Is the NFL About to Become Extinct?

Brain injuries are a hot topic in the NFL these days due to the lawsuits brought forward by former NFL players and the efforts made by Roger Goodell to reduce concussions.

Yet it would appear as though most NFL fans don’t want to hear about it and many NFL players prefer not to think about it.

I base this assumption on the many comments I read from fans that believe that worrying about head trauma makes you a wimp. I have also heard the same sentiment countless times from NFL players. But the truth about head trauma is very different.

Here are some important facts:

• Over 62,000 concussions are sustained each year in high-school contact sports.
• 34% of college football players have had one concussion
• 20% of college football players have had multiple concussions.
• Suffering a second concussion while still having symptoms from a previous concussion can kill you.
• Suffering multiple concussions throughout a career can lead to CTE, a progressive, degenerative disease that starts with depression, followed by dementia and death. CTE often strikes about 10 years after a player retires.
• Recently, a brain researcher found evidence of the beginnings of CTE in the brain of an 18-year-old that had played high school football
• A study commissioned by the NFL found that NFL players are 19 times more likely to be diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimers’s disease or other memory-related illness than the same 30-49 year old age group in the general population.

Perhaps the best way to get fans to care about concussions is to make them understand that concussions don’t just affect NFL players. They affect Pop Warner football players, middle school players, high school players and college players as well. So the chances are very good that the average NFL fan has a friend or family member playing football on some level.

So if you’re a fan who takes the tough-guy position on concussions that “its just part of what these guys sign up for,” then you need to realize that applies to your little brother, your cousin or your nephew, regardless of where they are playing.

You need to understand that your macho “who cares, strap it on a play" mentality is going to change in a heartbeat if one of your loved ones gets seriously injured or starts having neurological problems stemming from a football concussion.

In other words, what you need to realize is that cheering for violence from the comfort of your couch and choosing not to care about the plight of the athletes who provide your entertainment is pretty hypocritical.

It’s time to come over to the rational side of this debate.

Football at all levels needs to evolve for the safety of the players, even if the players themselves don’t fully realize the risks they are facing. I’m sure that many of the workers at asbestos plants intuitively knew that their working environment was bad for their lungs, with all the fibers they were breathing in. But they had no idea that 20 years later they would develop lung cancer.

We now know that a significant percentage of NFL players will develop CTE as a result of the accumulation of hits they took during their career.

The game simply has to change. And with awareness increasing and the lawsuits coming and the inevitable skyrocketing of liability insurance for schools with football programs, the change is going to come one way or another.

Football will have to evolve in order to survive.

Source: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1153774-is-the-nfl-about-to-become-extinct

Sergio Romo Ron Artest Shannon Brown Kobe Braynt Andrew Bynum Jordan Farmar