Bennet Omalu Quotes

I think, a lot of guys, when they get, you know, those hits or those concussions, they think, 'OK, well, I'm just going to kind of play through it here for the short term, and it's going to get better.' I would venture to say probably 100 percent of the guys that played my sport in the NFL have been there.

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we're also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.

All the NFL players I have examined pathologically, I have not seen one that did not have changes in their brain system with brain damage.

I have a lot of college football players in my Brain Bank with CTE.

They're on the right road, but there's a long way to go on concussions, not only in the NFL, but college football, high school football and all football.

More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.

Literally thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the NFL by retired players, many of whom say that information on brain injury in football was withheld from them.

My father was an NFL running back, so I feel like I might be more susceptible, genetically, to CTE.

The NFL should be more worried about pensions than CTE.

We've now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker.

If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.

I think I'm connected to this issue in some capacity, football and brain damage. So carving out a way to address it tactfully is important to me no matter what I go on to do.

It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.

I'm concerned about the future of football, because we have paid a lot of attention to concussions. We are more aware of concussions. But it's really the repetitive minor injuries, the ones that are asymptomatic that occur on almost every play of the game, the sub-concussive hits: that's the big problem for football.

As the story about CTE got more real, it became more clear that players are playing that without a full understanding of the risks they face, and the long-term effects.

The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players.

The increased rate of brain disease in the NFL population is caused by the way the game is played within the rules.

When people say that you kind of just get - you know, just feel like a little buzzed or dazed or had your bell rung - they consider that a concussion. I wouldn't. But if that is considered a concussion, I would say any football player at least records 50 to 100 in the course of a year.

Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease.

I'm sure there were concussions galore back when we played, but the doctors would just say, 'Shake it off,' or something like that... or 'Come on, you got to be tough... get back in there.' I see so many guys who played pro football in their 50s now who are so debilitated from having played it.

Until they study the general population and find out what the likelihood of CTE in a soccer mom is versus an NFL brain, we really have no baseline to rate this study off of.

The relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of C.T.E. remains unknown.

At some point, we're going to have to get to the point where, before you play football, I'm going to test you at some stage in your life to determine if you're susceptible to concussions. We need a test that shows us that your brain is situated a certain way that puts you at risk. If you are susceptible, don't play football.