Is Football Dangerous?

Is football dangerous? It’s a question many parents are asking themselves now that summer vacation is but a distant memory. Kids are back in school which means try-outs. Should you let your child try out for the football team? Or is football dangerous?

As a parent, your duty is first and foremost to keep your children safe from bodily harm So if football is dangerous, shouldn’t you forbid your child to play the game? It’s a question many parents have wrestled with over the years since the game was first played, in 1869. There were concussions even in the initial decade in the history of the game. In fact, in 1905, there was a spate of 19 fatalities due to playing football. Appalled by these senseless deaths, President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban the game if changes weren’t instituted to make football safer.

The result of Teddy Roosevelt’s threat was the modification of the game, with some dangerous moves eliminated. Also, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was formed. The association worked to create uniform measures for safety and to address other football issues, too. These were good steps.

But players still got hurt and parents were still left worrying about their kids. “Is football dangerous?” they wondered. “Should I forbid my child to play this contact sport?”

Parents, you see, are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they forbid their children to play football, they may be seen as overcautious and robbing their children of a chance to play a good, old-fashioned, red-blooded American game. Not to mention their kids will be really, really upset with them and may call them, “the worst parents EVER.”

On the other hand, if parents let their children play football, they’re taking a chance on the safety of their children. What sane parent can do that—take a chance with his child’s life? Apparently, Ed Riley, brother of Mike Riley, Nebraska’s head football coach.  According to Ed Riley, the question: Is football dangerous can be answered with an unequivocal no.

In fact, Ed Riley says that football is no more dangerous than glee club, band, or choir (yes, really). Riley cites a study by the Mayo Clinic which looked at seniors who played football from 1946 to 1956 on high school football teams in Rochester, Minnesota. This was back at a time when football headgear was not as protective as it is today. The researchers were looking to see if these now-elderly former football players were more likely to have developed Parkinson’s disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and dementia.

They weren’t.

There was no significant difference in the number of ex-football players with these conditions, compared to those who did not play the game, back in the day. Is football dangerous? Not according to Ed Riley and the Mayo Clinic.

Now Riley is a doctor, so his opinion isn’t something to simply blow off. He does explain that the Centers For Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) did find that football players are three times more likely to suffer from neurodegenerative disease (brain damage). That’s a shocking figure, until you realize that this is still only  3% of National Football League (NFL) players, compared with 1% of those in the general, non-football-playing population.

Is the risk that your child will be in that 3% of those football players who go on to sustain brain damage worth letting him play? Riley offers an emphatic yes. He touts all the benefits of playing football. It’s healthy, he says. Football’s colorblind, he says.

Meanwhile, the list of ex-NFL players found to have something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) continues to grow. CTE develops after a person sustains many concussions and other brain injuries. So far, 63 players have been identified as having developed CTE over the past 60 years. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, consider this: CTE can only be identified through an autopsy.

How many players end up getting an autopsy after death? How do we know how many players who didn’t have autopsies, ended up developing CTE?

The answer is, we don’t. We have no way of knowing.

And anyway, we’re talking NFL. What about high school kids? Younger children?

Well, the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) conducted a study in 2014, and tracked injuries for tackle football in kids ages 7 to 14. The researchers wanted to see if it made any difference in the number of injuries when players received safety education from their football coaches.

The study looked at young players from four states, dividing them into three groups: players with no education from their coaches (704 players), players with Heads-Up education plus Pop Warner affiliation (741 players), plus players with Heads-Up education, only (663 players). Heads-Up and Pop Warner education programs offer guidelines that keep football players from too much contact during practice, which should, in theory, cut down the number of football injuries.

All told, there were 370 injuries reported during 71,262 athlete exposures. And yes, the lowest number of injuries was in the group of 741 players who had both Heads-Up and Pop Warner instruction. So is football dangerous?

It’s certainly more dangerous when kids don’t receive enough guidance on restricting contact and on other issues relating to football safety. “Our findings support the need for additional coaching education and practice contact restrictions. Future research should look at how different programs work at various levels of competition and sports,” said the study’s lead author, Zachary Y. Kerr.

On the other hand, a much smaller study of just 24 football players ages 16 to 18 found changes in the white matter of the brain in players categorized as “hard-hitters,” after only a single season. These players were outfitted with headgear that monitored how often and how severely, the wearers sustained impacts (hits) to the head when playing football. Now this is just a small study, and no one really knows whether these changes to the white matter of the brain have any link to long-term brain damage. But it certainly does seem to warrant further investigation.

The Question Remains: Is Football Dangerous?

So again, the question remains: is football dangerous? Or perhaps more importantly, is the risk small enough that we should allow our children to play this all-American game?

It would be nice if this column could offer parents a definitive straight-up answer of yes or no.

Unfortunately, that definitive answer continues to elude even the best of us. You’ll have to just go with your gut feeling as your child’s parent,  and hope that as more information becomes available, you’ll be proven to be the world’s “best” parent, no matter what decision you make.

Welcome to the club of parental insecurity, the insecurity all parents feel, even when making possibly the most consequential decisions of their entire parenting history.  Especially when asked to consider two question: “Is football dangerous? Should I let my child play?”

It’s not always fun being a member of a club. Even one as big as this.