began in 2015.
The NFL continues to improve safety measures for the players, and it seems players remain passionate about the game and don’t plan to retire anytime soon.
“Even the people most affected by those hits — the ones reporting their concussions — don’t seem to want to take the violence completely out of football,” says Weideman.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] When an athlete is coming back from, say, a knee injury. It’s a fairly straightforward thing to assess when they’re well enough to take the field again. Either they can run and jump and pivot to excel at their sport or they can’t. If the damage is too severe, that bum knee will probably end their career. But what if the damage they sustain is invisible to the naked eye? From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. We’ve come a long way since the days when football coaches would goad concussed athletes back into the game with statements like You just got your bell rung, son. While for years the NFL denied or downplayed the long term hazards of repeated blows to the head, the scientific evidence is now so overwhelming that the league acknowledges those injuries are serious, which is not the same thing as trying to eliminate them from the game. Reeves Wiedeman is a features writer at New York Magazine, which published his article, “The End of the NFL’s Concussion Crisis.” Reeves Welcome back to Think.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:01:00] And thanks for having me, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:01:01] Anybody who follows football will have heard about the injuries that have plagued Tua Tagovailoa in the past couple of seasons as quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. But for those who are not fans of the sport, will you tell us a little bit about what he’s been up against?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:01:15] Yeah, sure. So Tua is the quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. He’s he’s kind of one of the young stars of the league. Playing for the Dolphins is very high flying fast offense. One of the teams expected to contend for the Super Bowl in each of the past couple of seasons. But in 2022 two suffered a series of of what appeared to be very serious injuries to his head. He was sacked in one game and sort of, you know, not even hit that hard, but just pushed to the ground. His head sort of snapped back, hit the ground. He actually got up and tried to walk and then just kind of his body sort of fell slack. And and there was some controversy at the time because the Dolphins actually said this was just a back injury and not a head injury. And so there he came back into the game in the second half. He was back on the field again a week later and suffered what at that point was obviously concussion. He got hit again, slammed into the ground, and he was just sort of laying there frozen. He missed a few games, came back. What happened again? Another concussion. So three concussions seemingly, although, again, this this one was was not defined as such in a single season. Fast forward to earlier this year and and and he in one of the earliest game to this season he gets hit again knocked out and and has to miss much of this much of the season. There were a lot of questions. Is it time for Tua to retire? Should he keep doing this to himself? Ultimately, a few weeks ago, after taking a little over a month off of the season, he was back on on the field for the Dolphins again.
Krys Boyd [00:03:15] And I think just a week or two ago, he took a knee to the head in a game against the L.A. Rams.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:03:20] You know, it’s funny. I didn’t even know that. But I’m not surprised and I’m not surprised because these kinds of hits happen in every football game and in ways that we never notice on every single play, one player, another is getting hit on the head. And it might be it might be a softer blow than others. It might not be one that that causes a concussion, but there is just no way to play a football game and be 100% sure that you’re not going to take some blows to your brain.
Krys Boyd [00:03:55] So to the point you made a moment ago. Reeves People have started asking Tua if maybe he should think about retiring from the game because he has a wife and he has kids. And so far, I think he’s said he loves it too much to consider quitting early. But you are troubled, if maybe not surprised, that almost nobody is asking whether the NFL ought to be accountable for his welfare.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:04:16] Yeah, it was pretty striking. You know, if you go back ten, 15 years, there was this moment when there were the concussion issue had come to the fore and there was a ton of conversation about is the NFL going to go away? Are people going to stop playing football? Is it going to go the way of boxing, a sport that we kind of, you know, has has wither in part because of the concerns about about the health of the of the athletes. Fast forward to today. And and there were no questions at least that I could see about what the NFL needed to do or what the future of football was. All of the questions were directed at Tua as an individual and what was the responsible choice for him to make. And and in certain ways, you can take that as a sign of progress. The NFL has stopped denying that this is an issue. They have done a number of things to attempt to make the game a little bit safer. And it is no longer possible for an NFL player to not know that that they are taking a risk with their bodies. So we we’ve entered this era where it’s up, it’s up to the individual. But but at the same time, that also means that collectively, at a moment when the NFL is more popular than ever, we’ve sort of decided as a as a society that that and as fans that that we’re more or less okay with this.
Krys Boyd [00:05:42] All right. We will get into some of the reasons why that is the case in a bit. But I do want to get some background here and I’ll remind our listeners that you are a journalist and not a doctor. I do know that you’re a journalist who certainly does a lot of research, generally speaking. Reeves How long do. Doctors think it takes four concussions to heal. Is it possible to get a concussion this week and then be completely fine in a few days?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:06:06] I mean, the rule of thumb and thank you for that disclaimer. I’m not a doctor, but I have talked to some and and the rule of thumb is the longer you wait to hit your brain again, the less risk you have of of causing further harm. How long is is enough, I think is is a matter of debate. One of the problems with studying the brain is it is difficult to to understand exactly what’s going on until someone dies and you can actually look at what their brain looks like. But as best we know, the longer you can wait, the better. There is sort of a a rule of thumb of, you know, a week, ten days is is a number. I’ve heard that that you should really try to, you know, try to avoid staying, you know, getting getting another injury for for at least that long which you know, again, in an NFL season you’re playing every week, every every five, six, seven days there’s there’s another game.
Krys Boyd [00:07:08] Do experts think there’s additional risk for long term damage if someone suffers an additional head injury before a previous one has healed?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:07:18] There’s some debate about this. One thing that is certain is, is there is a thing called second impact syndrome, which is exactly what you’re talking about. The date that a second blow to the head can cause more damage. From what we know, in my understanding, from talking to doctors. And that is much more common in younger people. So in high school players in in even younger players who are playing the game, whose brains are not fully developed, there is a much greater risk of the so-called second impact syndrome. And there’s been some evidence a number of of high school football players have died as a result of traumatic brain injuries. And there’s there’s some evidence that that second impact syndrome may contribute to that. It’s less clear with NFL players when your brain is fully developed. There’s not as much clear evidence of whether it’s as much of an effect. But every doctor will tell you if you suffered a concussion, the safest thing to do is is to give yourself a little bit of time to heal.
Krys Boyd [00:08:21] Okay. So the concern many people have on behalf of Tagovailoa and other football players who suffered multiple brain injuries is this disease that is now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE? How did that diagnosis come into existence?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:08:37] It’s been around for a while, but it hasn’t. It was only sort of beginning in the in the 90s in 2000 that it started to be associated with football. It was it was primarily known as a boxer’s disease and and something that happened to boxers and it’s essentially defined as it’s a it’s a disease of the brain and that is the result of repeated blows to the head. And and, you know, we haven’t talked about this yet, but it’s not just concussions. It’s it’s all the different ways that if you’re if you’re a boxer or a football player, you you get hit in the head. It cause this this disease causes damage to your brain. And if we if we can call in a doctor, that can probably give us some more specifics. But it’s been tied to various illnesses of the brain from dementia to depression to Parkinson’s disease as a potential cause of some of those illnesses.
Krys Boyd [00:09:37] And this can only be definitively diagnosed in an autopsy. Otherwise, doctors just look at symptoms.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:09:43] Yeah, that’s one of the big things is basically for a lot of brain diseases, basically the diagnosis is is symptomatic and and with with CTE, there is no way without cutting into the brain and seeing the damage that has occurred currently to diagnose it, there are some efforts to try to figure out a way to do that. There’s a big study going on to try to get to that point, but it’s going to take hundreds and hundreds of people dying and donating their brain to this kind of research before we can even get close to that. So it’s it’s years away. And that’s part of the problem, is that for an NFL player today, there’s no way of knowing whether or not and how bad the CTE may be that you might be suffering. The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of NFL players will deal with some amount of this, but we can’t know for sure exactly to what degree for each individual.
Krys Boyd [00:10:45] Are there behavioral changes common to people suspected of having CTE?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:10:51] It’s many of the things that that I talked about. And it develops in people at different at different stages. And often what has been identified is that things like dementia, for example, will emerge much earlier than you would expect. And this is one of the tricky things about diagnosis is if someone develops dementia or Alzheimer’s when they’re in their 70s and they played football 40, 50 years ago, it’s hard to say for certain that that football was the cause. But there have been a disturbing number of cases of of athletes in their in their 50s, in their 40s, even their 30s suffering sort of early effects of, you know, of diseases like this. Forgetfulness is kind of the most obvious one. And then depression comes up a lot. There have been a number of of NFL players, a disturbing number, including some very prominent ones who have killed themselves. And and when scientists have cut into their brains, they have found CTE. So some of these things, signs of depression, early signs of dementia are some of the things that doctors look out for.
Krys Boyd [00:12:04] So the naming of CTE is a relatively recent phenomenon. But you found evidence that people have understood the physical dangers of football for a very long time.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:12:15] Yeah, it’s been around more or less since since football has been around, you know, going back to even the late 1800s. There were there were athletes, football players who were dying on the field, too, to a much greater degree than than they are today. The dangers were different then. One of the things, you know, back then, there were not the plastic helmets that we that we have today. They were they were using these much thinner leather helmets. If they had helmets at all, and people were dying from skull fractures and things like that. So there were there were different concerns. But it became such an issue early in the 1900s that that Teddy Roosevelt, when he was president, sort of famously got involved in in trying to reform the game before its things sort of got out of out of hand. And one of the things he’s he and the others who worked on this reform are credited with is the invention of of the forward pass of basically everything that quarterbacks do on the field today before the game which just hand the ball off to to a runner who would run into a defender. And so there was just a lot more of people running into each other. The forward pass enabled, you know, just just some more fluidity to the game in a way to move the ball down the field without hitting into it, you know, to two guys just slamming into each other. What we’ve discovered more recently is, is obviously, if you if you watch the NFL today, you know, the forward passes is the dominant way of of moving the ball. These guys are running in different directions at full speeds at at much faster and stronger than than the athletes of 100 years ago. And these collisions are much worse. So so in some ways, you know, even that invention to try to solve the problem has led to different kinds and a different degree of injury.
Krys Boyd [00:14:05] Reeves How did the NFL initially respond to those early revelations that CTE existed and that football players in particular seemed to be at significant risk for it?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:14:19] You know, early on and we’re talking about kind of the 1996 is sort of the moment that there started to be some some serious questions about concussions and brain injuries in football. The NFL kind of sort of started looking into the idea, but by and large, they were not interested in taking it all that seriously. It kind of one one sort of marker of that was the doctor put in charge of the early effort with a rheumatologist. So not neurologist. And so for much of the 1990s into the 2000, the the position from the NFL was kind of to, you know, to sort of look into the idea but also to make clear or to try to make the point that there was no direct connection between concussions and and CTE, you know, that could be proven. And again, some of that is, again, because the difficulties of diagnosing this eventually throughout the 2000s, there was just a a several years in which a number of prominent players died young. Some were suffering, again, from dementia, Alzheimer’s. Some killed themselves in sort of horrible situations. And in case after case, doctors found CTE and and so through through various efforts. Alan Schwarz, a reporter for The New York Times, was one of the people who was who was most consistently prominently on this beat. It got to a point where the NFL could no longer deny the issue. And and finally, kind of in the early 2010, sort of had to kind of say, okay, we acknowledge this is this is something we need to deal with. Now. What are we going to do?
Krys Boyd [00:16:05] Well, there had been this study that came out in 2009 that made it really hard to deny the effects of CTE and the risk to pro football players. And the men enrolled in this study were young, right? The oldest were 49. I think some were as young as 30.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:16:22] Yeah, it was it was a study of kind of all ages. But but they sort of broke out the results by demographic. And you looked at if you looked at players between 30 and 49 who had received a diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer’s or another sort of memory related disease, they were receiving those diagnosis at a rate that was 19 times higher than the national average for people in that age group. So it was just very clear that this was happening to to young people and young people who had who had played professional football.
Krys Boyd [00:16:57] I also think about pro football players. Maybe this is just the way we report on these things. But. But many seem to have reports of uncharacteristic violence off the field. Do brain experts think those incidents might be tied to CTE?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:17:14] I know there have been certain players where this has been found. I mean, infamously and I you know, I should say this at this point, I watch football. I’m a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs. And in in the early 2010s linebacker for the Chiefs, Jovan Belcher was 25 years old, killed his girlfriend, shot his girlfriend, drove to the team’s practice facility and then shot himself in front of the team’s head coach and general manager. Doctors cut into his brain and found CTE. I think with many other brain diseases, there is a sense that when you suffer these things, your your impulse control, your your behavior can change as a result. And so, again, it certainly seems as if there there is the potential for for the very least correlation between between these kinds of things.
Krys Boyd [00:18:11] So as you’ve noted, the NFL has stopped denying that CTE is a thing, has made some concessions to the reality that head injuries can be devastating, if not immediately, then perhaps down the road. How has the league responded to concerns about this?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:18:29] In, in, in a number of different ways. I mean, if you’re, if you’re a football fan, you, you are now very aware of kind of the different things that the NFL has tried doing. One of the most obvious ones this season is the change to the kickoff. The kickoff. This is the play where you have people running at high speeds from from far apart directly at each other. It was widely considered sort of one of the more dangerous parts of the game. The NFL has has tweaked the kickoff in various ways over the last ten years to try to make it a little make those collisions less severe. There are more and more penalties given to players who, you know, if you hit someone in the head, if you hit the quarterback in the head, you’re going to get a 15 yard roughing penalty. And then there is significantly increased vigilance around these injuries when when they do happen. Players are now if they are showing symptoms of a concussion, there are actual spotters in the sort of in the stadiums who don’t work for either team, who are just tasked with looking around the field for potential injuries, identifying players who might be injured and might have suffered a concussion. And then if they identify someone, they have to go through what is is known as the concussion protocol. And this is a process with various steps that include an independent neurosurgeon looking at the player’s symptoms and determining whether they’ve suffered a concussion. If a player has been determined to suffer a concussion, they are not allowed to go back into the game and they didn’t have to go through a series of steps to to get get back on the field. You know, these these are have been meaningful attempts, I think, to to try to address this problem. And yet, you know, concussions are still happening every Sunday in the NFL.
Krys Boyd [00:20:35] The NFL did assign a physician to study concussions like on behalf of the league. But the first doctor they paid to do that was not a neurologist.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:20:46] Yeah, that’s right that the doctor who kind of been this was again back in the in the 1990s when the B sort of first started looking into this the initial doctor was rheumatologist so not a neurologist. So again that was kind of back in the early days. But you know, later on, even after the league had had sort of acknowledged this as an issue, one of the people leading the charge was was an antitrust lawyer, you know, not a doctor. Today, I will say, you know, the NFL’s chief medical officer is a neurologist from the University of Vanderbilt, a very well respected, well regarded. You know, the league is trying I think I think no one would say that the NFL has not attempted to try to address this issue. The problem is you can’t solve it. You can’t solve it and still have tackle football, be tackle football.
Krys Boyd [00:21:39] Is there a stigma? Reeves, to players that are pulled off the field because of a suspected concussion, Like, do they have an incentive to try not to reveal to anyone who is watching that they’ve been hit very hard in the head?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:21:54] Yeah. I mean, that’s always been kind of the case in the NFL. And certainly, you know, you you get you get macho guys who care about their jobs, who care about their teammates, who care about about winning. I think some of it is macho ness and some of it is, you know, the drive to compete and and and that I think for years both both from a sort of pressure you might get from your teammates or coaches or whoever and then and then whenever internal pressure athletes at this level put on themselves, there was a pressure to get back on the field and and to play through it and, and, you know, yeah. When you got a concussion, you were just dinged up. It sounds like you got in a little fender bender. I think today that’s that’s changed to a degree. I think there’s you know, no one would argue that that the macho culture of the NFL has gone away. There’s still toughness is is if not the the number one attribute that a football coach looks for. It’s it’s it’s up there. But I do think there is more awareness from players you do see players voluntarily say hey I need I need the doctor to to take a look at me. I just you know, I don’t feel great. So I think the culture has shifted, you know, as much as it might be possible to do so.
Krys Boyd [00:23:10] The football fans in my life are talking about these guardian caps. Can you explain what these are?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:23:17] Yeah, they’re essentially they’re a funny looking thing. I think they are an extra layer of padding that attaches to the outside of a helmet. And they first started to come to most fans attention in the preseason this summer before the regular season began in the NFL. The NFL mandated that all players wear these guardian caps. There is some evidence so far that they can reduce the likelihood of suffering a concussion. A handful of players have chosen to wear them during the regular season. It’s a very small proportion and the NFL decided not to mandate that. And to Tagovailoa, when he gave his initial press conference saying he was coming back, was asked if he planned to wear one and he just said nope. And he said said it was his personal choice. So it’s it’s again, kind of one of a million little things that have changed. Players are wearing them during practices during the season. And you know, it is possible that that at some point in the future the NFL might say okay we’re you know, we’re used to people are used to looking at these these kind of funny looking helmets. We’re going to we’re going to make players wear them. But for right now, you know, they there was not enough pressure to make the NFL mandate that all players wear them.
Krys Boyd [00:24:45] There needed to be pressure even to get the NFL to say players would be allowed to wear them during the regular season. Right?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:24:52] Yeah. I mean, look, this is an I’ll quote Alan Schwarz from The New York Times, who again, was kind of one of the leading people to cover this. You know, the NFL is it will change as much as it needs to change. The NFL is not in the business of putting itself out of business. And, you know, the guardian cap is a reminder to people of the danger of the game. And I think, you know, when when when fans see that and especially now when you see I think one guy out of 11 players on his team, 22 players on the field wearing it, I think it is a reminder, at least subconsciously, to players. So I can’t say for sure that that’s the reason the NFL wouldn’t want to do it. You know, again, like you hear from Tua Tagovailoa, some players don’t don’t want to wear it. They’ve been playing football their whole lives with a helmet a certain way and and they’re willing to take the risk. But I think it’s certainly the case that, you know, the NFL is not inclined to to put a reminder of the dangers of the game on on every player’s head.
Krys Boyd [00:25:56] You’ve mentioned Alan Schwarz a couple of times, still out there, still doing good work. But it does seem as if despite these guardian caps and the buzz around them, we’re not talking about CTE the way we were when like that Will Smith movie came out about the doctor who pushed for, you know, taking care of concussions and head injuries. Have we sort of dropped the ball on this, if you’ll pardon the pun?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:26:21] Yeah, I think. I think the pawn is apt. I think, as with many crises, attention moves on. The media stops covering a story as as on Schwartz himself, who has has largely actually moved on from covering this issue, pointed out to me, you know, at a certain point, you know, another another NFL player dies. You find out they have CTE. It’s kind of like, duh. Basically, you know, there was nothing new to the story. And so it became hard to kind of figure out, you know, what was the next step in telling the public about this. And I think the public started to just kind of move on. So I think that the lack of media coverage and I think, again, the NFL has has done enough to kind of placate people and placate fans. And so, you know, much like other crises, whether it’s it’s climate change or it’s the opioid epidemic or whatever it might be, things make the news and then they go away and our attention goes on to the next crises. And and meanwhile, the problems only continue to get worse.
Krys Boyd [00:27:39] We’ve been talking mostly about professional athletes here. Grown men paid lots of money to risk their health. Presumably they are no longer being told they don’t need to worry about CTE. Of course, nobody in the NFL started playing the game as an adult, right? Most of them have played the sport since childhood. For a while, it seemed like American parents were a little more reluctant to let their sons play this game.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:28:02] Yeah. Once dirt news started to break, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there was a decline, a meaningful decline in the number of kids playing either youth football or high school football. That decline, you know, has more or less continued. Like a lot of youth sports. It took a it took a big dip during the pandemic. It has, interestingly, sort of dipped back upwards or turned back upwards in terms of the levels of participation. But it is still lower than than it once was. What hasn’t happened is, is what some experts, prognosticators were predicting ten, 15 years ago is, which was that that kids were going to just stop playing entirely. The parents were going to get the picture that this is bad for my child, just as bad as letting them smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol as a teenager and and that, you know, parents were going to step in and and end youth football. That really hasn’t happened. You know, and and even if there has been a dip in participation of ten, 15, 20%, there’s still a million kids playing high school football every year, more than than any other sports, any other high school sport, and more than enough to to populate the college and professional teams above them.
Krys Boyd [00:29:25] Yeah. For all the talk of soccer moms, there are a whole lot more football Moms are out there, aren’t there?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:29:30] Yeah, yeah, definitely. And just as as rabid and crazy and in their own ways and, you know, letting letting their kids do this.
Krys Boyd [00:29:41] So and there is no threat, therefore to the kind of feeder pattern that will eventually produce some NFL players.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:29:49] Yeah, that was the argument that that eventually there just there just wouldn’t be talent in the NFL and that you know our best athletes would would you know just naturally migrate to to basketball or soccer or tennis or whatever, whatever the sport was. But, you know, the reality is they’re still going to be strong, fast, talented people who who play the game of football because playing the game of football is a lot of fun. And there are a lot of there are tons of reasons to to play football. And for the best athletes, obviously, the potential for a college scholarship, the potential to become wildly wealthy as a as an NFL player and to get to play a game for your job, I think is, you know, it’s just proven that that despite the evidence of the danger that people are taking on, that all these different reasons that people might play football and let their kids play football continue to to be stronger.
Krys Boyd [00:30:48] Reeves We can certainly hold the NFL accountable for its role in profiting off a sport that is quite dangerous to its players. But I mean, we also should maybe took a look in the mirror, right? How do our expectations as fans for what makes a good game? How did those feed the violence on the field?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:31:08] Yeah, I mean, look like the fans have not turned away from from the NFL in in meaningful numbers there. There are obvious people I know people who have have said for a variety of reasons that the primary one of which is is the concussion issue that they just don’t watch the NFL anymore. But that’s a small number of people. And and again, you know, if you look at whatever metric you want, revenue, TV ratings, the NFL, it just remains more popular than ever. How do we justify this? I think it it comes back to the conversation that revolved around Tua’s earlier this year, which is, you know, a fan can can somewhat reasonably tell themselves that that an NFL player is making a choice, that they know the risks, even if 25 year olds are not well known for thinking long term and thinking about the the long term risks that they might be taking, that they’re paid handsomely for it, that the NFL is denying this anymore, that there are measures in place to try to make the game safer. And and that I as a fan love watching football enough that that even if I’m going to cringe when when a big hit comes in in a way that I might not have 20 years ago, I’m still going to watch the games. And and I don’t think that there’s any any meaningful evidence that the concussion issue is is going to turn a meaningful number of fans away from football.
Krys Boyd [00:32:49] There were observers a few years ago who thought football might go the way of, say, horseracing and boxing, sports that still exist but are maybe not as big as not as big a part of the culture as they once were. How and why did those sports lose popularity over time?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:33:06] You know, I think it was a number of things. I mean, you know, in in both cases, you had you had ethical issues. You know, certainly animal rights people have long felt that that horse racing was was not ethical. And so I think it became easy enough for for people to to say, yeah, I agree with that and move on from horse racing. I think boxing suffered a similar fate. I think each of those sports also had sort of unique, unique things about it that, you know, in boxing’s case, you know, the violence is just impossible to ignore. With football, you can at least sort of trick yourself into thinking this is a beautiful game with with just athletes zinging the ball around the field. With boxing, it’s just two guys punching each other. So if you don’t have the stomach for that, you’re not going to watch it. I think in both cases, you know, the demise of boxing, the demise of horseracing probably partly be credited to the rise of football. I mean, football has taken over so much of our culture. It’s it’s the most watched TV shows of of any kind any kind of entertainment every year. And so you look at the rise of of obviously other sports the NBA as well. But I think there are just other options if you if you wanted to if you wanted to gamble 50 years ago, 70 years ago, you were you were probably going to do it on a boxing match or a horse race. And you can sit on your couch in most places watching, watching an NFL game and do the same thing. So, you know, in some ways I think that it’s those that the ethical problems, the health problems in those sports contributed to it, but it wasn’t enough. And and same case with the NFL. It’s hard to imagine what the thing that’s going to come along is that that would actually bring the league down.
Krys Boyd [00:34:58] Yeah it is interesting that the sport the rest of the world calls football, that we call soccer has gained some traction here, but it is still kind of a niche thing compared with football and the penetration of the NFL into like regular American culture.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:35:14] Yeah, I think, you know, there’s a whole long conversation about why why football has become and remains the dominant sort of American cultural sport. I think. I think soccer, you know, is is making inroads. But but, you know, football is just it’s ingrained in in so many parts of America. It it is. And I think, look, let’s be honest. I’m a fan of of all kinds of sports. There is no better TV experience than watching a football game. It is it is a sport built for for television, built for the streaming era. It is it is just sort of a perfect kind of just experience of if you’re wanting to sit on your on your couch for three hours and get excited and worked up about something that you have no no influence over or no involvement in. And I think for for all kinds of reasons, you know, that’s just the NFL and football for Americans who who have have had this as part of their lives for for so long. And increasingly, by the way, yes, soccer’s becoming more popular here. The NFL is playing more and more games around the world. It continues to play games in Europe, started playing games in South America. I don’t think there’s any universe in which football our football overtakes their football in terms of popularity in those countries. But but the NFL is expanding, you know, in in similar ways to the way soccer is is growing here.
Krys Boyd [00:36:49] Are you saying that football fans liked the game in part because it is violent so that like, some professional version of flag football would never satisfy?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:36:59] It’s hard to imagine that. I think, you know, flag football is just a different game. You know, at its at its core, I think it’s fun to play. I know it’s fun to play as someone who has has has a has a 5’10, 165 pound body. It’s a lot easier for me to get on a football field than a tackle football field. But I think that, you know, for some people, sure, I do think the violence is is part of the game, the manliness, the toughness. There’s no question. I mean, for all the talk we we have about about boxing becoming less popular. The UFC mixed martial arts is more and more popular. There’s clearly an audience of people who who are there to watch our version of of what was happening in the Colosseum 2000 years ago. I think there’s also a lot of fans who who wince at the violence. I you know, I know I have converted into into one of those fans. And, you know, for me, it’s it’s partly the fact that my my Kansas City Chiefs have been so good in recent years. But it’s also partly because, you know, the game is just something that I’ve watched and and become used to and and have come to love and enjoy for for my whole life. And I think I think even for fans who sort of turn away from the violence, it’s hard to give that up.
Krys Boyd [00:38:26] Yeah, it’s not nothing that many people have grown up associating football games with, being with family and friends. It’s it’s a part of the holidays for a lot of people.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:38:36] I, of all my childhood went to chiefs games with with my grandfather. Thanksgiving Day there’s there there used to be two games. There’s now three games on on Thanksgiving Day. The NFL has now has games on Christmas. And it is it is just a part of people’s lives, I think, in a lot of different parts of the country. Obviously, where I’m from, in the Midwest, obviously in Texas, Sundays are for football. You go to church and you go to football and college football. Same thing in many parts of the country. Saturdays are for college football. And it’s, I think, the weekly cadence of it and the seasonal nature of it. In many ways it feeds into the popularity that in a way with, you know, with with a an NBA season, you know, you have 80 games, it sort of spans almost the entire year at this point. But with football, it’s it’s a weekly ritual for people. And I do think that’s that’s hard to give up.
Krys Boyd [00:39:34] Reeves How does athletes choice NFL athletes choice to play through and play despite head injuries, get framed as a matter of personal autonomy and medical privacy rather than league ethics and safety.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:39:50] I think it gets framed that way, partly because it’s easier for everyone involved. It’s easier for fans to sleep at night. It’s easier for the league to say, we’ve done what we can and we’ve put it on individuals again. This is you know, you can you can talk about which just few years ago lived through a pandemic where we’re getting individual goals. You know, there was a whole movement to just say this is this is individual choice. Do you want to wear a mask? Do you want to get a vaccine? There is a real ingrained sort of ethos for a lot of people of as long as you understand your risks then you can do whatever you want. And it’s certainly not something everyone believes in, and I think there’s problems with that. But it’s it’s clearly a belief that there are many people and many Americans have.
Krys Boyd [00:40:49] Does the NFL routinely compensate players who are permanently disabled by CTE or by any other game related injury?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:40:59] So, yes, a few years ago, as as as the news started to come out about about cities, a number of former players, thousands of former players eventually filed lawsuits against the league. And this eventually got bundled into a single class action lawsuit that was settled in the middle of the last decade that in which the NFL agreed to compensate former players who suffered from from brain injuries. So far, the league has paid out more than $1 billion to more than 1600 former players and their families. And and that number, by all accounts, is is only going to continue to grow.
Krys Boyd [00:41:50] There have been some recent examples of players weighing the risks against the rewards and making unusual choices. Tell us about Grayson McCall.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:42:00] Yeah. Grayson McCall is sort of the most recent example of someone who made the opposite choice. Grayson calls a starting quarterback for North Carolina State University kind of a a mid-tier college football team. And he was 24 years old, a senior. And he had suffered several concussions in his career, including one earlier this season in which he got hit by three different players at the same time. His helmet went flying off. He got carted off the field and he made the choice to say, I’m done in the middle of the season and I’m retiring from football. And I think, you know, look, Grayson McCall was not going to be a number one draft pick in the NFL. He was probably not going to go on to play professional football. So in certain ways, it’s probably an easier decision for him to say, I’ve got the rest of life ahead of me. I don’t need to play the last half of my last season of college football. But it’s also the case that that he and a number of other players who have retired early have not turned their back on on football. And in fact, in his announcement in which he said he was retiring, he said he planned to go coach kids.
Krys Boyd [00:43:18] So you mentioned that you remain a fan of the sport. You you cringe a little at the violence. Now, has that diminished your enjoyment of watching football?
Reeves Wiedeman [00:43:27] I think that it has. I very genuinely, when I watch the games and someone gets hit hard, whether it’s a guy on my team or the other team, yeah, I wince, I look away from the screen and then I look back, you know, and I and I keep watching. And so I think it’s it’s something that I, I certainly grapple with personally in deciding why do I feel okay with this? And, and I think for now, you know, my answer to that question is, is the one we kind of talked about earlier, which is these are grown men out there. They’re making the choice for themselves. I’m in favor of the NFL doing everything that it can to make the game safer. If those goofy guardian caps will protect players from injury. I say let’s let’s put them on every player next season. So has it been enough to get me to stop watching football? But it’s certainly continue to make me look at the game a little differently.
Krys Boyd [00:44:23] So even if we’re fans, we we sort of owe it to ourselves to think deeply about why we watch.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:44:30] I think so. I think we should think deeply about every part of our lives. And this is one of them. And look, this is part of the problem is if football is entertainment for people, it’s the thing that they get to do on Sunday so they don’t have to think about all the hard things in their life. It’s something to have fun with. It’s something to get excited about. I’m certainly not going to tell Tua Tagovailoa that he should retire. I’m not going to tell someone to stop watching the NFL. But I do think that for for people who want to continue enjoying the sport, thinking about this issue, continuing to take it seriously, continuing to think about ways in which we can make the game safer, and especially for young people, for kids and high school players who choose to play the game, who are inspired by the NFL players they watch on the weekends to continue to kind of press on this issue, even as we continue to watch the Super Bowl every year.
Krys Boyd [00:45:25] Reeves Weidman is a features writer at New York Magazine, which published his article, “The End of the NFL’s Concussion Crisis.” Reeves Thank you so much for making time to talk about this.
Reeves Wiedeman [00:45:34] Thank you for having me, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:45:36] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, on Instagram, and wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for KERA Think. The website is think.kera.org. You can listen to the show there and you can find out about upcoming shows we’re planning and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
