You see them at every NFL training camp. Giant mushrooms, on all the heads. They are called Guardian Caps, named after the company that sells them. They are supposed to shield the brains of football players and are standard equipment during practice. A few players, including Houston’s notably violent nickelback Jalen Pitre, wear them during games.
On Tuesday morning the Guardian Cap became a metaphor for the sport. It hides what’s underneath. The New York Times, citing a British Medical Journal survey, reported that CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) is present in the brains of football players to an extent feared but never enumerated.
The study focused on the 878 NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. It found that 215 had CTE, which comes out to nearly one in four. There were 643 brains that were not examined, and the reasonable assumption is that many of them contained CTE, too. Of 235 players whose families donated their brains, there were 215 cases of CTE.
In 202 of the 338 brains that were donated between 2008 and 2021, almost 60 percent contained dementia, including nine of 23 that did not have CTE.
Such headlines were dominant in the days of the movie “Concussion,” and the players’ suit against the NFL that reaped $765 million. That was in the middle of the previous decade. Since then, the NFL has instituted ejections for targeting, and the helmet companies claim they have modernized and de-weaponized their product, and players with concussion symptoms are spotted and forced to leave games. There is little taste for the revival of the narrative that consumed football not so long ago. ESPN.com had removed it from its headline list on its football page by Tuesday night. We can’t be thinking player safety when there’s fantasy rosters to set.
Meanwhile, the perky sideline reporters and ESPN’s opionated studio aren’t stationed at the memory care facilities, when another NFL alumnus is led by the hand into the lobby.
Until there’s a survey that measures the health of today’s players, we can’t know if the NFL’s measures are effective. CTE still isn’t detectable until the patient dies. The league claims the Guardian Caps reduce the force of head contact by 10 percent. Stanford and Wisconsin have produced studies that say the Caps don’t really reduce concussions, but the sample isn’t big enough for strong conclusions. Helmet companies, particularly Riddell, say the Guardian Caps interfere with their warranties. Thank God that they’ve discovered the team logos and other stickers can be attached to the Caps with no problem.
But the Caps aren’t just there for optics. They protect players from the helmets, and prevent players from using their own helmets to harm others. They’re also much lighter than they look. Pop Warner Leagues are permitting, but not mandating, the Guardian Caps for their little tacklers, some of whom get hit at age seven.
Those who don’t believe football is synonymous with fracture are playing flag football, which will be an Olympic sport for both men and women in 2028. The NFL is driving that bandwagon, claiming that 20 million are playing flag football worldwide. Somehow it has discovered that the flag game can install the same teamwork values that the savage game does. High school 7-on-7 tournaments, with all passing and no hitting, are the big events of the summertime. It’s where recruiters judge quarterbacks and receivers. It’s possible to get hurt in those games, too, but much harder to plant the seeds of Lewy Body dementia.
Unfortunately, commercial football is getting bigger and more grotesque. College playoffs are getting longer, and one can easily foresee 20-game schedules once the Big Ten and the SEC break away from the parasites in their midst. The richest high school teams jet cross-country to play each other, primarily because the teams in that area see no point in getting abused.
The NFL is inexorably gaining on its 18-game schedule goal, the one that its Players Association said it would never accept. The Super Bowl will coincide with Valentine’s Day at SoFi Stadium. The international schedule is nine games long, including an utterly preposterous date in Australia on Sept. 10, featuring the Rams and 49ers. There is nothing to gain and a lot of sleep to lose, and it deprives one market of a significant divisional home date. A floating stadium in the Strait of Hormuz looms.
Thursday games on three days’ rest…..a year-round schedule of OTAs and mini-camps and “being the first in the building and the last to leave”....the annexation of Christmas Day to go with Thanksgiving….more and more games disappearing from the view of the workaday fan and into the world of streaming, The NFL doesn’t need to test the limits of its excesses to remain the nation’s most successful business enterprise. It just does it because it can.
At the very least, the NFL should require the hired help to wear the big mushroom in its regular season games, just to establish the data. Teams should be permitted to dress all their practice-squad players in games. If 18 games are necessary, two bye weeks should be, too.
You say the game will always be about wreckage and risk. Auto racing used to be that way. Thanks to improvements in neck restraints and the composition of walls, no one has died in a NASCAR event since Dale Earnhardt, 25 years ago. No driver has died in a regular Formula One race since Jules Ferrer in 2015. No Indy Car driver has died in action since Justin Wilson in 2015.
If racing can do it, football can do it, regardless of the discrepancies. If football doesn’t fix this, it’s only postponing the day when someone else, beyond its control, does.
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