Performance
Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru investigate NFL concussions through linemen’s routine impacts, autopsies of former players, and the league’s efforts to shape research.
The authors relay researchers' finding that the most cases of the brain disease appeared among linemen, who knock heads on every play, not among players who suffer the spectacular collisions. If that holds, the harm comes from small repeated blows built into ordinary play rather than rare accidents. That makes it a problem with the nature of the activity, not something fixable by policing a few dangerous plays.
An organization that has long marketed its product on the very risk it now promises to reduce struggles to be believed. The authors argue that after years of promoting the sport's violence because audiences enjoy it, the league's new message that the game can be played more safely rings hollow to many.
An industry facing evidence of harm can use its money and power to attack independent scientists and promote its own flawed research. The aim is to manufacture doubt, the same playbook tobacco companies used to deny the link between smoking and lung cancer. The authors document a sports league officially concluding, against what even casual fans could see, that its players did not take frequent repeated blows to the head.
People can knowingly accept a visible danger while being kept from a deeper one the institution understands better than they do. According to the authors, players knew the sport was violent, but not that no padding could protect the brain from the forces involved. The authors say the league worked to keep that knowledge from the players whose labor built its wealth.
When a product earns billions and sits at the heart of a culture loved by millions, evidence that it causes harm runs into both corporate interest and public affection. According to the authors, this let the league deny any link between the game and brain damage for about two decades.
Evidence of a hidden disease can build one examined case at a time until it can no longer be dismissed. The authors describe researchers who kept receiving donated brains of former players, kept analyzing them, and kept finding the disease. They call the count troubling on its face, though it comes from donated brains, not a random sample.