Last season, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone after a hit from Minnesota linebacker Anthony Barr. The roughing-the-passer penalty prevents this type of hit from happening.

This new penalty is another attempt by the NFL to reconcile an ongoing problem facing the league: the idea that football is inherently unsafe.

The danger of football first came to light in 2002 when Dr. Bennet Omalu, co-founder of the Brain Injury Research Institute, identified chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in former Pittsburgh Steelers’ center Mike Webster’s brain.

CTE occurs in the brain of those who suffer repeated concussions or head trauma. CTE causes the brain to lose mass and deteriorate over time.

The effects of CTE include depression, cognitive impairment, suicidal thoughts, aggression and dementia. CTE has been found in the brain of numerous NFL players who have committed suicide.

Football players are prone to CTE because it is likely caused not by the intensity of the hit, but by repeated hits to the head. Additionally there is no way to definitively test for CTE until an examination of the brain after death.

In 2016, after attempting to deemphasize the issue, the NFL publicly acknowledged that there is a link between brain disorders like CTE and football.

The NFL has now found itself trying to mitigate the conflict between maintaining the spirit of football while still making it safe. New rules, such as roughing the passer, are an attempt to try and make football “safer.”

The problem is that the NFL cannot change the essential elements of the game, mainly, repeated hitting. Rules to protect players might make the game slightly safer, but the NFL can never eliminate the repeated hitting that will inevitably occur.

Many players have actually spoken out against these changes.

“Listen, this is football, man. We all sign up to get hit. We all sign up [knowing] you might get hurt. It’s a violent sport. It’s meant to be that way,” said Joe Flacco, Ravens quarterback.

Even Aaron Rodgers, who this rule was made in response to, said that the rules might be going too far.

“I’m a traditionalist, I’ve watched the game and loved the game for a long time and some of the rules I think help, but some of the rules, maybe are going in the wrong direction. They’re trying to think about the progress of the game and the safety and stuff, but it’s still a collision sport,” Rodgers said.

If players know the risks associated with football and voluntarily choose to still play, then they should be allowed to make that choice. This moves the problem to the NFL to make players aware and informed of the risks of brain damage like CTE.

However, the NFL will not be able to ever make the game fully safe due to the inherent nature of football.

Cover photo courtesy of SB Nation.

This rule is an extension of the kickoff rule changes made in 2012, moving the actual kickoff from the kicking team’s 30 yard-line to their 35 yard-line and allowing the offense of the receiving team to begin their drive on their 25 yard-line after a touchback as opposed to the 20 yard-line.

This new rule, along with the rule changes in 2012, are for the purpose of increasing touchbacks on kickoffs to reduce the number of returns in an effort to increase safety. The sport of football has introduced a multitude of rule changes within the past few years in an effort to increase safety-special teams plays, like kickoffs and punts, have been a huge target of these rule changes. It’s not difficult to see why these plays are targeted. These are often the plays that involve the most high-speed collisions as players have a majority of the field to build up speed for tackles or blocks as opposed to a small 10-15-yard window.  

While rule changes made in order to increase player safety often face criticism, like the recent NFL rule addition that prohibits offensive players and ball carriers from lowering their head preemptively to an oncoming tackler. However, this new kickoff rule seems to have struck some empathetic cord with most. The national championship runner-up University of Georgia Head Coach Kirby Smart lamented that while it could diminish the value of a good kicker, it doesn’t change his preparation and ultimately his team has aimed for touchbacks to be the result of their kicks anyways, as this is the safest option for all players involved. Kansas State University Head Coach and William Jewell College alumni Bill Snyder said that he was all in favor of any rule that increased player safety and prevented injuries.

Perhaps it was the rule changes of 2012 that were the precursor to this generally sweeping change against kickoffs, or perhaps the culture of football is simply becoming more aware of the issue of player safety and long-term health. In this instance, it seems as though many are willing to sacrifice a relatively large change in the sport to facilitate an improvement in safety. Whether this attitude will continue or if we will see the same backlash over future safety regulations is yet to be seen.

Photo courtesy of Sports Illustrated

“The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains,” Costas said.

A recent study published in Brain, a journal of neurology, presents the strongest case yet. Repetitive hits to the head that don’t lead to concussions — meaning no loss of consciousness nor other symptoms, including headaches, dizziness, vision problems or confusion — cause CTE or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. This is a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma. In CTE a protein called Tau forms clumps that slowly spread throughout the brain, killing brain cells.

This study ultimately reinforced the importance of concussion prevention and awareness, not only within the NFL but high-impact sports in general.

“The cracks in the foundation are there,” Costas said. “The day-to-day issues, as serious as they may be, they may come and go. But you cannot change the nature of the game. I certainly would not let, if I had an athletically gifted 12- or 13-year-old son, I would not let him play football.”

Al Michaels also recently came out and expressed his concern for whether football should even be legal considering how deadly it is. He believes that head injuries have an extremely lasting impact.

“Concussions are a major threat to a degree … to the extent that when kids are coming up and want to play football and are not allowed to by their parents or by their grandparents — whoever is raising them — I think that would be the most important issue going down the line,” Michaels said.

Costas and Michaels are raising important questions regarding the safety of the sport. Head injuries are common in the NFL and in other high-impact sports. Costas and Michaels’ call for change could engender many new regulations.

Photo courtesy of NBC Sports Pressbox

Researchers at Boston University found CTE in over 100 deceased football players, some of whom committed suicide. CTE can cause depression, dementia, aggression and confusion in people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, such as football players. Symptoms can begin years or even decades after initial trauma, and CTE cannot be diagnosed until after death. In 2012, former Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, before killing himself. It was later found that Belcher’s brain had signs CTE.

Hernandez’s lawyers are pursuing a federal lawsuit against the NFL, claiming that the organization knew that CTE could result from repeated head collisions but did not attempt to protect Hernandez from head injury. Dr. Ann McKee, chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, stated that slides of Hernandez’s brain showed classic signs of CTE, including “early brain atrophy” and brain perforations. A summary of McKee’s study of 111 brains of NFL players was published in the The Journal of the American Medical Association. Of these brains, 110 had CTE.

The recent research on the link between CTE and NFL players has encouraged the NFL to respond publicly. The organization has begun to advocate for children playing safer forms of football, such as flag football, instead of the traditional tackle football. Other researchers at Boston University recently found that adults who participated in tackle football before they were 12 years old developed more behavioral and cognitive problems than those who started later in childhood. In 2015, a federal judge approved a class-action lawsuit against the NFL filed by former players. The NFL was ordered to pay up to $5 million to each retired player with brain injuries resulting from his time in the NFL.

In 2010, rules within the NFL were changed to help limit the number of head injuries. These included whistling a play dead if a player loses his helmet and creating stricter return-to-play guidelines for players who have suffered concussions. New regulations for return-to-field play force a player with a potential concussion to be immediately escorted off the field, and the player will be examined by an NFL physician and an unaffiliated neurotrauma consultant (UNC). In previous years, NFL teams were known to keep players in the gameregardless of concussions.

It is the will of the certified athletic trainers (ATC spotters) and UNCs to determine whether a player comes off the field after being hit.

“Key players in crunch time rarely ever get removed for an evaluation, probably because the ATC spotter doesn’t want to be blamed for creating a competitive disadvantage,” Mike Florio of ProFootball Talk said.

The entertainment value of the NFL might not coincide with fan-favorite players being taken off of the field due to a potential concussion, argues Scott Davis of Business Insider.

The NFL has not made any public statements regarding Hernandez and his CTE diagnosis.