This is your brain on football...

Here you will find an excellent article titled "Game Brain" about the dangers of concussions suffered by NFL players. According to the article, which is written by Jean Marie Laskas (she was my professor for two of my writing courses at Pitt), offensive linemen seem to be at the highest risk for a disease now diagnosed as CTE. The unfortunate part is that the NFL is refuting the science being brought before them. They are dismissing it as if it were inconclusive opinionated fluff rather than the autopsy of former NFL players' brains.

It is believed that these repeated concussions can lead former players to dementia, memory loss and Alzheimer-like symptoms.

The solution, according to one of the scientists quoted in the article, is not helmets. He says,

Helmets are not the answer. The brain has a certain amount of play inside the skull. It’s buoyed up in the cerebral spinal fluid. It sits in this fluid, floats. When the head suddenly stops, the brain continues, reverberates back. So when I hit, boom, my skull stops, but my brain continues forward for about a centimeter. Boom, boom, it reverberates back. So you could have padding that’s a foot thick. It’s not going to change the acceleration/deceleration phenomenon. And a lot of these injuries are rotational. The fibers get torn with rotation. You’ve got a face mask that’s like a fulcrum sitting out here: You get hit, your head swings around. That’s when a lot of these fibers are sheared—by rotation. A helmet can’t ever prevent that.

In fact, the article even argues that helmets have potentially made the game more dangerous because it makes players fearless to lead with their heads.

Suddenly, I don't feel so bad about some of the "ballerina" rules the NFL is taking on to protect players.

As a football fan, I know the intensity and excitement of the game suffers with more and more rules diminishing the "machismo" of the sport, but at the end of the day, we're dealing with real people's lives here.