Photo Credit: Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Waiting for the NFL to do something right seems like an endless wait. They take one step forward and then take two steps back. One of their biggest issues is the discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CTE, by Dr. Bennet Omalu. As soon as Omalu found evidence to link the disease to hits sustained over a football player’s career, the NFL was quick to try and cover it up. The spotlight on the issue once the movie ‘Concussion’ was released last year, however, made it nearly impossible for the league to deny the link.
The NFL has tried everything to downplay the issue, however it has finally decided to stop denying the truth. During a discussion with the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy & Commerce, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety Jeff Miller confirmed the link. Instead of trying to tiptoe around the issue, Miller was very direct, “The answer to that question is certainly yes.” which may not seem like a big step, but it is still a progressive step for the league. Miller’s answer came out of research conducted by Dr. Ann McKee, a Boston University neuropathologist who has been investigating this issue and found CTE in 90 of the 94 NFL players she investigated. During her research, she also saw 45 out of the 55 college football players studied had the disease.
Mckee also gave a brief explanation of the disease, “No, I don’t think this represents how common this disease is in the living population, but the fact that over five years I’ve been able to accumulate this number of cases in football players, it cannot be rare. In fact, I think we are going to be surprised at how common it is.” If that doesn’t show not only the NFL but the world that CTE is real and is a problem, nothing else will.
