Your son is a ninth grader, a freshman in high school. He’s big, athletic, likes football, and wants to play football — not touch or flag football, but tackle football, the full contact, head conking, knee wrecking, violent kind of football that millions of Americans love watching, especially if their son or brother is on the field of battle.
Here’s the question you won’t like pondering. At what point does the risk that your son will suffer a brain injury playing become too high to be acceptable? Or to put it another way, how many concussions, or near concussions, or hard knocks to your son’s noggin, can you accept?
The questions are fair because he will get hit in the head. Can you accept a one in ten chance that he’ll incur at least a mild traumatic brain injury during a season? During a high school career? How about a 50 percent chance of a brain injury during a high school career? What numbers do the experts report?
Writing in the 21 September 2013 Atlantic, Amanda Ripley reports:
Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) In fact, the chances of getting a concussion while playing high school football are approximately three times higher than the second most dangerous sport, which is girls’ soccer. While such head injuries have long been ignored — until recently, players were resuscitated with smelling salts so they could re-enter the game — it’s now clear that these blows have lasting consequences.
Writing in Grantland, where Ripley may have found her numbers, Jonah Lehrer reports that:
If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.
The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) In fact, the chances of getting a concussion while playing high school football are approximately three times higher than the second most dangerous sport, which is girls’ soccer. While such head injuries have long been ignored — until recently, players were resuscitated with smelling salts so they could re-enter the game — it’s now clear that these blows have lasting consequences.
The consequences appear to be particularly severe for the adolescent brain. According to a study published last year in Neurosurgery, high school football players who suffered two or more concussions reported mental problems at much higher rates, including headaches, dizziness, and sleeping issues. The scientists describe these symptoms as “neural precursors,” warning signs that something in the head has gone seriously wrong.
So what does a 15 percent chance a season of a brain injury mean for a high school freshman who makes the junior varsity and then plays varsity for another three years, for a total of four years playing high school football? If there’s a 15 percent seasonal chance of an injury, there’s a companion 85 percent of not being injured. That sounds a lot better — until Dad runs the numbers. If the probability of not suffering a brain injury is 0.85 per season, then the probability of a freshman not suffering a brain injury during four consecutive seasons is .85 x .85 x .85 x.85, which works out to .52, or 52 percent. So if junior starts playing tackle football as a high school freshman, the odds are even that he’ll have suffered a mild traumatic brain injury by the time he graduates.
So the question parents must answer is: what virtues does playing football provide that outweigh a 50 percent chance of suffering a traumatic brain injury during a high school football career?