CFL still has no clear stance on the link between football and CTE, despite the overwhelming supporting data ... After tragicomic 60-1 loss to Stampeders, Ticats playing more like dogs ... West is the best
TORONTO — When
Randy Ambrosie was introduced in early July as the new commissioner of the Canadian Football League, he was quickly asked the concussion question: Did he think there was a link between football and the brain disease CTE?
Although Ambrosie was an offensive lineman in his playing days, on this question, he punted.
“I don’t think it would take a lot for me to convince many of you that I’m not a doctor nor a scientist,” Ambrosie said. “There are parts of that question, for a layperson, that it would be impossible to answer.”
Ambrosie went on to say that in his early discussions with team executives and officials — he had, after all, just been hired — he was aware of “how deeply and passionately they feel about player safety” and that the important thing was “making sure we do everything possible to make this game as safe as we can.”
Neatly avoided in this response is the question of whether the game can truly be made safe at all.
In the few weeks since Ambrosie took the job atop the CFL, evidence has continued to tumble forth about the risks associated with playing football.
On a small scale, a Toronto hospital that studied the brain of former CFL player Rick
Klassen found that it showed signs of CTE, and also signs of a form of dementia. And on a much larger scale, a Boston University study of the brains of former football players detected defining features of CTE in an overwhelming number of subjects: 99% of players with National Football League experience; 87% of a much smaller subgroup of former CFL players.
Neither of those developments were necessarily unexpected. In the case of Klassen, he had shown symptoms associated with CTE — anger, irritability — in the years before his cancer-related death in 2016. It is very often the case that when someone suspects they have CTE while alive, a postmortem examination of their brain confirms the suspicion. (This is, notably, not always the case.) And with respect to the large Boston University study of more than 200 brains, the findings were in line with previous studies of brains after death, which tend to discover a prevalence of CTE pathology in at least 95% of the brains of former NFL players.
After the study was released, the CFL said in a statement many questions “remain unanswered” and player health safety remains an “important priority.”
Huge parts of the CTE puzzle remain unsolved. How does the rate of CTE characteristics in the brains of former football players compare with the rate in the wider population? And how many of those people, football-playing or otherwise, with the telltale CTE proteins in their brains, outwardly suffer from the symptoms like depression, memory loss and anger that have been seen in so many high-profile cases, like Mike Webster and Junior
Seau? Put another way, is there a population of people whose brains show signs of CTE but who do not seem particularly harmed by it? Because post-mortem tests are the only avenue available, researchers have no means to compare the football-playing group with a control group.
That Boston University study acknowledged these limitations, saying its findings, headline-grabbing though they were, should not be used for an “estimation of the risk of participation in football and neuropathological outcomes.”
Still, the risk is not close to zero. Baltimore Ravens lineman John Urschel, who happens to be pursuing a doctorate in mathematics at MIT, retired last week and said the new study was a factor in his decision. Former NFL player Dominique
Foxworth, who was also the president of the NFLPA, said he would not let his young son play football. The benefits — lessons about teamwork and work ethic — no longer outweighed the risks, he said.
His kid could get those lessons from soccer or