Serious Injuries Put NFL Players at Huge Risk

By Kira Yates ’16

Football has an ongoing reputation as being a violent sport in which players risk their safety each game. While many injuries are serious, the most dangerous and prevalent injuries are concussions, or any trauma to the head.

On the opening Sunday of the 2015 season, almost every game had at least one player out with a concussion by halftime, with a total of nine concussions before the Monday game was even played. In the 2014 season alone, 112 professional football players in the NFL suffered concussions. Although the NFL claims that the number of concussions in each season had decreased by 35 percent, the number of concussions that occurred on opening weekend this year was double the number of those that occurred on the opening weekend in 2010, and these numbers could continue to rise as the season progresses.

While a concussion may force a player to sit out a week of practice and a game or two, multiple concussions, or even one major concussion, can cause many serious long-term issues. Traumatic head injury in professional football players has been correlated with the disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

CTE, a progressive, degenerative brain disease caused by hard and/or repetitive hits to the head, has been studied extensively at the CTE Center at Boston University. The Center thoroughly examined the brains of 91 former NFL players, and found CTE in 87 of those brains. Combined with studies from the Department of Veterans Affairs, CTE was found in nearly 80 percent of 165 former football players from all levels of the game. Some former NFL players such as Dave Duerson, Ray Easterling and Andre Waters, who are now known to have suffered from CTE, suffered a very painful decline and are believed to have committed suicide after suffering from the symptoms of CTE.

Besides concussions, the sport of football presents the constant threat of mild to severe injuries, ranging from broken fingers to torn ACLs. In order to keep up with all of the injuries in the NFL and to ensure that members of fantasy football leagues choose the right players for the week, many websites including ESPN, NFL, CBS, Fox Sports and Yahoo keep a running list of all of the injured players in the NFL. According to these lists, almost every single team in the NFL has at least five injured players who are unable to play. For example, the Pittsburgh Steelers had eight players injured in the last weekend of September with injuries including a broken hand, a shoulder injury, a thumb injury, a chest injury and a knee injury that will cause starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger to miss four to six weeks of the season.

Such injuries, as well as mounting evidence of long term brain trauma caused by playing football, is leading some to question the very safety of the game itself. Steve Almond, author of “Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto,” writes an “exasperated, frustrated, wide-ranging argument that the time has come to abandon football as a sport built on … a willingness to find it entertaining to watch people suffer brain damage.” A sport in which dozens of players suffer severe injuries week after week calls into question the general safety of the game, and whether or not the regulations being made to improve the safety of the game are actually working.