This last Sunday I watched an interview of Chris Borland on Face the Nation.  Many of you may be wondering who Chris Borland is anyway.  Up until recently he was a Linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers.  He made news because he had decided to retire from football after only one year.  A very talented player, with many years of playing time ahead of him, decided he had padded up for the last time.  It got me thinking.

Chris decided that he did not want to take the inherent risk that comes with playing in the NFL.  He didn’t want to play for ten years and then retire and have a poor quality of life after football.  As the years go by we are learning more and more about the dangers of playing a violent sport like football.  For years everyone knew of the physical toll the game took on your body and that your ability to get around would probably be limited but most people had no problem playing the game they loved and making a great amount of money for the price it takes on your body.  And then it happened, players started showing signs of head trauma.  Years of concussion upon concussion.  The disability was no longer physical.  It was mental and it wasn’t that easy to detect.

In 2013 the NFL settled with 4500 former players who had sued them for concussion related injuries.  Over 600 million was setup to cover medical expenses and that amount has been changed to have no cap on it so the NFL will have to pay everything for these cases.  During the case the NFL hired actuaries to calculate the amount of players that have had head trauma.  The number they came up with is astounding.  Of the 5900 players that were studied 28% had chronic head trauma caused by concussions.  That’s right 28%.  Just think about that for a moment.  There are currently 1,696 active players in the NFL.  That means that if you use the same rate as the players in the past (even though I think the rate is currently higher because of the speed and size of the players) 475 players playing right now are suffering head trauma.

Now you may start to see some of what Chris was concerned about.  It made me start to wonder about how dangerous the NFL is compared to other occupations.  When I did my research into dangerous jobs I thought that maybe Police or Fire Fighters would be high on that list.  Surprisingly they don’t even make the top ten.  Maybe a soldier, that has to be the most dangerous.  Right?  Nope.  The most dangerous occupation is logging.  Out of every 100,000 loggers 128 die.  Next is fishing at 117.  A soldier is down the list a bit at 41 and the police and fire fighters come in at 11 each per 100,000.

In the past few years some very famous players have taken their own lives.  The most famous being Junior Seau.  When he committed suicide he shot himself in the chest so his brain could be studied.  He knew he had problems with his head and he didn’t know what to do to fix it.  He did know that he wanted his brain studied so that others may not have the same fate.  When his brain was studied it was determined that he had CTE. CTE or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain.  Symptoms include depression, aggression, and disorientation.  It can only be diagnosed after death and is caused by repeated head trauma.  18 NFL players that have died have been diagnosed with CTE.  Another 7 that have died are suspected of having it but the tests were not done.  They are estimating that currently 32 players that are still alive are showing systems of the disease.

Now it’s hard to calculate a death rate for this time of situation.  The players are dying after they retire so you can’t necessarily tie it to the number of active players playing in any particular year.  So, being the numbers geek, I found out how many players have played in the NFL all time.  That number is 25,000.  Looking at how many have died and are currently living with CTE the death rate comes in at 228 per 100,000.  Keep in mind that’s just the cases they know of now and that number is sure to grow.  So as an occupation the NFL is almost twice as dangerous as a logger, over five times as dangerous as a being a soldier, and 22 times as dangerous as a police officer or fire fighter.

With this information it is not hard to understand why Chris Borland has decided to call it quits.

What does this mean for the NFL?  Will more people quit?  Will it change the way they draft players?  Will they worry about drafting someone who is really intelligent that will figure it out and retire early?

The only thing that could solve this problem for the NFL is if they made the game less violent.  I mean a lot less violent.  I, for one, know this will never happen because football is an American game and there is really nothing that Americans love more than violence.

Let me leave you with this.  What would you do?  Would you play the game you love?  Would you pass up millions of dollars?  How much is it worth to want to live a healthy normal life?

Those Pesky Facts