After Frontline released their findings that 96% of 91 deceased football players had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), I came to a conclusion: youth football will be illegal by 2030.
The premise of the ethical argument against youth football is simple: specific liberties of a minor should be taken away from them, when that liberty directly threatens their health. Take the examples of smoking cigarettes, driving a car, even joining the army. These activities, among the dozens that are specifically illegal for children, are illegal not to conform to arbitrary cultural norms, but for the safety of the minor whose brain has yet to fully develop.
“A history of concussions also associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease found in people who have suffered brain trauma, including a number of deceased football players.”
For Wisconsin fans, the gigantic leaps in knowledge regarding concussion related injuries should be blatantly obvious: Just two weeks ago, Michael Caputo’s dazed act of lining up in Alabama’s backfield would have been considered a hilarious gaff. Now, we take it as sobering evidence of traumatic brain damage. This incident echoed off the momentous announcement from just a couple months prior, when Wisconsin alumnus Chris Borland made national headlines for choosing to retire from football at the age of 24, passing up millions of dollars in guaranteed money as a starting linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers. So, what does the retirement of a 24-year old have to do with signaling the end of youth football?
Let’s take Michael Caputo’s head injury as a case to exemplify some of the moral issues at stake. The most promising aspect of Saturday’s game against Alabama, from an ethical standpoint, was that Michael Caputo’s helmet was immediately taken away from him. Why is this ethical? Because, Michael Caputo at the time of the injury didn’t know the full extent of his situation, and couldn’t rationally assess his own safety.
Taking away his “liberty” to play was an issue of protecting his mental and physical health. Of all advancements in concussion research, the evidence of severe trauma caused by second impact syndrome has been the most influential. In fact, “An athlete suffers a second concussion while still recovering from a previous one. The brain swells rapidly and catastrophically, causing severe disability or death.”
To revisit my argument: there is only objectively ethical reason to take away a minor’s liberty, and it’s when that person’s safety is directly at risk.
“I just honestly want to do what’s best for my health. … From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”~Chris Borland
Prior to a calm before a storm, there’s most often a chorus of unsettling noise. In the case of football injuries, the unsettling noise has arisen from a slew of scientific studies that have exposed the risks of youth football.
Another Frontline report also found evidence that high school concussions were twice as prevelant as they were in the college ranks. This likely occurs because players haven’t spent enough time working on tackling safely, and trainers aren’t aware of the warning signs.
We shouldn’t belittle morality into binary options of good and bad. The problem of repeated head trauma may be caused by playing football (among other sports with high concussion rates, such as soccer), but the limitations of concussion protocol should diminish the most harmful repercussions. Yet, this vital safety net isn’t being properly utilized.
Patrick Hruby’s 2012 investigative piece on the dangers of youth football explains that concussion protocol is often bypassed by the at-risk players, and offers an explanation of why safety is often disregarded. “A national survey of high school trainers found that more than 40 percent of concussed athletes return to play too quickly, and that 16 percent of players who lost consciousness after being hit returned to the field the same day. Such is the ethos of the sport. Last December, the Associated Press surveyed 44 NFL players, a cross-section of the league; 23 of them said they would try to conceal a possible concussion in order to stay on the field.”
To further systematize this process, some have called for empirical evidence to ensure that players aren’t heading back to the field without properly being assessed. One passionate neurosurgeon from North Carolina offered a novel solution for innovating concussion protocol. “My hope is that eventually all football helmets will be equipped with devices that measure the force of a blow. We’ll provide coaches with hard data, so they know that if a player gets hit at a certain force he needs to come out of the game and rest.”
An ESPN article stated that “football concussions reported among 10- to 14-year-olds more than doubled from 4,138 in 2000 to 10,759 in 2010, according to the CDC.”
In many cases, parent have taken note of the research: despite a consistently growing youth population, the non-profit SFIA research group found that participation in youth football dropped nearly 5% between 2008-2012. The number of concussion has steadily risen, not as a result of worse collisions, but as a product of better detection method. In the years to come, once detection of head injuries has been fully optimized, the concrete picture provided by the data may end up being much more grave for football. Just take the last decade as an example of the immaculate increase in reported concussions. “Concussions have risen 200 percent among teens ages 14 to 19 in the last decade. High school football accounts for 47 percent of all reported sports concussions, with 33 percent of concussions occurring during practice,” a study by The Head Case Company found.
I believe we should start by making football illegal for anyone under 14, and if the research continues to indicate a large ratio of players suffering from severe head trauma, ban the game for anyone under 18. The fundamental question at the core of the case to make youth football illegal is whether a youth, someone who is in a legal sense not fully responsible for the acts they commit, responsible enough to make a decision that has a likelihood of permanently damaging their health?
The trend is extremely clear: the more scientist research degenerative brain diseases associated with football, the more the case against youth football builds. In researching, I several times found myself drawing parallels between cigarette research in the 1960’s. It took until the 1980’s for every single state to ban cigarettes for minors.
Will America’s most profitable sport continue to reign as king of American sports, or will Football face the same fate as boxing did in the 20th century? If we extrapolate the rate of troubling research, youth football will likely come to an end in the next ten to twenty years.
Sources
Image: Youth Football
ESPN
Frontline
ThePostGame