HOUSTON—Things change. The last few years the National Football League would do a health and safety press conference at the Super Bowl, on Thursday afternoon. It was a busy day to do it — there was also the counterfeit merchandise press conference, the Super Bowl halftime show press conference, and so forth.
But they would trot out doctors, including San Francisco 49ers chairman Dr. John York one year. They would quote concussion numbers, talk about how much they cared about safety, talk about improvements. Last year, it went poorly.
This year, it vanished. Or at least, has been billed as something else. Early Saturday morning, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will appear and kick off the league’s Start-Up competition, in which the league launches a reality show-like competition to fund start-ups in three categories, one of which is “protecting the athlete.” When asked, the NFL said this was the health and safety event for the week.
Clearly, the old method wasn’t working. Instead, the league held a conference call last week in which they said reported concussions were down, year over year, from 275 to 244, though that is still above the two seasons before 2015. This is similar to how Tom Brady’s father bashed the commissioner over Deflategate on Friday last week — that way, the Brady family could get its viewpoint out there, and then avoid the topic when the brightest lights came on. The Goodell appearance Saturday morning was not billed with the words health or safety, and it was early Saturday morning, which is not a prime-time media window at the Super Bowl.
It may have something to do with last year’s health and safety conference. Mostly, it was companies competing for NFL grant money: helmets, recovery technology, concussion detection, turf underpads. And then Dr. Mitch Berger, from the NFL’s head, neck and spine committee, answered questions about a link between football and degenerative neurological diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. I asked him five straight questions on the subject, and every answer was like this.
“There’s no question that there are degenerative disorders of the brain that occur after a car accident, we can see it after gunshot wounds to the brain,” Berger said. “And the interesting thing about the literature as it’s evolved over the years is you can see tau deposits in the brain in individuals who have never had a traumatic brain injury.”
I eventually asked, so is there a link between football and degenerative brain disorders?
“No,” said Berger.
A little over a month later, NFL executive vice-president Jeff Miller told a Congressional committee that there was a link — “The answer to that question is certainly yes,” he said. It felt like a mistake, even as the class-action lawsuit with approximately 4,500 former players was being settled with that admission included.
This year, though, talk of concussions felt like they had been scrubbed from Super Bowl week. At the commissioner’s state of the league address, there were no questions about concussions. At the NFL Players Association news conference, there was a complaint the league needed to do a better job of enforcing the concussion protocol during games. Ask players, and many will say things have gotten better, but will admit that is partly because it was still a terrifyingly violent league within the last 10 years.
“There were no rules,” says Atlanta backup quarterback Matt Schaub, on what it was was like when he came into the league in 2004.
Quietly, some officials close to the players say it is because the media has simply moved on: that the drumbeat of former players with CTE continues but has become almost routine, and the movie Concussion — which gave a lot of NFL players and their families genuine worries — has receded since its release in 2015. Concussion fatigue, coupled with some genuine improvements in the game, holes and all, and combined with a shift in the NFL’s approach, have combined to make the issue go away during Super Bowl week. ESPN’s Outside The Lines reported this week on the case of former Detroit Lion Mel Farr, who was found to have Level 3 CTE when he died at the age of 70. It barely made a ripple.
But it never vanishes. Chris Nowinski, the co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, thinks the focus shouldn’t just be on the NFL.
“Well, there’s a lot of activity, but I think it’s weighted too much towards concussions and not enough towards CTE,’ Nowinski says. “So they’re talking a lot about helmets and technology, but if they want to reduce and avoid CTE, the onus on them is to get out of the business of recruiting and underwriting children playing football.”
“The reality is, they don’t want to admit that all evidence points to a clear effect. There’s literally no other reasonable cause of CTE other than trauma out there. As a society, the reasonable thing to do would be to assume cause and effect. There are no other magic reasons.”
In the past few years, Hockey Canada and USA Hockey have moved the age of contact hockey up to 13. And yet, the NFL continues to push football in American schools.
Oh, and Dr. Mitch Berger is still on the head, neck and spine committee. Some things change. Some don’t.
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