The NFL keeps answering CTE with a slogan, and 75% should end that

Three out of four. That's the new estimate for how many former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 had CTE, and the league answered it the way it always does, with a sentence about making the game safer. I'm tired of that sentence. The men in this study already played. Safer for the next kid doesn't do a thing for them, and it's time the NFL stopped talking about the future when the bill in front of it is from the past.

Let me give the careful version its due, because the researchers gave it themselves. The study, out of Boston University with Mass General Brigham and the Concussion & CTE Foundation and published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open, doesn't say three of every four living players have CTE. It doesn't say anything about active players, college or youth football. BU says plainly that not everybody with CTE pathology develops symptoms, and the paper said many cases may have been early stage and possibly symptom free. If you want to argue about what 74.5% means for a 24-year-old on a roster today, you can, and the authors would agree with you.

But they also did the work to make the number hard to wave away. The old knock on brain bank research was that families only donate when something's wrong. Fair enough. The August study from this same group came back with a range from 25% to 98% for exactly that reason, which is a range so wide you could park a bus in it. This time they looked at all 2,362 former players who died in that window, used death records for the ones who weren't donors, and figured players with cognitive symptoms were about five times as likely to be donated. Then they adjusted the 94% they found in the donated brains all the way down to 74.5%. So 74.5% is the number you get after somebody worked hard to shrink it. In community brain banks, BU says, CTE shows up in less than 1% of donors.

I spent a career with my hand in the dirt, leaning into somebody on every snap, and I don't know what's going on upstairs. Nobody does until it's too late to ask, because CTE can only be diagnosed after death. That's the part of this that should bother a league more than the percentage. Julia Gallini, the lead author, said the number suggests we need to support families, diagnose CTE during life and treat the symptoms. Notice that none of that is a rule change.

The NFL's statement said it "continuously strives to make the game of football safer." The players' union called studies like this "critical to improving our understanding." Both of those are true, and both of them are the kind of thing you say so you don't have to say anything else. Matt Hasselbeck, who played 18 years and is the ambassador for the DIAGNOSE CTE study, said he's looking at it like a scouting report. I like that, because a scouting report is useless unless somebody changes the game plan.

My game plan is simple. If the league wants credit for taking this seriously, it should be writing the biggest check in the room for diagnosing this in living men, and paying for the specialists BU is telling former players to go see, this season, while a lot of the guys who built this thing can still sit in the waiting room. I don't think that's radical, and I'd love to hear the league explain why it is.

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