Rant: once more, with feeling, it's not just concussions!

I promise this one isn't from The Onion, although I couldn't blame you if you doubted me.

One Michael Turner, medical director of the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation, is going to get a nice piece of change to fund his research on concussions across four sports prone to them: American football, ice hockey, Australian rules football, and horse racing (the latter being Turner's own principal field).

This is actually a pretty sound idea. Comparison across different sports makes plenty of sense, if you do it right.

So why am invoking a notorious satire site as a lead-in to this blog entry?

Turner, you see, has some pretty ... ah, interesting ideas about What's Really Going On.

Based on his experience with those jockeys, he's pretty sure all the "media hype" on the subject is out of line, because:

I don't think my jockeys end up all dribbling and demented, and we have good reason to suspect that.

Nice.

Turner is also quite willing to offer up another theory on how the post-football-career issues with mental health happen:

Also when athletes retire they are at a very critical period in their lives. Prior to that they were well-known they might have been famous and earning quite a lot of money and suddenly, they have very little status, nobody knows who they are, they don't have somewhere to go to work and I think that transition can be badly handled by lots of sports.

 Yeah, we never remember sports heroes of the past.

Oh, and:

You never hear that discussion among professional athletes or student athletes when they have finished competing and what we find out is that people who have pre-injury had mood disorders or depression do worse than those who don't...

So the likes of Junior Seau or Dave Duerson had mood disorders before they ever got their bells rung on the football field, most likely. Or something like that.

In short, the NFL is throwing a chunk of money (minuscule, in comparison to its profits, but still) at some classic denialism "research." The kind of stuff the tobacco industry threw out there for decades, and that the fossil fuel industry has been funding for decades even as they knew damn well what was going to happen if we kept burning their product.

In short, the NFL wants to keep you from thinking clearly on the subject. Even as they make public pronouncements about how much they care about the health of those who play in the league, they will do their damnedest to distract you from the very idea that playing the game might be even the least bit dangerous. And as you remain sufficiently distracted, they can keep on pursuing pet projects like expanding their schedule to eighteen games per season, playing games on Thursday nights, and ohter measures that are completely at odds with any kind of concern for player health (concussions or otherwise).

And, as long as you continue to watch and spend money on NFL products, they will be quite happy to pursue obfuscation rather than genuine research.

For example: they would rather you keep thinking about concussions, damaging as they are, without ever comprehending the degree to which repeated subconcussive hits are implicated in the long-term brain traumas that have galvanized public attention. Concussions, bad as they are, sound like a solvable problem. When you start considering the degree to which any hit you see at the line of scrimmage or downfield, the type from which the player hit hops up and shows no sign of undue injury, actually may well be contributing to a raging case of CTE down the road...then that becomes a problem with the fundamental nature of the game and the way it's played. The NFL would rather you not think about that. So they're quite happy to throw money at a jockey doctor who will say what they want you to hear, such as:

Whether you're knocked out or you have a concussion from falling off a horse or being a linebacker or whether you're playing Aussie rules football -- it's all the same.

Interesting. I was unaware that jockeys were getting hit that frequently between falls.

Meanwhile, don't think I'm giving the NCAA a pass. They're even happier to let the NFL take all the public scrutiny and pay for the research, as long as you still pony up for season tickets to see your Dear Old Alma Mater serve as the NFL's farm system, any ethical concerns that you might see in any other situation overwhelmed by your tribal loyalties.

 Have a nice weekend. Enjoy the games.

Poor Tom Crabtree (@itsCrab, formerly of the Packers)