Is your alma mater being honest?

Like a drunk and noisy neighbor, college football crashed into the living room this weekend. If you're like me you didn't have to watch a down of football this weekend to stay highly informed on the games being played and their results; a quick survey of your Facebook and/or Twitter feeds did the job highly effectively.

So it seems only fair to look into college football and its handling of brain trauma today.

Though no one pretends that college football players are immune from the effects of concussions and sub-concussive hits, a larger share of attention has tended to focus on the NFL (addressed numerous times in this blog) and conversely on high-school football and younger. The attention on youth sports is not at all unreasonable; severe brain injuries have occurred on that level, and players -- fourteen- to eighteen-year-old kids -- have died from them. That can't be ignored.

It has happened in college football too. And no, I'm not referring to the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

In 2010, a Penn football player committed suicide; an autopsy on Owen Thomas revealed signs of the early stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease found in a number of NFL veterans who also committed suicide, such as Mike Webster, Andre Waters, and Junior Seau. This despite Thomas never having a reported concussion.

Derek Sheely never had a chance to commit suicide. A season later, in August 2011, Sheely died six days after collapsing on the field, having been a part of an "Oklahoma drill" mandated by his coaches at Frostburg State.

Penn (an Ivy League school, for pete's sake) and Frostburg State aren't the "big boys." Ohio State is, though, and the disappearance and eventual death of Buckeye reserve lineman Kosta Karageorge did draw a great deal of attention last season. Karageorge had also been a wrestler before walking onto the Ohio State team, which might also have contributed to his condition even more than his brief football stint.

The relative lack of scrutiny over collegiate injuries compared to the NFL is cause for concern. The NCAA's response has been, in effect, "not my job." Its authority, so goes the response, is limited to academic violations and other rules infractions, which it polices so well. Therefore, responsibility for monitoring head injuries lies with each individual athletic program.

And that, in effect, means that the health and safety of college football players (or soccer players, or wrestlers, etc.) is left in the hands of the person who stands to gain most from that player's use, and who, in may cases, is prone to the kind of secrecy your average Soviet dictator craved above all else.

Take the four participants in the NCAA's college football playoff. Of those four teams, three reported either zero concussions or one concussion over the entire 2014 season. (In the case of eventual champion Ohio State, the one "reported" concussion was Kosta Karageorge, and his concussion history was reported by his family, not the school.) Alabama reported one concussion; Oregon, none. If these are in fact accurate reflections on how many concussion are suffered by players at these schools, I believe it is incumbent upon those schools to report just how they manage to protect their players so well. (The fourth, Florida State, reported seven concussions over the season, suggesting that the FSU program is at least able to be forthright about *something*. Full disclosure: I did get a graduate degree there.)

At least one other school had one concussion "reported" during the season that was "reported" only due to outside pressure. You might remember last season's contest between Michigan and Minnesota, in which quarterback Shane Morris was bounced around the field like a defective piñata while Michigan coaches dithered and actually re-inserted him into the game while he was still in La-La Land. The positive take from this, I suppose, is that fan pressure after that game probably helped dislodge the head coach, Brady Hoke, from his Michigan job (that and the fact that the game was televised to at least a regional audience). On the other hand, Hoke wasn't having success at Michigan. Urban Meyer's job is in no danger at Ohio State after Karageorge's suicide; Meyer could probably kill and eat the team's backup punter on the fifty-yard-line at halftime of the Michigan game and keep his job (exaggeration for effect, people).

As the above link notes, the number of concussions reported by the 129 FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) schools actually dropped from 2013 to 2014, and twenty more schools than the previous year did not report any concussions (again, please share how you accomplish this!). Key word: "reported." Unlike the NFL, which requires weekly injury reports, there's no such mandate for NCAA teams. And, frankly, there is precious little incentive for NCAA coaches or programs to report or acknowledge such injuries. Furthermore, even as awareness of the risks of these injuries becomes more and more known, college football players -- "jocks" -- still refrain from reporting such injuries for fear of being judged or disposed of by their coaches. Karageorge was apparently a tragic example of such an athlete.

So, folks, even more than in the NFL (which looks downright enlightened in its concussion protocols by comparison), the ultimate arbiter of your alma mater's treatment of its active athletes is ...

You.

How much do you care that your alma mater actually give a damn about the safety of its players?

Do you demand that your local fishwrap actually report such stories?

Do you even pay attention to such things?

Yeah, I'm getting personal about this, because somebody has to. Right now there is nobody holding major college football programs accountable. Nobody.

And that never leads to anything good.

Kosta Karageorge (image credit abcnews.com)