Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Football Players

This is Lew Margolis.

With apologies to Willie Nelson, “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be football players.” Given the growing evidence of the long-term harm of concussions, all the adults involved in the game of football—coaches, parents, boards of education, trainers, and doctors—should halt this experiment in brain damage. Motivated by the National Football League’s concern about maintaining its workforce and its fan base, it has pumped millions upon millions of dollars into research on head trauma and football, not to mention the nearly $1 billion fund to care for former players afflicted with brain damage. Big-time sports universities are, of course, totally dependent on the revenues generated by the young men who put their brains at risk on the gridiron. The problem with the direction that the NFL, the NIH and other institutions are taking is that the vast majority of these resources are directed at improving the diagnosis and management of concussions once they have occurred, instead of at prevention. Unfortunately, there are many subjects available for study, because over one million boys play high school football alone, experiencing tens of thousands of concussions each year. Football is by far the leading cause of sports-related head trauma.

If we are going to allow our sons to participate in this national head trauma experiment, at a minimum, shouldn’t school systems and athletics departments be expected to inform parents about the risks as would be the case in any other experiment? Over the years, thousands of parents in the WCHL listening area have enrolled their children in research studies in psychology, education, public health, and medicine. Think about the protection of human subjects process of informed consent for even the most harmless of studies and then ask how we can allow boys to be subjected to the risks of brain damage without similar protections.

To paraphrase Willie Nelson, “Mamas, don’t let your boys grow up to play football, Don’t let ’em knock heads, get concussions too much, Make ’em be doctors and lawyers and such.”