The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (16 page)

“I would have played [football] if I could have, absolutely,” she says. “Even today, I've never sat and watched my nephew play. My brother Mike coaches him, and I'm on the sideline, yelling at him.”

“I stand on the sideline too,” says Monet's mother, Mae.

“The other moms drink wine from coffee cups,” Monet says. “I don't dress up cute. I'm there for the game.”

When Parker turned four, Monet searched for a local youth football league that would take children that young. She wanted him to play. Get his first taste of the family business. No question in her mind. When she found one, she was pumped.
God bless the South.
“Our coach's son was three years old when he first came out,” she says. The boys went through spring training—no, really—doing bear crawls and running through tires. They had full-contact practices, complete with Oklahoma drills, coaches screaming
Knock his lights out!
The actual games were full-fledged events, with packed stands and tailgating adults.

For Monet, all of it felt familiar. Like an old childhood blanket. Was she worried about brain trauma?

“No,” she says. “I was getting mad at [Parker] if he didn't tackle, like, ‘What are you
doing
out there?'”

 

University of North Carolina researcher Kevin Guskiewicz studies football collisions for a living. Big hits and little ones. Full-speed human missile strikes. Mundane helmet-to-helmet blows delivered across the line of scrimmage after every snap of the ball. Much of his analysis involves using sensor-equipped helmets to measure impact forces and locations. Guskiewicz has been doing this since the 1990s, and his campus office is home to one of the world's most extensive databases of football brain-rattling.

He also has three sons. One of them, a high school junior, plays football. The other two have given up the sport in favor of baseball and basketball.

“I never pushed or pulled them to play,” he says. “As long as I knew there was a coach out there who cared about health and safety, it was fine.”

Guskiewicz published some of the earliest research linking football to long-term cognitive harm. At one point in time, he was an outspoken critic of the NFL's decades-long campaign to deny and minimize that connection. While working as an athletic trainer for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he saw the sport's brutality up close.

That said, he coached his sons in youth football, and says he would do so again.

“For some reason everybody thinks there is a concussion epidemic,” he says. “That frustrates me. I sustained two concussions playing football in high school myself. There's not an epidemic. We just know a lot more about them and care more about them than we ever have. We need to be smart about how we're doing this.”

Should your child play football? In most cases, Guskiewicz isn't against it. But he can't really answer for anyone else. Not his place. There are too many variables to consider. Besides, his work focuses on a different question: what, if anything, can be done to make football safer?

The NFL, some college conferences, and a number of high school and youth leagues have mandated limits on full-contact practice, the better to reduce the total number of head hits that players absorb. Guskiewicz believes that's a good first step. So do many others. He also advocates for state laws requiring that players who show signs of being concussed be removed from games or practices and not be allowed to return until they're cleared by a health care professional—largely because research indicates that unresolved concussions leave the brain more vulnerable to additional damage and concussions, which in turn increase the risk of long-term harm. The worst-case scenario? A condition called second-impact syndrome, in which an athlete suffers a second concussion while still recovering from a previous one. Though the precise physiological cause is uncertain, the outcome is not: the brain swells rapidly and catastrophically, causing severe disability or death.

Of course, there's a problem with said laws, a problem that dogs football at every level. How do you spot concussions in the first place? Self-reporting is unreliable. Players are conditioned to hide injuries. The sport's entire ethos revolves around playing through pain. Moreover, brain damage affects the seat of awareness, so even a player who
wants
to report a concussion may not realize that he has one. As for coaches? They're distracted. Mostly unqualified. Asking them to consistently diagnose a mysterious, invisible injury is foolhardy. Would you ask a neurologist to draw up a goal line defensive play?

Speaking of neurologists: the NFL recently required teams to have an independent one on the sideline at every game. During Philadelphia Eagles home games, said neurologist is joined by an orthopedic surgeon, an internal medicine specialist, a spine specialist, a chiropractor, a dentist, a podiatrist, an ophthalmologist, and an anesthesiologist.

By contrast, a recent survey of Chicago public high school football teams found that only 10.5 percent had a physician present during games. Only 8.5 percent had an athletic trainer. During practices, no school had a physician, and only one school had a trainer. This is hardly unique. According to the National Athletic Trainers' Association, only 42 percent of high schools nationwide in 2010 had access to a certified athletic trainer educated in concussion care—and while the numbers for junior varsity, middle school, and youth squads are unknown, they unquestionably are far lower.

“If I said that one in ten middle schools has an athletic trainer, I'd probably be overestimating,” Guskiewicz says. “Having a trainer isn't going to prevent every injury or solve every problem. But it's important. Some people say this is extreme, but I think that at the high school level, if you can't afford to hire a certified athletic trainer, then you shouldn't field contact sports at your school.”

No trainer? No contact sports for kids. A simple formula. But doesn't it imply that the vast majority of youth football programs—short of trainers but stocked with vulnerable young brains—ought to be shut down?

Guskiewicz winces.

“It's a problem,” he says.

Cantu has written an entire book arguing that children under 14 shouldn't play contact sports. NFL Hall of Famer Ron Mix thinks the prohibition on youth football should extend to age 15. Hockey Canada recently outlawed bodychecking for 11- and 12-year-old players, citing a study that showed that youth players in checking leagues were four times more likely to suffer concussions than players in leagues without contact. Numerous NFL players—including New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady—didn't start playing tackle football until high school, and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees says he won't
consider
allowing his three sons to play tackle until they're teenagers. Should children be playing flag football exclusively?

Guskiewicz says no.

“I'm adamantly opposed to the suggestion of banning contact sports for kids under some age,” he says. “One, we don't even know what that age should be. Two, if the first time a kid is going to strap on a helmet or shoulder pads and play football or hockey is at age 15 or 16 when the weight differential between players [colliding] could potentially be 80 to 90 pounds—like a 210-pound senior linebacker tackling a 130-pound freshman—that is when you're going to have problems, if it's the first time you're trying to protect yourself. I'm a proponent of teaching kids how to tackle and block properly at younger ages.”

Guskiewicz brings up a football video on his desktop computer. A North Carolina player lowers his head while making a block.
Thwack!
The collision delivers 104 g's of force to the side of his helmet. He sustains a concussion. Up comes a second video, this from a game that took place a month later. The same player makes another block—only this time, he strikes his opponent with his left shoulder, remaining mostly upright and turning his body to shield his head.

“See that?” Guskiewicz says. “It's an entirely different approach. We taught him to do that. We can change behavior. And that's in a college player. It's a hell of a lot easier to do with a high school team.”

This, according to Guskiewicz, is the future. Behavior modification. Teaching players to tackle
without
hitting their heads, assuming that's possible. Guskiewicz is a member of the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee. In conjunction with USA Football, the league is aggressively pushing the safe tackling concept on youth coaches and nervous parents through a program called “Heads Up.” Goodell himself insists that it works, that it makes the sport “safer than it has ever been” and moves closer to “taking the head out of the game” entirely.

I have doubts.

In USA Football's glossy tutorial videos, boys practice their new-and-improved tackles against empty air, foam pads, and stationary opponents who seem to be imitating scarecrows. Tackling is broken down into five distinct stages. There's plenty of time and space to take just the right angle, launch into a tackle, maintain perfect form, keep one's head from getting bashed by tucking it under an opponent's armpit. Football becomes an exercise in aggressive, studied chest-bumping. It really does look safer.

Thing is, the actual sport is completely different. Uncontrolled chaos. Players of varying sizes and strength run at full speed. They trip and shove and hit and fall, pinballing around at ever-changing heights and angles. When I showed a “Heads Up” tackling video to a pair of college football players, both shook their heads. When I asked former NFL player Nate Jackson about it, he laughed. Knocking someone else to the ground, he explained, means getting leverage on them. Which means getting low. Which means dropping your shoulders. Drop your shoulders, and your head will follow.

I also asked longtime
Chicago Sun-Times
sports columnist and former All–Big Ten defensive back Rick Telander about “Heads Up.” His reply was dryly incredulous: “Does the ball carrier cooperate with you?”

“Have I seen behavior modification not work?” Guskiewicz says. “Absolutely. It doesn't work 100 percent of the time. But I've seen it work.”

In fairness to Guskiewicz, his program is far more involved than the NFL's youth tackling clinics. This season, players at nearby Chapel Hill High School have been outfitted with special helmets that measure the location and intensity of hits to the head. When a player suffers a series of what Guskiewicz calls “bad hits”—that is, head hits that are too hard, too frequent, or too often on the crown of the helmet, based on deviations from previously established positional averages—trainers and coaches will study video with the player and attempt to make changes to their collision technique.

“During the first half of the season, we identify who has a bad hit profile,” he says. “We put them into a coaching intervention that links video footage and data from accelerometers in their helmets. Then we study them for the second half of the season to see if we can reduce those bad hit numbers and put them into safer play.”

One problem: the force threshold for “bad hits” is largely a matter of guesswork—while some studies suggest that hits over 60 to 80 g's significantly increase the likelihood of concussion, there is no hard-and-fast rule. One player can absorb a 100 g blow and appear perfectly fine; another can take a 30 g hit and be knocked out cold. No hits are
good
hits. Moreover, basing the “bad hits” frequency threshold on positional averages seems odd. A defensive back who absorbs 250 hits to the head during the first half of a season might be in line for an intervention; a defensive lineman who absorbs the same total might not. Are their brains all that different?

More doubts. I express them to Guskiewicz. I tell him that both the “Heads Up” push and new rules across football penalizing certain types of helmet hits seem like a replay of the 1970s, when football responded to criticism from the American Medical Association by banning “butt-blocking” (blows delivered with the face mask or front and top of the helmet to an opponent in close line play) and “face-tackling” (driving the face mask or front and top of the helmet into a runner), all while calling on coaches to teach “correct, head-up blocking and tackling.”

Has anything really changed?

“We have a kid at the high school who I already know—based on watching video from last year on kickoffs—has a bad hits profile,” Guskiewicz says. “We're already starting to work with him for this season. I can show you video footage of a guy who changed his behavior in three weeks. We've been working on this for eight years. We didn't come up with it overnight.”

Suppose Guskiewicz is right. Suppose he's on to something. Sensor-equipped helmets are expensive. Video intervention takes time. Guskiewicz's lab is partially funded by the NFL, and staffed by paid research assistants. What about the typical Pop Warner squad? Or high schools that already are facing budget shortfalls? I'm reminded of something journalist Stefan Fatsis said at the Aspen Institute roundtable:

 

You're talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what's going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game in the country?

 

I'm also reminded of something else Guskiewicz told me, the first thing out of his mouth when I asked him if children should play the sport.

“It's not for everyone,” he said.

 

Monet shakes her head. She knows it sounds ridiculous. Looking back, she really should have known better. After all, she once watched her brother Mike get knocked unconscious during a Lions game. Her mom ran down to the team's bench. Monet stayed put and bawled. Sitting in the very same Pontiac Silverdome skybox, she also saw Detroit lineman Mike Utley taken off the field on a stretcher after suffering a 1991 spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down.