Chris Borland 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.

I would bet you that even though people think I absorbed an inordinate number of head injuries, I'd say relative to the number of guys who have played this game, I would say that my head injuries were relatively small.

While the U.S. government is unlikely to ever limit the number of football games, plenty of parents are refusing to let their children play the sport due to the risk of head injuries.

No, no, I don't watch football. The last time I tried watching was the last Super Bowl. The problem I have is, you know, the graphic nature of my imagination; when I watch and see them meeting head onto head, helmet onto helmet, what flashes through my mind is what's going on in their brains. It's like torture to me.

As long as we're having contact and as long as there are collisions, there's going to be head injuries. What the long-term consequences are of that, we're beginning to learn, and that definitely will have an impact on the game as we know it.

The reality is that it's just the nature of the game. It's the nature of playing offensive line, defensive line, and linebackers, where your responsibilities as a player involve those little hits that are going to accumulate. You can't take that out of the game.

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.

My generation, people who played with me, they're suffering from football.

Football has always been violent. In the early days of the game, they didn't wear hard helmets. They wore soft helmets, which were just designed to protect the ears. In the '40s and '50s they began to introduce hard helmets, which provided much more protection against things like skull fractures.

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.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

When I played for the Steelers and I got my bell rung, I'd take smelling salts and go right back out there.

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.

The NFL today has bigger, stronger, bodies than ever, moving faster than ever, hitting a stationary object harder than ever before - so the physics of the hit have changed.

It's simple to get a concussion, you know. I don't know how many I've had over my career, you know, but I've definitely had my fair share.

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.

I'm learning how to prevent my brain from getting worse than it is after suffering a career worth of concussions playing football.

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

I think they shouldn't allow cut blocks, because our knees are important to us, too. I know concussions are a big deal, too, but I think knee, cut blocks are a big deal, but that seems to be OK with the NFL. So they're not too concerned about safety, obviously.

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.

My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?

I've been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I'd already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you've been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.

I understand football is a freaky sport, and injuries happen.