Will Concussion Report Daze the NFL?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Football season hasn't even started and already the National Football League is tackling some difficult challenges. It's coming off a season that saw an 8 percent decline in television viewership and now is faced with startling new evidence about the serious medical risks its players face.

Derrick Heggans, an adjunct professor in the department of logistics, business and public policy at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, says what the NFL does now – how it reacts to the concussion risk issue – will drive change at all levels of the game. But, he says, he doesn't see the concussion issue diminishing the popularity of the sport in America.

"While fans do care about the concussion issue when they read about it, they separate their concern from the excitement of the competition," Heggans says. "They want the product with the hard hits. They don't want to believe those hits translate to resulting disability for the human being."

He also says fans want to believe that the NFL is doing its best to make the game safe for the players. "And that's enough for them," Heggans says.

Just weeks ahead of the NFL's preseason, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an updated study with dramatic conclusions about degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Researchers examined the donated brains of dead former NFL players and found that 110 of the 111 brains showed signs of CTE.

After the JAMA report, John Urschel, an offensive lineman from the Baltimore Ravens and a PhD candidate in mathematics at MIT, announced his sudden retirement from football at age 26, typically the peak of a player's career. It was the latest early retirement, but not the first, linked to concussion risk.

Today, just mention CTE and most anyone who knows the acronym will associate it with the league – the 2015 movie "Concussion" told the story of how its link to the game was first discovered.

According to ESPN, at least 14 players under the age of 30 retired during the offseason this year. And while those retirements may stem from a variety of circumstances, the question of whether concussion risk played a factor is fast becoming a ubiquitous one.

"This is an interesting crossroads for the NFL," says Henry C. Boyd III, clinical professor of marketing at the Smith School. But the league has been at crossroads before, he adds.

Through the years, the NFL has revised its rules many times, governing which players can be hit, and when, and how.

"Back in the day, when I started watching football, the quarterback was fair game. You could knock this guy out with a big hard blow, and everyone would say, 'Well, that's part of the game,''" Boyd recalls. No more.

The chop block is banned. Crown-of-the-helmet contact is banned. "Now the NFL is saying, 'we should throw a flag,' and – boom – we start to change the culture."

More than a century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt founded the predecessor to the NCAA after a string of college football fatalities. Back then, players didn't wear helmets.

"At the time, people were looking at the game and saying, 'We need to end this sport of football,'" Heggans says. "But Teddy Roosevelt, who of course loved football, was saying no. He wanted to save football, but he knew there needed to be safety measures."

Players started wearing helmets – made of leather, initially. Eventually, they were plastic. Eventually, facemasks were added.

"My dad remembers when they came out with that facemask," Boyd says. "The players would be on the line, and when they heard 'hike' the players would grab that facemask and pull their opponent down to the ground, because there was nothing in the playbook to say you couldn't do that."

The league stepped in and made a facemask rule, recognizing the risk of neck and spinal injuries. "As we learn more, we have to keep changing," Boyd says.

"That's the nature of all business," Boyd says. "Things never stay the same. Things always change."

The NFL is adept at change, Heggans says. And he says its fans will stick with the gridiron. "The NFL," he says, "is not in crisis."

He says the Nielsen figures, which reflect the viewership drop, don't tell the whole story because they only count TV screens. Fans are increasingly streaming games on laptops and mobile devices. "The overall consumption for NFL football from different devices and time spent has actually increased," he says.

"There will be a handful of people who will say I just can't watch this because I know what's happening with the concussion risk," Heggans says. "But that won't be a large number."

Boyd says the league has to strike a balance. "Yes, there are fans who have a hunger or a desire to see a sport that's got some energy and contact," he says. "But on the other side, we have the players. And the league has to ask, longterm, what's their quality of life going to be? And it's got to address that."

"That's what management is all about," Boyd says. "It's about being responsible."

Five years ago, shortly after the suicide of retired linebacker Junior Seau, the NFL announced it would donate $30 million to the National Institutes of Health, stipulating that it would have have a say in how the money was spent. The NIH recently announced it would end its brain-research partnership with the league, two years after the NFL backed out of a major study of football player concussions. The research was being led by a neuroscientist who had been critical of the league's handling of the issue.

Boyd says the league must keep communicating its concern about the safety of its players. "Keep talking about it," Boyd says. "Keep talking about technology and the equipment. The worst thing you can do is try to run away from the problem in denial. That doesn't work."

The NFL says it has pledged about $100 million to support medical research and engineering advancement in topics related to neuroscience, and says the league is contributing to another $100 million pledge to fund medical and neuroscience research with its partners.

"Now the dialogue on brain injuries is much deeper," Heggans says. Helmet manufacturers are working with neuroscientists and others who really understand the brain.

And that's good, Boyd says. "The last thing you want is for the fans to think, 'The owners and the doctors, they knew and they didn't do anything.' No, no," Boyd says. "You gotta get the message out, that as soon as you found out, you did something to correct or fix it. Then you can keep the fans who are loyal and build fans going forward."