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.

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.

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.

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 really do care about the health of the players. That's one of the tough things about the NFL - it's so physically tough on the players.

During the course of a 16-game season, everybody, in the end, is injured. It's almost as if pieces just get broken off, and you give up pieces or an appendage every year.

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.

Sometimes I wake up and I think, where did my memory go? But at the same time, I signed up for it. Football has been like that for a long time, for ages.

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.

Only in football is long-term injury the result not of accidents but of the game played properly.

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

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

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

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.

But now there are more concussions due to not being used to the hard hitting.

I know how much my late center Mike Webster suffered. I can only imagine what a lot of defensive players from my era are going through.

Concussions have brought the consciousness to the problem, but I think the problem is football-related injuries, period, and the lack of support from the league of those players who have suffered those injuries. The denial factor has been unbelievable. I'm here because I'm a fighter to try to bring attention to this fact.

Some people get nervous when I run because quarterbacks, they gotta go down and stay healthy.

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.

My experience over my five years at Wisconsin and my one year in the NFL was that there were times where I couldn't play the game safely. There are positive measures we can take... but on a lead play, on a power play, there's violence.

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

I've thought about what I could accomplish in football, but when you read about Mike Webster and Dave Duerson and Ray Easterling, you read all these stories, and to be the type of player I want to be in football, I think I'd have to take on some risks that, as a person, I don't want to take on.

There's been a lot talk about football and safety issues. My big thing is the benefits far outweigh the risks.

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.

He [Gerald R. Ford] played too much football with his helmet off.