Brain study puts fan of football in quandary

Ihate football. I love football. Should I even be watching football? ask in the wake of this news: Researchers studied the donated brains of 111 former National Football League players and found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in of them.

The scientists also found evidence of the degenerative brain condition in seven of eight former Canadian Football League players, 48 of 53 ex-college players and three of 14 former high-school players.

The report was issued Tuesday, with the scientists cautioning that the brains were donated by families who might have already suspected that their loved ones’ symptoms (depression, memory loss, impulsiveness, suicidal tendencies) pointed to CTE.

In other words: It’s not a representative sample of all football players — but still sufficiently terrifying for a lot of parents to say, “Honey, please play tennis instead.”

Back in 2010, when the NFL finally stopped pretending that head injuries were not a cause for alarm, I thought TV viewers would begin to abandon a game so obviously dangerous to its participants.

Wrong (sort of).

TV ratings stayed steadily strong until 2016, when they fell a bit for reasons that could spring from a variety of factors other than CTE: the distracting presidential campaign, millennial “cordcutters” who prefer Netflix to the NFL, too many televised games or declining quality of play.

But the last Super Bowl still drew an average of 111.3 million viewers, putting it in the top five for Super Bowl audiences. It’s too soon to write the obituary of televised football.

Still, I can’t escape the nagging thought that the players are risking their brains for my amusement.

The argument that those helmeted adults are exercising their choice to play a dangerous game holds little merit for me. No one gets to the NFL without subjecting himself to thousands of hits in lower-level play. Is a talented 16-year-old really capable of assessing the lifetime implications of a sport that brings him so much acclaim in high school?

We would understand those implications more fully if the NFL hadn’t chosen the Big Tobacco strategy of willful ignorance for so long.

So let’s just say that I have decidedly mixed feelings about football, whose best games are riveting dramas that few offerings on television can rival. (And the rest are 3 ½ hours of mediocrity and commercials.)

Even CTE experts struggle with the allure of football.

Dr. Ann McKee, the Boston neuropathologist who led the study of players’ brains, was an avid viewer of Green Bay Packers games until 2016, when the weight of her lab findings compelled her to stop watching.

As she told an interviewer for the League of Fans website last year: “I can’t ignore what I’m seeing.”