Concussions In Professional Football

Early January, I’m watching the AFC wild card playoff game, the Cincinnati Bengals and Pittsburg Steelers are going down to the wire. With under thirty seconds to play and the Steelers down just one point, they are invading into the Bengals territory. On First and ten, the Pittsburg quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger drops back to throw. Antonio Brown, the Steelers star wide receiver and one of the league leaders in receiving yards starts his route. After running vertical for ten yards, he makes a hard cut towards the middle of the field to get free from the Cincinnati cornerback. Ben sees him and throws a strike to his open receiver, the ball sails over Brown’s head just out of reach of the diving corner. Vontaze Burfict, a 250 pound Cincinnati

I’ve been on the field plenty of times witnessing head injuries and the effects it does to them. My freshman year I witnessed a severe concussion. One of my teammates at practice was playing quarterback, running a routine play and one of our defensive guys looked to make just a regular routine tackle but our quarterback didn’t get up right away. In fact, he was out cold, there wasn’t anything about the hit that looked out of the ordinary. The coaches scrambled to get the trainer and when he got out there he went through a series of questions with him to evaluate his alertness and consciousness. First the trainer asked him if he knew where he was and he responded with “am I at contact camp?” as he looked down at his arms and legs in amazement that he had extremities. Contact camp had already been over with for more than a month at that point. He then asked him if he knew what day of the week it was, what he ate for lunch, and what his first class of the day was. All of which he didn’t know the answer to. These types of tragic occurrences are what make parents reluctant to sign their children up for tackle football when they get to middle school. One could imagine what could happen if they were talented enough to make it to the professional ranks. NFL players that were selected in the first round of the NFL draft have an average career length of 9.3 years and players to make at least one pro bowl appearance had an average career span of 11.7 years. The number of blows to the head would be staggering over the span of that