Would you let your kids play football?

Just a quick warning, this episode includes a brief mention of suicide. I know we are officially in September and that means for a lot of you, tailgate plans are brewing and the kids' size cleats are in the shopping cart. In other words, football season is back and you know I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but this week we're talking about recent news that's giving some pause to football players and fans alike! A new study from researchers at Mass General Brigham published in late August in the prominent medical journal The BNJ revealed that from a sample of athletes who played at least one NFL game in their careers and who died between 2016 and 2021, a minimum of around 25% of those players, that's one in every four of those players, had a brain condition called CTE upon their death. CTE is short for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It's a brain condition linked to repeated head impacts and concussions like those that occur in the football field in games, practices and scrimmages across the country to players of all ages. The NFL is responded by saying in a statement to NPR that the league "continuously strives to make the game football safer, including by implementing strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts." The NFL remains committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust and expanding set of resources to enhance their physical and mental well-being. We encourage former players to utilize these resources to identify and seek treatment when they are concerned about their health. Meanwhile, the NFL Players Association, which is the players' union, told its members these findings should serve as "a call to action across the entire football ecosystem. We all share responsibility to advance research, improve access to care, develop better treatments, and support those affected by the long-term impacts of the game. While we have learned a great deal over the past two decades, there is more work to do." Despite these findings, the new NFL season will kick off, unabated, tonight. My question is, how did we get here? And is this news strong enough or scary enough to change this country's relationship to football? To parse through these questions of football, masculinity, and American fantasy, I'm here with co-host of NPR's Code Switch Gene Demby. Welcome back, Gene. Let's go with your brandy. Good to see you again. Good to see you. And I'm also here with Elsie Granderson, host and creator of the Elsie Granderson podcast, and op-ed columnist at the L.A. Times on other things. Hi, Elsie. You there, Brandy. Thank you very much for having me. What's up, Jane? Love the podcast. Oh, thank you for having me. I've been a fan of yours since the years been days. I'm going to show you, but yeah, yeah. Thanks, Robin. Oh, I love what this happens. I love what this happens. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Loose, and you're listening to it's "Bin a Minute" from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. A reminder, if you love, it's "Bin a Minute," which from the sweet comments y'all have been leaving, it sounds like maybe you do. Be sure to follow or subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. That way you get new episodes the moment they drop. Okay, I have so many questions about CT. So I wanted to be able to have you all, because Gene, I know that you have been a football critic and also a football engineer for a very long time. And also same thing to you, Elsie. I mean, sports is something that you don't inside it out. I mean, this is, this is y'all's lane and I myself am somebody who's not super into football, but I have been watching over the past 15 years as this conversation around CTE has developed. And this news to me felt like an alarm bell, like this felt like a possible turning point. And something I've been wondering about all of this is if the end of the day football players are essentially workers. I don't know. I think about like being in any workplace. Always going to be that sign from OSHA. Don't put on your no slip shoes, you know, make sure that you have your sleeves cover, pull your hair back. They're going to let you know about how to stay safe in your workplace. I wonder in what ways, if any, has CTE been taken up as a labor issue for the players? Elsie, we'll start with you. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned the NFL PA, the players you'll get. Well, you know, they have been very instrumental in both publicly making sure that the pressures on ownership and the league to take care of the players, but then also financially by investing themselves in their own research and the league itself wouldn't do it. So this has certainly been a labor issue from the very beginning, but I think it's important to know that at the crux of all of this is the very premise that the NFL contracts are not guaranteed and had not been guaranteed for basically a century. Yeah, that's a really, really, really good point, meaning that players have partial guarantees. Fully guaranteed contracts are extremely rare. And so that means you're incredibly vulnerable, and especially considering like, I think the average tenure of an NFL career is like five years or less. It's like three years. Three years. Yeah. It's a very short career. And so obviously, we pay a lot of attention to the Tom Brady's, or even going back to the Jerry Rice's, the guys who play forever, but most of these guys are playing for really short period of time, and they have to maximize their earning window, basically. And so that is a giant part of the calculus is the why people, you know, decide to play a sport that we're getting more and more evidence, there might be like no amount of football that's actually safe for people to play. It reminds me of something that was said on a recent episode of the out of couple podcast, former NFL offensive lineman and from Salam. He said this about how long term health care often gets left out of NFL contracts. They'll come in and they'll pose it. Do you want more money a year? Do you want more guaranteed money? Then this is what you have to give up. You can't talk to a room full of players, current players who want to maximize their earning potential and tell them about in 20 years, you're going to want to have health care in 20 years. Yeah. It is. I was there. I was in the room during the conversation. We want bigger salaries. So that's what's on the table. You want more profit sharing or you want health care for life? Well, I have health care now. That's from F from Salam again, former NFL offensive lineman. He said that on the recent episode of the out of couple podcast, when that was shared with me by our producer, Cory Antonio, it kind of gave me chills thinking about going back to being 22 myself, right? And thinking like if somebody was like, you want some money right now? Or do you want health care when you're 40, which now, of course, I'm knocking on 40 store, but at the time, it seems ancient and far away. It just seems extremely difficult for players to navigate. It is very difficult. When players start, rookie start, they go through a symposium and they're told all of these things about how to invest in money, how to save. They're told all these things about women. They get the whole lecture, but nothing replaces lived experience. And I think what needs to happen is that the older adults in this space, the ones who have the wisdom of years and understand the foresight needs to be more proactive in creating an infrastructure within the NFL system so that you aren't asking 20 some euros to make lifelong decisions that you know they are capable of making. I want to touch on that a little bit. I mean, I wonder like what are some things regarding health specifically that rookie players are first time draftees might not be considering when they're signing their NFL contracts? Like how are these risks communicated to them? What do these conversations sound like? Well, you hear it most often when there are adjustments being made in terms of tackling or how a certain player, you know, if it's a quarterback for instance, how you can put them to the ground, right? Where you can hit them on their bodies, no longer hit players on their heads, the way that we used to. They used to target players in their heads and we would celebrate those hits. That was good. Still good defensive strategy, right? It was a defensive strategy, you know, that we would say he had his belt wrong. You know, I got the win knocked out of him. But really, there were suffering concussions that we were deliberately trying to have. And so the NFL has gotten much, much better over the years than that. But that's the progress that we're talking, that the NFL had cups before they had helmets to give you a sense of, you know, priorities. Wait, I'm sorry. What does that mean? A cup? Oh, you mean like over years, over years, general, like for right, right, right, right, right. For the genitals, gotcha. Yeah, that's deep. That's a statement. So think about it. There's all these hits, there's all these tackling going on. And for decades, players play with a cup, but he didn't play with a helmet. So that should tell you how the processing of terms of brain injuries, why it took so long. You had to tell the originators of the sport to cover the hits. I was considered unmanly for a long time, right? And I think, you know, one of the things about CTE in particular is that it's the kind of disease that we know does not show up that you can't really test for until you until you die, right? And so I think there's a lot of sort of polite fictions around how much is already affecting players. When they're coming into the league, like a lot of players by the time they're already making it to the NFL, they probably have already sort of laid the sort of foundation for CTE at that point, right? They probably have had enough hits at that point for it to have start developing, right? What you just said, CTE is not something that can be fully diagnosed until after someone has died. So like what we're seeing now is like obviously, it's going to be a smaller sample size but to me that makes me feel almost more distressed about the possibility of it because you really can't know when someone's alive you really can't know. You really can't know. But at 20 right because it's something you can't see right you can't see the like plaques of people you can't like do these brain scans. It might be easy to tell yourself if you're looking at you know tens of million dollars for your first contract at 2021. Yeah. That like a man I'm this is a gamble I'm willing to take right because it's an injury that is not visible right if you had a ACL tear or something like that that's a thing that you're thinking about sort of constantly right but yeah yeah you can be like maybe or I'm gonna get lucky like this is not going to happen to me right I mean there's a lot of ways in which the actual damage that is happening as people are playing is just camouflage to them right it's just it's not visible and I think that's a part of what is skewing the calculus of young players and their families. I teach at West Michigan University and we recently had one of our former players who was with the Dallas cowboys amidst suicide and we learned that he had CTE and he was I don't believe he was 25 years old and so even though you know the study is about one in four and usually we're talking about retirees this is something that is prevalent in people who are in their 20s you know so so there are a lot of sports in which these injuries are sort of happening and again but because we don't really look for them and can't tell and diagnose until death we don't truly have data on how all the sports are impacting us not just football and not to get too scary here about it but like we know about the players in the NFL who are part of the study but there's all this evidence that CTE is a major problem among people who only played high school football. I'm taking notes because this is y'all have blown my mind a couple of times this conversation this idea of having cups that hold the generals before a helmet to protect your head that is such a statement about masculinity and pain and also too I mean to a certain degree like the fantasy that we want to hold around football and anybody who makes it to the league I imagine has invested a lot in that fantasy and what we want to believe about football. I wonder what are the cultural messages around the NFL and football as a whole that young people particularly young boys are getting. I mean it's important to remember that like football is mostly played by boys at the young level right. I think that there's all these messages around football maybe more than any institution in American life except for like the military that is like tied to these ideas about like how to become a man and how to become a good teammate right. Football culture is kind of not coincidentally very militaristic but it is a lot of the sort of like this is the kind of if you play football more than other sports more than basketball more than baseball you get this messaging around what it means to be a responsible part of your community even in the countries as obsessed with sports these aren't the states there's a kind of cashier that comes with being a football player and a kind of cashier around masculinity around football that is like still unique to football. Even thinking about like culturally the quarterback like what it means to be the quarterback and where Letterman's jacket like there's actually not any other position I could think of in any other sport that that has that same cultural cashier as being the quarterback. Absolutely not being a pitcher in your high school team not being a point guard on you. Nobody cares about that sorry it's really about being the quarterback. You think about football rising in American culture it was rising in American culture concurrently with all the words that we were in specifically world war two in Vietnam and so again you have that sense of you have to sacrifice for your brother next to you in order to get through this thing alive and that is a similar element of football I just don't think you have with some of the other team sports. That is such an incredible point it's giving that band of brothers idea of the American military especially when we're talking about masculinity when we're talking about being all you can be being the pinnacle of whatever manhood means in America yeah the military and football really capture those ideas for a lot of people in this country. I mean think of what the ads that run during NFL games right like it's it's giant pickup truck has but also asked for the Marines and the Navy and the Army right yeah you go to an NFL game you know depending on the game there's a military flyover right there's like the music they play on NFL films which I love growing up that it's like it's it's military martial music it's like it's a drummer right it's like the connections between the military and the NFL are really tight in the throw football right like there's a department of defense spends a lot of money yes it's like to have a presence both sometimes very obvious unless so in American football so I think there's a part of the ways we talk about the military are very very similar to the ways we talk about football coming up after the break you know at the heart of this isn't the players isn't the owners isn't any broadcasters to fans and the fans have already said we don't care stick around I wonder like why is it more noise made about CTE like why isn't CTEs like a a season pausing like conversation like how is the NFL managed to just move forward with this new season given these stats because we have it's simple we have I mean like there's been a movie made I think Will Smith was the star about the doctor who discovered like CTE right concussion from 2015 it's not like the word hasn't been out in the street it's because we have to collectively decided either intentionally or not that everyone on that field is aware of the risks and so we just collected the society that we're good with it you know like black people didn't stop watching the NFL because what happened to Colin Kaepernick we didn't stop watching the NFL because you know some of the players were well found to have been beating their girlfriends and wives fans we didn't stop with getting the information either so why are we asking the people who are making money from the action that they should stop when the people who are paying to see the action won't stop hmm I can understand why that would be their logic gene what do you think about I mean just just to piggyback on what else he just said like yeah this is like something I've been thinking about a lot I have a little theory about this but like so this is number that always makes my brain hurt a little bit so if you look at the 100 most watch television broadcast in the United States in 2025 83 of them 83 of them were NFL games so there is no way that isn't that wild for real 83 of them were like that every year for decade 83 is low because the year before I think it was like 92 right so what you have is people think of the NFL as a sports league but I think you also got to consider the NFL as like one of the most powerful players in American media because every single TV network has a contract with the NFL NBC does CBS does ABC TV ESPN does right like now the streamers do Amazon does right everyone is trying to go to the NFL game because that is where the money is because in the age of streaming nobody watches live TV except for the NFL so they have all of this power they've all this say and there's all these disincentives to cover the league that is making you money I mean that's my guess but this is an unprecedented though I mean it's starting with the conferences like sports conferences in college had relationships broadcasters with different networks oh like the cap Eastern conference exactly and so you become disincentivized to investigate any wrongdoing of these universities because it could never be into impact your relationship broadcast with the conference and so yeah this this this marriage you know to Gene's point it makes it very difficult for for any broadcaster anyway to stand up and take any sort of definitive stance against the leaders bringing the money and then like I said before you know at the heart of this isn't the players isn't the owners isn't any broadcasters to fans and the fans have already said we don't care absolutely wow I didn't realize that the relationship was that financially deep often when fans hear about the possibility that their favorite players could suffer from CTE they blame the players themselves you know saying that the millions of dollars that they're getting must be worth it now let's go back to which I'll say it earlier this is a million dollars you know can be a little conditional is not guaranteed um you know we know that there's no price tag for your long-term health but why do people online sometimes and I imagine possibly in sports bars across the country what why do they try to ascribe a price tag to it like what do you think is underneath that instinct to blame the players I think it's multi-tiered I'm going to start with the first tier which is the nature of capitalism the nature of capitalism is to consider the labor of capitalism to be less intelligent less qualified less deserving and that the job creators or the capitalist are the ones who should have preferential treatment because they create jobs that makes everything else go right so when you think about it from just that level in terms of how we characterize job creators versus laborers well basically what we're doing in the NFL we're saying that the job creators hints to NFL network or the NFL ownership group are the good guys in this because they're creating jobs and if you're complaining about the job i.e. laborers i.e. laborers eat the players while you're the bad guys in this dynamic. That's the way that we historically have been in terms of talking about capitalism. That's the first here. The second tier, 30% of the players are black, 6% of the entire players are black. And so having compassion for black man in America has been a struggle. It's been a struggle. So you're asking people in a capitalist society not just to care about the workers more than the job creators, but that most of the workers are black men. And so you're asking a lot from a society that still struggles with acceptance of black vulnerability, black leadership, and basically just blackness in a liberated state. I mean, those, that's exactly right. I'm those two things. And I'll just add the element of the nature of fandom is very weird because there is this sort of like weird mix of like aspiration, but also in a lot of cases like envy and maybe like a little like like animus, right? Like it's a very weird thing as well. Oh, I see that. That can see. Or ownership. Like you owe this to us. Yeah. That back and forth between like fandom and entitlement is really, really messy. And it's always been, but it feels like a supercharge now. And so I think when you call someone a laborer, you're right to call them laborers. But then people throw out their salaries as if like, well, but then they're getting paid $10 million a year. So they can't complain about X, Y, or Z. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's this very weird thing is like there's a sort of like, I'm proud of you for taking my teams to the playoffs. I don't think your commander's fan ain't got to happen. Anyway, um, I'm proud of you for, you know, representing me, but also like almost like, hey, hey, don't get too high a mighty, right? Like racism and capitalism, making so that fandom is, it's like just braided, braided with entitlement. And this way, there's really kind of toxic sometimes, even among fans who like love the players, right? Even like, it's just, oh, yeah. It doesn't seem like, again, this has not stopped the show. This has not stopped the show at all. I wonder in what ways our cultural ideas about recent masculinity tied to the outcomes we're seeing with CTE and the NFL. So one thing that's really interesting about the Washington Post is this big series a couple years ago about youth football in the United States. What they found was that among the, you know, pop water for the youth leagues and then in high school football, the ranks of those players is becoming less white all the time. Like fewer white people are playing youth football. And they said that a lot of that is because of these concerns around CTE. So it's not as if football was like lost its cashier, right? People will still watch college football and they'll still watch the NFL. But people are making different choices about their children. And it seems like white people in particular make a different choice about the children. And I think the fact that black folks, Latino folks are still putting their kids in youth football is about, it's about a bunch of stuff, but I think it's about the ways that like, that is a kind of visible success that like, I feel like if you know somebody in your city neighborhood who went to the NFL, could have been 15 years ago, right? Like everybody in their neighborhood knows that person, right? You are more cognizant of that person's existence than you are. If you live in an inner city, like I grew up in, right? Like I can name like a bunch of dudes from Philadelphia who went to the NFL or NBA, right? Like who were like roughly mocking separators, right? But I wouldn't necessarily know somebody who was like an attorney or a CPA or some of that, right? Like that's not like, if I was a kid, like there's a way that there's like a hyper visible kind of escape from the hood or escape from poverty sort of narratives are really legible to people in lots of places in the United States. I think particularly among black people in the United States, it like that will allow football to have traction as dangerous as it is, right? Like there's still going to be like, I would play these lottery odds, right? If I can get my family out of here, I can get my mama house, right? My kids would be sick and send them private schools, like that seems like a gamble a lot of people willing to take because that is a more legible path out of, you know, economic hardship. Then a lot of other ones. I bet you, if you ran a socio-economic graph on top of that, like a x-wide graph on top of those at that point, you'll see a quadrant of black folks at a certain economic level who aren't seeing their kids to football, right? Because they feel that their other choices, that they don't have to risk their health in order to quote unquote make it. But the poor you are, regardless of race, I think the more willing you are to put your child or your body on the line to get out of your current current situation. And I just think the reason why the numbers are so stark in terms of black parents and white parents is because of the socio-economic dynamics of America. You know, it's nothing about inherently because I'm black, you know, it makes me want to play football, you know. But if I broke, and my kids broke, but he'd run fast, you know, I might treat him like Michael Jackson. You can love me. You can love me. Yeah, you can love me. You can go on that stage, boy. I mean, I hate to be so flippant about it, but like, it's been reconciled. The Super Bowl is the most washed event every year. People have figured out that I'm going to watch this recognizing the dangers and the fears, and I'm going to find entertainment in it. You know, I don't know what else to say. I really appreciate the conversation that we've had today. I have learned so much from you both. Elzie, Jean, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you. That was Jean Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch and Elzie Granderson, host of the Elzie Granderson Show podcast, and op-ed columnist at the LA Times. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or the crisis text line by texting home to 741741. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Corey Antonio Roos. This episode was edited by Nina Patuck. Our supervising producer is Sheriff Vincent. Our executive producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.