Football's CTE Scandal Is Over a Century Old — SkimNews
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- A new Boston-area study found nearly 1 in 4 NFL players in its sample had CTE at time of death, with the authors estimating maximum possible prevalence around 98%, though they cautioned the findings "cannot necessarily be generalized to the American football community."
- The NFL Players Association called the findings "a call to action across the entire football ecosystem" in a statement reported by ESPN.
- Harvard College team doctors warned of concussion risks in the early years of college football via the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, establishing that the link between head hits and lasting brain damage was already accepted in medical circles.
- Walter Camp, known as the father of football, covered up concussion reports as early as 1894 — player accounts of head injury are crossed out in thick black crayon in his archived papers, missing from the glowing public accounts he circulated.
- The 1933 NCAA Medical Handbook acknowledged that concussion caused "punch drunk" — what is now called CTE — while the 1906 Harvard doctors forecast football would persist so long as people "fear unpopularity more than they dare to be right."
- An earlier Boston-based study of young contact-sport athletes who died young found signs of CTE in 40% of cases, predating the current wave of coverage and undercutting the "landmark" framing.
- The author documents that past risk-reduction interventions have "masked the ongoing problem, cast parents (especially mothers) as responsible for risk inherent in their children's available recreation, and in some cases worsened the problem now showing up as CTE statistics."
Why it matters: The author argues that demanding more evidence has been football's recurring strategy for delaying safety reforms for over a century, running from Walter Camp's 1894 crossed-out surveys to the 1933 NCAA handbook's "punch drunk" admission — leaving parents, especially mothers, to absorb blame for risks that the sport's own medical authorities documented generations ago.
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