Joe Thomas Quotes

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

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.

It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

While we know, on average, that certain positions experience more repetitive head impacts and are more likely at greater risk for CTE, no position is immune.

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

As a physician, I'm somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

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?

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.

We're hoping that there is large-scale recognition that CTE is a risk when playing football.

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 families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

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.

It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.

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

What interested me was the story of Bennet Omalu. You hear his narrative: Immigrant from Nigeria, landing in Pittsburgh, only to learn and tell the truth about this most American - and sacrosanct - cultural institution: the NFL.

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.

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.

The overwhelming evidence is that trauma is a major factor in CTE.

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.

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.

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.

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

The thing you don't realise is that every time you head the ball, your brain shakes. Every single time. Have you ever headed a ball badly and seen stars for a couple of seconds? That's your brain shaking. Let's be honest: that can't be healthy, can it?