FOOTBALL’S DEMISE IS STILL A LONG WAY OFF
Expanded NFL schedule, new leagues show that the maligned sport is far from the end
Five years ago, Chris Borland retired from the NFL. It felt like a sea-change moment for the sport. Borland had been excellent as a rookie linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers and then, at 24, he up and quit, citing concerns over the health of his brain.
He had done his research, and that research told him football was too dangerous a job.
Borland’s move, coming after the suicide deaths of several former NFL players, the legal mess over the league’s attempts to combat accusations of health risks, and the alarming incidence of brain disease discovered in post-mortem examinations of former players, was treated as a seminal moment, with headlines like “The End of Football?”
But if football was at a crossroads in the spring of 2015, it is rather surprising to see the direction it has since gone.
On Wednesday night, reports from an NFL owners meeting suggested the league was hopeful of a deal with its players association that would add an extra playoff game in each conference and a 17th game to the regular-season schedule. News of the expanded schedule comes during the infancy of the reborn XFL, the second time in as many years someone has tried to launch a spring league. And in Canada, one of CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s signature policies has been to sign agreements with football-playing organizations from Mexico to Scandinavia to Japan in an effort to foster international growth of the sport.
Rather than the end of football, then, the past few years have seen quite something else: more football. It is particularly striking that the NFL, after a period in which it was besieged on all sides by concerns over brain health, now seems ready to increase the amount of high-leverage football in its season. Reports say the league owners would drop a pre-season game in exchange for the extra regular-season game, but that is not much of a tradeoff. A game in which few starters would play would be replaced by one in which most of them would. And so, less than a decade after the deaths of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, former NFL players who killed themselves amid the debilitating effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the league wants to add football to its calendar.
I confess to having no confident explanation for how this happened. It has long been evident that playing football poses a greater risk to the health of one’s brain than not playing football. For some, that revelation was enough to change behaviour, and at the grassroots level there were measurable declines in football participation rates. But where there was money to be made, it has continued, in the pro leagues and at U.S. colleges. There are still far more people willing to play football at a high level than there are places on rosters.
This is not the trend that was anticipated. Is it simply because, as much as we have a better understanding today that playing football poses a clear risk to cognitive health, we remain uncertain how to quantify that risk? For years now, the revelations about CTE in the brains of former football players have been accompanied by the caution that, because the disease can only be discovered via autopsy, there is no way to know if the hallmark signs of CTE would be present in the brains of the non-football-playing public. Accordingly, no medical professional has been able to put a specific number on the risk of developing a degenerative brain disease. The risk is there, and the closer one looks at the evidence the more likely one is to pass on playing football.
That uncertainty may yet change, as long-term studies seek to compare the overall brain health of living former players with that of non-playing controls, but for now it remains. And for many players, that seems to be enough. They know they are putting their long-term cognitive function at risk when they put on a football helmet, and they are comfortable with that risk.
Consider Zach Collaros, who was concussed while quarterbacking Saskatchewan in the 2019 opener and missed most of the season. He finished the season with Winnipeg and won the Grey Cup, playing despite a history of concussions. The Blue Bombers signed him to a multi-year deal. Collaros and the Bombers are at peace with what another blow to the head might mean.
The kind of rationalization has taken place throughout the sport, from leagues to owners to broadcasters to the media and the public. Five years on, the case of Borland remains an outlier.
The End of Football? Not even close.