A lot of blog space has been taken up around the world worrying about head injuries incurred by NFL players. Anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that they suffer more than their fair share. RICK TELANDER at the Sun Times took some time to interview Alan Schwartz, a legally blind mathematician who has put in several years of study on the effects of head injuries to NFL players. And, after some fun stories about his youth, he gets directly to the crux of the matter. I’ll let him and Rick tell you all about it.
Schwarz’s dogged, smart, mathematically-grounded pursuit of the rising brain trauma and dementia issues in the NFL has put him at the journalistic forefront of the hottest ethical topic in the football world. Nor is it a coincidence that Schwarz is a football outsider, having for 15 years been a writer for ‘’Baseball America.’’ He brought to football a foreigner’s perspective and a logician’s trust in things like batting averages and ERA, equations which can’t be chop-blocked.
In a metaphorical sense, Schwarz entered the football brain debate with an infinite legion of co-workers. Numbers.
‘’I can look at a page of numbers and say, ‘They’re lying,’’’ Schwarz says. ‘’Then I can work backward and see why it’s wrong. Then I can go on to find what the motives of the person who did it might be.’’
Schwarz has now written over the course of three years some 30 articles for the Times on the connection between brain damage and football—and, he insists, it is no longer a connection, but a fact.
The numbers he has looked at from retired players lists and the NFL’s documents and independent researchers like Dr. Ann C. McKee, co-director for the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University, a specalist who has studied the brains of deceased NFL players, tell him what only people ‘’with no horse in the race’’ seem willing to acknowledge: This is undeniable stuff.
Schwarz’s a-ha! moment regarding the bad math of the league came at the NFL brain trauma summit meeting in Chicago in June 2007.
‘’The fourth deceased player between age 36 and 56 had just been determined to have this incredibly rare condition, chronic traumatic encephalopathy,’’ he says at the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention Center. ‘’CTE. You get it from head trauma, no other way.’’
‘You don’t need more data’
According to Dr. McKee, who has seen 12 football players’ brain slices under the microscope, all of which showed signs of CTE, it is essentially nonexistent for those who haven’t been battered. In an interview she tells me that other similarly damaged brains she has studied include ‘’a boxer, an epileptic with seizures, two people who were developmentally impaired—head-bangers—a wrestler, physically-abused wife, a circus clown shot from a cannon.’’
Schwarz made his point to NFL medical representatives that such statistics were irrefutable evidence of the football/dementia connection. He grimaces when he relates their response. ‘’’That’s only four guys,’ they said. ‘We need more data.’’’
This nearly drove formula-man Schwarz batty.
‘’But you don’t need more data,’’ he nearly shouts as we eat lunch outside the media work room. ‘’I know probability! A million-to-one shot doesn’t come up four times in a row. Not on a roulette wheel. Not anywhere. I knew they were wrong.’’
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell even asked Schwarz: ‘’How do you know they did this from football and not swimming?’’
Schwarz sighs now. ‘’OK, each one can be explained away individually. But not collectively. No. Way.’’
Put it this way, for the visually inspired, I put four straw colored needles in a 3 foot high hay stack and you, lucky reader, grab only the four needles and never any hay. And you do that every attempt. That should give you an idea of how unlikely it is that that many cases of CTE showed up in such a small sample.
What is galling to Schwartz is what is galling to all of us up here; the NFL is lying. And lying consistently just to cover their collective asses. I guess they have their heads so far up theirs that they do not see the need for any special padding. They have plenty and that is all that matters.
More importantly is the fact that men are dying very young, as noted by the age ranges above (36 to 56), and their families are being denied husbands, fathers, uncles and so on just because of a game. Granted, a wildly popular and profitable game, but it is still just a game.
With the amount of money the NFL takes in each year, there is no valid reason for them not to be more proactive about this. As to the apologists who insist that the players “man up” and just deal with it, allow me to introduce my little silver hammer to your head a few times so you can think more clearly.