Football-Related Trauma Quotes

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.

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

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.

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 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 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 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.

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

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

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?

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.

To recognize that head injuries were as essential a part of football as they are of boxing would be to erase the fine distinction on which the game's respectability rested.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I walked away from pro football and a $2.9 million contract with the San Francisco 49ers because I didn't want to develop CTE.