Concussion prevention: CFL, NFL drag heels on changing game that makes its players sick

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2016 (3143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The world has changed a lot in the last 100 years. And the pace is only getting faster with each passing day.

And yet for all that change, the game of football that we will see this week as the CFL kicks off its 2016 regular season looks much the same as it always has.

There have been small equipment modifications over the decades, most notably leather helmets giving way to various and evolving composites.

And there have been tweaks to the rules — it was legal, for instance, to tackle a guy by the facemask in the NFL prior to 1962. Which is just, I mean, wow.

But basically, the game of football that Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans will see Friday night at Investors Group Field in the Bombers season opener will look much the same as the one people in this town were watching in the 1930’s.

And that is a big problem.

The science is now unequivocal — playing football makes people sick. And until we change the way football is actually played, it’s going to continue to make football players sick.

For all the new awareness in recent years of the long-term debilitating effects of concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the action that has been taken thus far has been almost exclusively aimed at mitigating the effects of concussions rather than actually preventing them in the first place.

Strict new concussion protocols now in place in the NFL and CFL are both necessary and long overdue. Ditto the neurologists that now staff football sidelines during the game, the “quiet rooms” concussed players can now retreat to during games and the advanced testing teams can now do to gauge when a player can safely return to play.

But none of that is actually reducing the number of concussions in football. While CFL numbers are unavailable, we know that after posting modest annual declines beginning in 2012, the number of concussions in the NFL last season actually went up — by a whopping 58 percent.

It doesn’t take a neurologist to figure out that the single best way to mitigate the long-term effects of a concussion is to prevent it in the first place and that NFL number from last season is a scathing indictment of how little meaningful action the people who run the game have taken to actually prevent concussions.

But while the people who run the CFL and NFL continue to drag their feet, there are big and meaningful changes already taking place elsewhere in the game. Consider:

— Pop Warner, the largest youth football organization in North America, is banning kickoffs beginning this fall in hopes of reducing the number and severity of head shots that young players take;

— Ivy League football coaches voted this winter to completely eliminate all full contact hitting from regular season practices, effective immediately, in a move the New York Times called “the most aggressive measure yet to combat growing concerns about brain trauma and other injuries in the sport”;

— The city of Marshall, Texas — a football hotbed that appeared in the book ‘Friday Night Lights’ — has ended its youth tackle football program and replaced it with a new flag football program, citing the unacceptable risk the game poses to young people;

And those are just the changes that have been put in place already. In what USA Today says was a first in the U.S., a school board candidate ran in Nevada this year on a platform of banning high school football.

The authors of a new book on the history of football, meanwhile, argued in a Washington Post op-ed this year that their research showed football actually became less safe with the advent of new helmets because it promoted reckless and unsafe tackling. Their counterintuitive solution: to reduce the number of concussions, the NFL should ban the use of helmets entirely during practice.

If that sounds crazy, others have called for the elimination of all padding during practice and even Mike Ditka — the legendary Bears coach — says he thinks that removing facemasks from helmets would immediately lead to safer tackling and fewer concussions.

You know you’ve got a serious problem in your sport when Ditka is considered a progressive thinker.

Do you know what you call a sport that refuses to meaningfully change even when its participants are getting sick and dying? Boxing. And the result of boxing’s inaction is that a sport that once dominated the entire continent is now dying off, relegated to the fringes of our society — except for the occasional marquee title fight — by its own unchecked barbarism.

If that sounds alarmist, make no mistake: the NFL recognizes the stakes at play here, coughing up an estimated $1 billion earlier this year to settle a concussion lawsuit brought against the league by ailing former players.

And if you think we’re immune up here in Canada, think again. A class action lawsuit brought against the CFL by former Winnipeg Blue Bombers receiver Arland Bruce was dismissed earlier this spring on a jurisdictional issue, but Bruce’s lawyer, Robyn Wishart, has vowed to fight on.

The stakes are nothing less than existential for a small Canadian league that operates on a shoestring and doesn’t have a billion dollars lying around to make the concussion problem go away for a little while like the NFL did.

And yet, while players have been the ones driving the push for compensation, it’s hard not to notice how quiet — and even resistant — those same players and former players have been to actually changing the game itself to make it safer.

NFL Hall of Fame QB Dan Marino, for instance, told an audience at the annual Rady JCC Sports Dinner at the Winnipeg Convention Centre this week that he thinks the game is fine just the way it is. “I did let my kids play,” Marino told the crowd, “and I would let my kids play.”

Marino even went so far as to say he thinks more kids at younger ages should play football so that they learn from an early age how to play it safely.

It was unclear what — if any — actual research Marino was citing in that conclusion, but then science isn’t actually a favourite topic in most football dressing rooms.

Bombers defensive tackle Keith Shologan — who takes a blow to the head on virtually every play as a defensive lineman — told me this week that he thinks the science on a link between playing football and CTE is still unsettled.

And Shologan also has some, well, unconventional ideas on the cause of concussions..

“Concussions happen in anything. You can get a concussion walking down the street and stumbling and hitting the cement,” says Shologan. “And some people are prone to concussions — that’s their head not the sport. If you’re not built for it and, personally, I think if your head’s not built for it — compact and for hitting somebody — you’re going to get those concussions.”

I have a massive head, definitely not compact. And I have had at least a half dozen concussions over the years. I had no idea those two things were connected until I spoke to Shologan this week.

Journalism — you learn something new everyday.

Shologan and the Bombers take on the Montreal Alouettes in the opener Friday night at IGF. Wade Miller told me this week a crowd of about 25,000 is expected..

Enjoy the game, while still you can. Because one way or the other, change — big change — is coming to the sport of football.

A game that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years is very soon going to change in dramatic and once unthinkable ways. Or it will begin to slowly die, like boxing.

Either way, football as we know it is coming to an end.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek