concussion commotion

The Issue: Concussion policy in all levels of football

The vocab: "Concussion" is a pretty common occurrence and a pretty common word - but let's not forget that it's still a brain injury.

Concussions are pretty common, especially for athletes - there are 3.8 million sports-related concussions every year (and probably millions more that are unreported). Because of its relative ubiquitousness, the public hasn't appreciated the long-term implications of the event. Well, until recently. The official medical term is a "mild traumatic brain injury," a terminology which I think better characterizes the severity of the injury. (And for those interested in the medical background, the fine people at Wikipedia, as always, have a great review.)

Concussions are especially incident in my beloved sport of football. Florida's QB Tim Tebow suffered one in a regular season game against Kentucky that kept him out of practice for a couple weeks, and Cal's phenomenal RB Jahvid Best suffered a reeeeally chilling one that put him out for the rest of the season. Whoever you're cheering for (and trust me, I'm no fan of Tebow), no one wants to see a player hurt. Including Congress.

Congress is looking at legislation that would protect athletes at all levels from exacerbating excessive complications due to concussion. The House Judiciary Committee held a forum today in Houston to talk about how high school football coaches are currently dealing with players who have had concussions. Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic neuropathologist and the foremost researcher in football-related head injuries, testified at the forum. He strongly recommends that players under the age of 18 should be required to sit out for three months after sustaining a concussion.

Most people are in favor of the proposed changes in policy - as Dr. Omalu outlines in his book Play Hard, Die Young, because football

players are subjected to repeated head injuries, they are much more likely to suffer from dementia and depression later in life. There are obviously immediate dangers, too. Matt Blea, a high school football player from San Jose, was in a coma for 17 days after getting knocked out in a game on Thanksgiving day - it was a very scary situation for everyone involved (Blea is reportedly recovering tremendously, but will probably never play football again ... but hey, at least he got to meet Heisman runner-up Toby Gerhart [In the pic, Blea is on the left and Gerhart is on the right]), and Californians have since rallied together to enforce more regulations that would protect high schoolers from head injuries.

Interestingly, and I suppose as we have all come to expect, not everyone is in support of Congress stepping in. Two Republican congressmen from Texas, Ted Poe and Lamar S. Smith, are critical of the proposed legislation. According to the New York Times, Poe is quoted as saying,

I mean, if Congress gets involved, it would seem to me it would be the end of football as we know it. We would all be playing touch football on these fields.

The man's got a point. I mean, people know what they're getting into when they strap on those helmets and allow 300-lb linemen knock them over. (I can just hear Colorado coach Dan Hawkins gearing up to reprise his famous, exasperated one-liner: "It's division one football!!") And I'm sure Poe wants coaches to be responsible when making decisions that affect players' health. It's just a matter of whether or not Congress should intervene.

The NFL has set a really stellar example for NCAA and high school football policy. They NFL conducted its own study about the long-term effects of repeated head injury (and while it suggested that players are at a higher risk for dementia, the results were statistically inconclusive ... for now), and they already held forums with the House Judiciary Committee about how they'd like to change head injury policy. The NFL's going to (1) institute stricter league-wide return-to-play guidelines and (2) require every team to hire an independent neurologist, who must be consulted before the player can even come to practice.

[A quick side note that's more about research than policy... Current and former players are getting pretty gung-ho about helping brain injury researchers, all for the benefit of future generations of players. A dozen or so NFLers have volunteered to donate their brains to the Boston University School of Medicine after their death. Kind of icky, but kind of cool.]

Because the NFL is a centralized and unified league (the same is basically true for the NCAA, it's just much larger), they can make these sorts of guidelines, fund the provisions, and actually monitor their enforcement. But there isn't a similar nationwide cohesive entity for high school and youth sports - and perhaps it's appropriate for Congress to enforce federal legislation to protect players. And in an effort to ease the financial burden for schools (and players' parents), the federal government proposed an Act that would give $10 million to high schools and middle schools so that coaches could accurately assess concussions.

Concussions have deserved attention for a long time - and there is basically a consensus amongst players and coaches and politicians (and anyone else you possibly think of) that concussions need to be dealt with in a more consistent and medically-sound manner - especially in younger players. [And, by the way, I'm irrationally excited to see BU's analysis of the NFL brain autopsies, even though it'll be a couple decades. Brain research is cool, but brain research on football players is waaay off the cool charts.]