NYTimes

American gladiators
The degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. stalks professional football players. We’ve seen it in the headlines for years, usually attached to a famous name. Hall of Famers like Junior Seau and Frank Gifford had C.T.E. So did the convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself in prison. Repeated hits to the head can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and it can be diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.

An alarming study released today suggests that C.T.E. is not just lurking at the margins, an outlier outcome for the most risk-prone players — in fact, at least 25 percent of N.F.L. players might expect to have it.

John Branch, a reporter for The Times, wrote about the study. He has covered C.T.E. in professional sports for nearly 15 years. Researchers, he tells us, looked at the 878 former N.F.L. players who died from 2016 to 2021. They were able to test the brains of 235 of them for C.T.E. Of those, 215 had the disease. That’s 24.5 percent of the total. “The actual prevalence could be far higher,” John writes. “The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.”

John then applied the statistics to today’s N.F.L. players. When the regular season starts in a couple of weeks, there will be 1,696 people on the league’s 32 active rosters. (That’s not including hundreds on practice squads or out for injuries.) At least 400 of them, John reports, will develop C.T.E., if the rate continues.

That’s a terrifying number. Symptoms of the disease include memory loss and confusion, as well as dramatic mood swings. Executive functioning decreases. Erratic behavior increases, as does addiction. Suicides happen. (Other studies have shown that the rate of C.T.E. in people who haven’t gotten hit in the head a lot is nearly zero.)

Where’s OSHA?
Imagine having a job like that, where 25 percent of your colleagues end up with a debilitating disease that will kill them, but not before making their lives and the lives of their loved ones miserable. You’d probably be safer as a commercial fisherman, or a coal miner. One scientist told John that Russian roulette has better odds. “We never see things that are this dire,” he said.

Wouldn’t the existence of such a job trigger outrage and calls for change from, among others, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration?

John wrote about that, too, today. His answer: Not if your job is playing professional football. The agency told him: “In most cases, OSHA does not take enforcement action with regard to professional athletes.”

The N.F.L. is simply too big and too popular for people in government to want to change its rules or abolish the sport. In 2024, its revenues were more than $23 billion, and 35 of the top 50 U.S. telecasts last year were N.F.L. games. Dangerous as it is, football is our culture.

And there’s also this, which John told me yesterday. “C.T.E. is one of those things that most people take seriously only when it directly affects them, like gun violence or climate change,” he said. “Until then, it can feel like someone else’s problem.”