Is the NFL Guilty of Sociopathy?

The highly disturbing news this last week of two former NFL players, Phillip Adams and Vincent Jackson, posthumously diagnosed with CTE, got me to thinking.

Thinking about the players and their families, their communities too, devastated by a preventable disease that seems, it’s surprising to say, a more brutal way to go than even Alzheimer’s.

Thinking too about the league and its projected aura of toughness, and the grave act of hypocrisy that that is. ^[1]Speaking of hypocrisy, I am admittedly a lifelong fan of boxing. How can I call out the NFL and not boxing, which no doubt inflicts its own head trauma? I do not have a credible answer for that.

A weak conscience, a lack of empathy, an emphasis on serving the self and its interests. The NFL, its employees, its associates and its supporters are engaged in an act of collective disregard that borders on, dare it be said, sociopathy.

The NFL’s pathological denial

In peeking in at games and watching highlights I see a disturbing trend. Call it a league pathology of denial. Helmet to helmet hits, which even on a micro level lead to CTE, receive little to no acknowledgment from announcers.

In this video, which details hits only from the league’s Week 14, you will see brutal hits involving helmet on helmet collisions. No flags thrown, no verbal objection from announcers, just a good old-fashioned hit—and that, we can infer, is how the league likes it!

And speaking of announcers, the pathology of denial of which I speak was on display in the Dec. 16 Chiefs-Chargers game, in which Donald Parham Jr. was carted off the field after his head hit the ground attempting to make a catch in the end zone.

Here’s what famed play-by-play man Joe Buck, calling the game inside a domed stadium where outside temps were 52 degrees,  had to say in his analysis:

“The last thing we would ever do about any injury is speculate, especially that type. But when you see his arm shaking and his hand shaking that’s the part that’s most unnerving. We’ll just add this: it is very cold at least by Los Angeles standards down on the field and hopefully that was more the issue than anything else.”

Perhaps this is wishful thinking on Buck’s part, but it’s tantamount to a kind of denial with which the league has grown chronically complicit.

But where the league may see entertainment and $ signs (even more now that the league has added an extra game to its season), I see something different.

I see a men making a very nice salaries with lives that will be horrifically cut short because of how they made those salaries.

I see loved ones and communities torn asunder by it.

I see the league and its $ signs—and then I see injustice.

The NFL and justice

The NFL went out of its way to take a stand (or a knee, as the case may be) against perceived injustice.

But the social justice movement is riddled with hypocrisy. And perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced than in the world of sport. Whether it’s David Silver, Lebron James and the NBA putting their business interests with a Communist regime before standing up for human rights—even when a situation blatantly begs for the latter—or the NFL and its insufficient response to domestic violence and sexual assault, corporate agendas, not ethics, rule the day.

And so how can the NFL legitimately say it’s for black lives (well over half the league is black) when its actions actually contribute to the random but inevitable destruction of them? Vincent Jackson, not to mention countless others, is leaving behind a family without a husband and father.

The League and its (lack of) rules

In 2018 the NFL, under intense scrutiny, modified its rules regarding helmet hits. It stated that “it is a foul if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent.”

The penalty for doing so? Fifteen yards and a first down. The record of enforcement of the rule has been virtually non-existent^[2]According to the ESPN report cited here, “the helmet rule was flagged six times through the end of Week 6. For context, there were nine such calls in 2020 and 14 in 2019 during the same time … Continue reading and in the rare instances when such a hit occurs refs have been ordered to generically refer to it as “unnecessary roughness.”

This is like passing laws against domestic violence but not using the police or the legal system to enforce those laws, and should the law be exercised referring to it as a “domestic disturbance.”

This can hardly come as a surprise. In this video, NFL Hall of Famer Chris Carter says of the league’s rule changes for the current season: “We focus on small number of rule changes and points of emphasis that were approved by NFL clubs for the protection and benefit of the players and the game.”

The helmet rule is mentioned last, hardly a point of emphasis. “Even if not called on the field,” the video states, “such actions could warrant further action and discipline by the league.”

The helmet rule and head trauma

But the helmet rule, even if enforced, does little to nothing to alleviate head trauma and brain damage in its players. The issue isn’t lowering the head to make a hit; it is the chronic act of helmets making contact.

In an ongoing study of brains of former NFL players 110 of 111 were found to have C.T.E., chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease that results from repeated blows to the head. A New York Times piece reporting on the findings stated

those who study brain trauma say the accumulation of seemingly benign, non-violent blows — rather than head-jarring concussions alone — probably causes C.T.E.

Data compiled by researchers at Stanford showed that one college offensive lineman sustained 62 of these hits in a single game. Each one came with an average force on the player’s head equivalent to what you would see if he had driven his car into a brick wall at 30 m.p.h…

The piece added that “linebackers who play in the league for 10 years could sustain upward of 15,000 of these sub-concussive hits.”

While C.T.E. can only be diagnosed post-mortem there are players like former star Jim McMahon who have opened up about their struggles while alive. He was diagnosed in his early 50s with early onset dementia.

“I was losing my mind,” he said. “Started having these bad thoughts and really bad headaches. I’d be laying in a dark room for weeks at a time….  When your brain starts messing with you you don’t know what to do…. Had I had a gun I wouldn’t be here.”

Some, such as Aaron Hernandez (pictured below), no longer are.

Our role

If all we as fans are willing to do is tune in each week, to admire the athleticism and the top dollars and status of these players, to smile an entertained smile at it all, then we too are complicit.

We are complicit in feeding a slick, well-oiled machine, one designed for our amusement that also offers a well-documented infliction of pain, trauma and devastation.

If that all sounds high-minded, one can watch and simply see for oneself, as they say, on any given Sunday.