The Problem With Football Helmets

The guardian cap controversy

0:00This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:06In August 2024, James Daniels was suiting up for an NFL preseason game. Daniels was an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he was signed to a lucrative three-year contract to play with the team. But that day, nobody was talking about Daniels as a player. The news media was focused on Daniels because of what he was wearing. That's producer Chris Berube. Daniels was believed to be the first NFL player to sport a new kind of helmet during a game, an awkward piece of equipment called a guardian cap.

0:40A guardian cap is basically an extra layer of padding that goes around the outside of a traditional football helmet. So you've got your helmet, and then you've got your guardian cap, and then you've got another layer that you pull down over the guardian cap that then represents the logos of the team, the Chargers lightning bolts or the Green Bay G or whatever it may be. Noah Cohan is a professor of American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and he's the author of an upcoming book about football helmets. He says the guardian cap looks markedly different from what football fans are used to.

1:11It sort of looks like if you had soundproof padding in the form of a cap and stretched that over your helmet. It's a series of lumps made of foam within a sort of fabric covering that's then clipped to the outside of the helmet. The guardian cap is meant to absorb the impact of headshots and to protect players' brains from concussions. Some people hailed the caps as a big step for player safety.

1:42Today, most NFL players are required to wear them during practices, and some players even wear them during NFL games. But since their introduction, players wearing the guardian caps have received a ton of mockery. The caps make players' helmets look bulbous and disproportionate to the rest of their body. They make professional athletes look like human bobbleheads. Your head is huge. You look like the Great Gazoo. It's very noticeable.

2:12It's not just the fans who take issue with guardian caps. Many players complain about sacrificing swagger for safety. Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelsey actually made fun of the whole idea of a guardian cap during a practice by covering his head in bubble wrap. Other players have said they have no plans to wear them during games. Like former Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tungo-Vailoa, who suffered multiple concussions, here he is in a press conference in 2024. Will you wear a guardian cap?

2:42Nope. Why? Personal choice. Most players will agree that, yes, it is a good thing to develop new football helmets that make the game safer. But they aren't embracing the guardian cap. In fact, pretty much every evolution of the football helmet has received a mixed response from players and fans. Football helmets have been a flashpoint between folks who want to make football safer and those who want to keep the game rough and tumble. It's been at the center of moral panics and court cases.

3:14And today, it's part of a bigger discussion about whether or not it's responsible or even ethical to keep playing America's most popular sport.

Origins of American football

3:23It may be hard to believe, but there was a time before football was America's game. Way back in the 1870s, football was mostly a distraction for rowdy college students. The very first sort of intercollegiate, organized match between Rutgers and Princeton, I believe, is more like a soccer match than what we understand today as American football. Ivy League college students started mixing soccer and rugby to make up a new kind of American super sport.

3:57Originally, American football had a lot of, you know, using your feet to kick the ball forward. But that changed after a fateful game between Harvard University and some good old Canadians from McGill University in Montreal. Like most new sports, there was a certain fluidity to the rules and style of play. Harvard was used to a version of football with a lot of kicking, while McGill was still playing a version of rugby where the ball was passed around by hand. So the Canadians saw what Harvard was doing and said,

4:29hey, why are you kicking that ball, you absolute losers? And McGill says, you shouldn't play that kicking game. What you want to play is this rugby game where you carry the ball. It's more masculine. It's better. That was the first sort of sliding doors moment where we get to American football. Even after football largely got rid of kicking, it was still a very different game from what we're familiar with today. There was no forward passing. Players would huck the ball backwards like they do in rugby.

5:00But the biggest difference might be how the players looked. In fact, early football stars didn't look like athletes at all. Yeah, I mean, they're literally wearing sweaters and what they would have called knickers. You know, heavy cloth, pants and high socks. Some kind of early cleated shoe, probably. But they weren't wearing pads. These sweaters and knickers didn't offer a ton of physical protection, which was a problem because even in the early days, football was quite violent.

5:33Right from the start, football players were tackling each other hard. Players might break a rib and then they might stuff something in their sweater. Or if they broke their nose. I mean, I've even seen pictures of like almost like a spoon attached to a headband to sort of brace a nose. So at first, there really wasn't anything. People kept hitting their heads. I mean, people died. Despite the violence, or perhaps because of the violence, football became a national obsession in the late 19th century. But this rise to prominence also set off a national debate

6:05about whether it was responsible to let smart young men play such a barbaric game. There were frequent calls to stop playing football. Even from people like Charles Elliott, the president of Harvard University, wanted his university to stop playing football at around the time of the turn of the century. But this sport was already so popular that his wanting this couldn't affect that change, even at his own university.

The 1905 crisis and rule changes

6:31This problem hit a crisis level in 1905. That year, 19 football players died at the high school and college levels. These were all young, healthy men. There were calls to ban the sport, which got so loud, President Roosevelt had to intervene. Teddy Roosevelt loved football. In one letter to his son, Roosevelt encouraged Ted Jr. to play the game despite the risks, saying, the chance of your damaging yourself in body is outweighed by the possibility of bitterness of spirit if you don't play.

7:06But President Roosevelt also knew the violence couldn't keep going at this level. He felt a lot of pressure to save the game from itself. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt convened an emergency meeting at the White House. And there, a group of coaches and officials devised a plan to reform football. They created the first national body to govern university athletics, a body that would become the NCAA. They introduced a whole raft of rule changes, including the forward pass, as a way to cut down on tackling and avoid violent pileups.

7:39And slowly, safety equipment became a standard part of football. Players started to wear shoulder pads and face guards. And some intrepid person came up with the first football helmet. Though, it's not actually clear who that was.

7:57One popular story says the inventor of the helmet was a Navy admiral named Joseph Mason Reeves. According to legend, Admiral Reeves was advised by a doctor to stop playing football because he was developing a totally wild medical diagnosis called instant insanity. So Admiral Reeves went to a local shoemaker and had the man fabricate a moleskin cap to protect his cranium. Noah Cohan says, yeah, that's a nice, clean origin story. But we actually don't know who came up with it.

8:28There's one version of the story that, in fact, James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, fashioned an early, crude sort of helmet for himself. So some people say he came up with it. But really, it's a kind of convergent evolution. Lots of people are hitting their heads, so lots of people are trying to figure out ways to protect them. Wherever they came from, football helmets became commonplace. But they didn't become mandatory in college football until 1939. The first helmets were made out of leather, and they were designed to be hard and rigid, like a shoe.

8:58Wearing these early helmets was definitely better than playing football with a bare head, but the helmets were far from perfect. So even if you were wearing a leather helmet, there were multiple players who died effectively from their skull caving in. They were hit so hard, and the leather was not strong enough that the skull would break, and part of it would poke into their brain, and then this could be, you know, almost instantly fatal. So the leather helmet does provide protection, but it's not really a permanent solution,

9:29and that's part of the reason the plastic helmet enters the picture.

The shift to plastic helmets

9:33The first plastic helmets were developed in the late 1930s by a company called Riddell. Their founder, John Riddell, fabricated helmets for the American military during World War II. And when the war ended, the company went back to making football helmets from a plastic compound called Tenite. Riddell's design was basically a round, hard dome with a chin strap. It was clear right away, these new plastic helmets were really good at preventing the kinds of injuries that had been plaguing college football.

10:05Today, when we think about football safety, the first thing that comes to mind is probably concussions. But back then, there wasn't as much talk about those. Usually people would use euphemisms like, he got his bell rung, or he's seeing stars. But there was much less public awareness about brain trauma in football. Instead, most of the talk around football safety was centered on breaks, specifically skull fractures. And the plastic helmet was great at preventing those. What I mentioned earlier with the leather helmet caving in,

10:36it does not happen when you're wearing a plastic helmet. But despite this safety innovation, the plastic helmets were also very controversial because they actually made other aspects of the game less safe. The plastic helmet could be used as a weapon. Weirdly, the effort to make the game safer made parts of it more violent. When that player's helmeted skull goes crashing into another player's knee, that blows out their knee, right? So the extremities are impacted by the plastic helmet,

11:10becomes a source of safety concern. There was this moment, this really interesting debate, like, should we go back to leather? Because it now seems like we're having other kinds of risks. Kathleen Byszynski is a public health professor at Ulemberg College and author of No Game for Boys to Play, about the history of youth football. Players are playing in a more dangerous way. If you're, you know, getting hit with a plastic helmet, the other person might be more injured in a way that they wouldn't have with leather. Some colleges were fierce holdouts.

11:41Notre Dame still had leather helmets into the 1950s. But in the end, football coaches and the NCAA decided the priority had to be preventing head injuries. So plastic helmets became the norm. And Noah Cohan says their success wasn't just because of safety concerns. But Riddell recognizes that there's something different going on with the aesthetics of the helmet when they switch to plastic. From their very earliest ads, from like a 1940 catalog, they talk about how the helmet is more beautiful when it's fashioned from plastic.

12:15The plastic helmets offered a lot of design possibilities. The football helmet became more than just a piece of safety gear. Now, it was a defining symbol for the game itself. Aesthetically, the early plastic helmets were usually just one color. And for a time, the helmets were colored by position. Receivers wore different colored helmets to help a quarterback see who they could throw to. In one particular instance, the Naval Academy, who had at that time gold helmets,

12:46painted the eligible receiver's helmets bright orange, like really neon orange. And so there's these very funny pictures of that game where they've got these sort of conservative outfits, except for like, you know, a couple dozen players who have these bright orange lids. These fluorescent helmets soon fell out of style. And instead, equipment managers started painting their helmets with school and team colors. There were already a few creative efforts to decorate helmets. In 1947, an artsy jock named Fred Gerke was a halfback for the Los Angeles Rams.

13:20And in a fit of inspiration, Gerke painted the helmet navy and then painted gold horns on the side. His teammates loved it. And soon, painted helmets spread to other teams. They became iconic. Before the 50s and 60s, football culture in America had really focused on the college game. But by mid-century, professional leagues were finding success. And in the 60s, professional football leagues started getting national television contracts. Now, fans could see football players up close.

13:52And helmets became an important canvas for branding. Once millions of people watching at home are seeing that iconic camera viewpoint, looking down the two lines of scrimmage as they're lined up across from each other, you have a whole new perspective on the game and a much closer view of these helmets and what's on them. Soon, the helmet became one of the most recognizable aspects of the game. And it became a defining symbol for fans.

Branding and television expansion

14:18I interviewed and, in fact, visited the home of a collector who has almost 9,000 miniature helmets. He's an extreme example, obviously, but the aesthetics of the football helmet really matter. It's why the NFL merchandising is worth more than $3 billion a year. In the late 1960s, football went from being a sport to a core part of American culture. And the NFL became the dominant league. 39 million people watched Super Bowl II in 1968. But by the late 70s, that number doubled.

14:50And during this time, football helmets became more polished, turning into hard plastic domes with epic branding. On the safety front, helmet manufacturers kept adding new safety features to protect players' heads. But again, most of those innovations were designed to prevent skull fractures and injuries like broken noses and chipped teeth. Helmet designers added face bars, which eventually became full-on face masks. They added air bladders to create some space between a player's cranium and the helmet's hard plastic interior.

15:21And for the most part, these types of changes were welcome. But helmets could only do so much to protect players from injury. By the 70s, football was a lot safer than 1905. But there were still a lot of high-profile injuries and even deaths, especially at the high school level. And some parents went so far as to sue helmet manufacturers if their kids were hurt during games. One famous case involved an 18-year-old named Ernie Pelton,

15:52who suffered a terrible injury that left him paralyzed. His family sued Rawlings, the helmet manufacturer, for damages, and it went to court in 1970. During that case, Rawlings pulled out all the stops. Kathleen Byshynski again. One of the legal arguments was that Ernie Pelton had been hit in the chin or somewhere else, so you can't blame the helmet because it wasn't a part of his head the helmet was protecting. They were making all kinds of arguments. To really push their case over the top, Rawlings even brought in a star witness,

16:22somebody whose good judgment was universally respected. At least, it was at that time. O.J. Simpson was this star football player. And so the helmet manufacturer actually got O.J. Simpson to be one of their expert witnesses. And so they bring him in to basically say, like, I have faith in this helmet. And the jury actually sent a note to the judge asking for O.J. Simpson's signature. So, like, what kind of fair trial can this poor Pelton family possibly get in this scenario?

16:57Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in this context, the jury ended up finding that the manufacturer was not responsible. Manufacturers kept winning in court, while also tweaking the designs of their helmets to try and make them more safe. And to reassure consumers, they helped set up a safety commission in the 70s alongside the NCAA and other groups. The commission conducted scientific tests to help improve their products. But the Maine Safety Commission got their funding from equipment companies and football leagues. Kathleen Baczynski says this was an obvious conflict of interest.

17:30And it turned out their testing was not the most rigorous. The way that they tested the helmets was pretty simplistic and not really representative of what would actually happen in a game scenario. To test these helmets, they would basically do these drop tests, where it's just like, how high and how fast do we drop the helmet until it cracks open? I mean, I'm sort of, I'm simplifying, but not by much, actually. Still, the safety board added some credibility to the idea that helmets were game safe. By the 80s, it was understood helmet manufacturers were concerned about safety,

18:03but high-profile injuries made it clear total safety wasn't really possible. The sort of line that these football manufacturers have to have is one that the game is dangerous. It's dangerous enough that you need our help. But not so dangerous that, with our help, it's not okay for Johnny to play. So they really have to be careful that, like, you know, we want to protect your sweet angel. But also, playing football will make him a man. So, with our help, it's okay for him to play. That said, violence was pretty central to how football was presented.

18:39Sports broadcasts would play clips of the most brutal hits over and over again in slow motion. And then, there were the opening credits of Monday Night Football, which was the sports marquee broadcast on ABC. During the period that I watched Monday Night Football the most, there would be this sort of opening from Al Michaels, and then these giant helmets would drop from the sky into this computerized representation of the stadium, right? They'd be shot with lightning bolts. They sort of would quiver as they're building up energy,

19:09and then they'd rise from the turf, rear back, and slam into each other in this just tremendous explosion. Tonight, a big game for both the Los Angeles Raiders and the New Orleans Saints on ABC's Monday Night Football.

19:26If I missed the opening credits when I was 12 years old, I was devastated. I mean, that was what I thrilled to. I mean, the drama of it couldn't be even greater. This tension has always been present in football. That shameful thrill of a hard tackle. And then the pang of guilt when you see the stretcher rolling onto the field.

The discovery of CTE

19:46But for some fans, those queasy feelings became too much in the early 2000s. In 2002, a doctor named Bennett Amalu discovered some unusual patterns when performing an autopsy on Mike Webster, a football legend for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Dr. Amalu was confused to find that Webster's brain was full of proteins known as tau. Eventually, he concluded that Webster had suffered from CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Usually, CTE is the result of years of repeated blows to the head.

20:20People who typically have CTE include military service members who have served in violent combat zones. But after Amalu's discovery, it was clear. CTE could be caused by regular football concussions. CTE has been linked to all kinds of mental health problems, like unchecked aggression, depression, bad mood swings, memory loss, and even dementia. And a study published this year found at least a quarter of NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE.

20:52The researchers also said that number could be much higher if they were able to access more data. Now, it's impossible to know whether a person has CTE until after they've died. The diagnosis is only possible during an autopsy. But in a recent poll, about a third of former NFL players surveyed believe they have it. George Visker is one of those players. I interviewed George back in 2018. He won a Super Bowl ring as a defensive tackle for the San Francisco 49ers in 1982.

21:23And during our talk, George could be gregarious and funny. But he could also be confused and even upset. George says he got his first concussion on a pretty routine play. So I guess we went top of helmet to top of helmet. And we both went down, and I was face down. And I laid there, I guess, for a few moments. And one of the coaches walked over to me, and I started to get up on my hands and knees.

21:51And I guess they tried to help me, and I said, I'm good. And I stood up. They said, the first step I take, I go over backwards on my back. Visker says he began suffering severe memory lapses, which got worse and worse. You know, I'd get these balls of light. My hearing would come and go with the beat of my heart. I'd start this projectile vomiting. George's behavior became erratic. He says his friends didn't recognize him anymore. And eventually, George Visker says he needed nine emergency brain surgeries.

22:21I got arrested three times. I had never been in trouble before or since. We'd go out and have a couple beers, like we used to do, almost every night. And after my first brain surgery, I'm hearing these crazy stories about me doing things totally out of character. You know, going into bars and punching people out and throwing chairs through windows. And I got, you know, all of a sudden, I started ending up in jail. I would have no memory. One minute, we're sitting, you know, eating, having a couple beers. Somewhere next thing I know, it's six, eight, ten hours later, I'm in jail.

22:53George didn't play very long in the NFL, only a couple of games. But the damage was done. After years of intense treatments, today, George has a sense of normalcy in his life. But his brain trauma has made a lot of things really difficult. I have major short-term memory issues, which to this day, I literally, as I sit right here, I have no recollection where I've been parked. I'll look in my notebook that I carry with me. I think I showed you my notebook before. I have to write everything down.

23:25In fact, I saw these memory problems on display a couple of times during our interview. You know, I'm sorry, I forgot your question, and I deal with this a lot. I've just hit a complete blank, and I don't even know where I'm going with this.

23:39Gosh darn it, I'm sorry. What was the question again? In lots of ways, George is an outlier among retired football players. Most of them don't need emergency brain surgery, let alone nine emergency brain surgeries. But the fact remains, he's one of countless retired football players who have struggled with brain injuries after their playing careers are over. Today, most football fans are aware of CTE and the traumatic brain injuries caused by football.

24:10And the NFL is more vocal about player safety. There have been new rules implemented to reduce injuries, and TV broadcasts don't revel in violent hits like they used to. And for the companies that manufacture football helmets, this newfound focus on concussions has led to a full-on redesign of their products. I mean, in some ways, CTE represented a threat to helmet manufacturers insofar as it represented and still represents a threat to, you know, football itself.

24:40From another point of view, CTE presented an opportunity for helmet makers because it gave them another chance to vigorously assert that they were, you know, scientifically innovating in the helmet space, right? So that's a big point of emphasis in how they market these things. And with that goes a narrative of unending technological progress.

Modern helmet technology limitations

25:04One example of this technological progress is the Guardian cap, the big bobblehead-style protective layer that players started wearing a few years ago. But as we've mentioned, the Guardian cap has been slow to catch on. Many players find them uncomfortable and hot. And of course, they look very awkward.

25:34For a minute, it looked like the Guardian cap could be the NFL's preferred way to try and make football helmets safer. They started requiring certain players to wear them during practices in 2022. But since then, other helmet manufacturers have been rolling out products that are supposed to be even more advanced. Newer helmets include high-tech features like flexible materials that squish and contort to soften the impact of direct hits or 3D printing that allows a manufacturer to fit a helmet to a specific player's head shape.

26:07And there are more rigorous safety tests for new helmets, carried out at a specialized lab at Virginia Tech. And the NFL says these new helmet designs, paired with rule changes, reduce concussions to a, quote, historic low in the 2024 season. And the NFL says it is actively trying to reduce the number of brain injuries experienced by their players. But all these claims, they have to be taken with a Jason Kelsey-sized grain of salt. People are still getting concussions quite a bit.

26:38According to NFL statistics, there were 129 concussions during the 2024 regular season. And that number actually increased to 168 the next year. That's more than five players on every team being diagnosed with a concussion. And then there's the problem of sub-concussive hits. These are football hits that don't reach the level of concussion, but they can still cause brain damage in the long term. Sometimes players don't see the effects of these kinds of hits until years later.

27:12They've tried putting sensors in helmets to measure, like, the magnitude of an impact. And sometimes there'll be what seems like a really, really high impact and that person experiences no symptoms. Sometimes there'll be what seems like a much smaller impact, and then that person might actually have a concussion that takes longer to heal. There's genuinely, I think, a lot we don't understand about what makes certain hits sort of more immediately causing symptoms versus others. How long people have played and how that can, you know, accumulate over time.

27:43On top of that, according to neurologists, you don't need a direct hit to sustain a concussion. In fact, many football concussions are caused by the way a player's head whips back and forth. This kind of trauma is called rotational acceleration.

27:58The fact is, football helmets are more sophisticated than ever. And yet, Kathleen Byshynski says, designing a football helmet that totally eliminates concussions is probably not technically possible. I remember chatting with a doctor who said, unless you strapped the helmet to a player's shoulders so that your head couldn't, you know, move around on your neck, the helmet really can't do all that much to prevent a concussion. I'm pretty skeptical of helmets being able to massively protect against concussion.

28:30I do think you can tweak design around the edges, but I think you're up against the laws of physics, and they're pretty tricky. Many fans will argue that while you can't eliminate concussions with better helmets, they are a useful form of harm reduction. And I do see the logic in that. If we are going to keep playing tackle football, we should obviously try to make it as safe as possible. But there doesn't seem to be a way to make a version of that game without brain injuries.

29:01A few weeks ago, I called up George Vizker to get his thoughts about this. And to be honest, I feel kind of weird asking George about football helmets. It's like saying, so remember that car crash that left you in a coma? Hey, what'd you think about the seat belt? But George was more than happy to talk. He told me that, yeah, okay, helmets are getting better. But the players are also getting stronger, thanks to more advanced training methods. So it's hard to see how helmet manufacturers are supposed to keep up.

29:31And they just kept coming up with more and more and more and more fancy, fancy, and guys are having worse and worse and worse brain injuries. So defensive backs and linebackers coming in, putting guided missiles, your brain is sloshing around. I mean, it's unbelievable the amount of kinetic energy these guys generate on these hits. Back in 2010, George gave an interview where he suggested rule changes that would help reduce brain injuries in football. A lot of his ideas were procedural, like heavier penalties for dirty plays.

30:04But one of his suggestions was about helmets. And it's a perspective I had never heard before. The last suggestion I give, I give them, give the NFL. I said, you want to reduce brain injury in football? I said, but this one will never pass. You want to reduce them? Get rid of frickin' helmets. In a way, his suggestion makes a weird kind of sense. Without helmets, players would be a lot more cautious with their hits. You're not going to lead with your head.

30:35You'll break your nose on the first hit. You'll have stitches in your face. You'll start keeping your head. Think about it. Another grim benefit of George's no-helmet idea, it would allow fans to see injuries play out in real time. One of the under-discussed consequences of football helmets is how they hide players' faces. And they make it possible for fans to disconnect from the consequences of violent hits. Defenders of football will say that today, players know what they're getting into.

31:22They're taking a risk, with eyes open, and they're well-paid for it. But this ignores a fundamental truth about the sport. That over a million children play tackle football in the United States. I'm often finding myself telling people, less than 1% of football players in the United States are NFL players. The overwhelming percentage, more than 95%, in fact, of football players are actually kids. Because most people don't play as adults. Most people don't end up making it into the NFL.

31:53So from my point of view, that's where the big public health issue is, is trying to understand injury and safety, particularly in youth sports. Football helmets are designed to keep players safe. And they also give us a permission structure to keep playing a game that's fundamentally unsafe. They make us care about specific teams with their colorful branding. And yet, they also help us ignore the human beings underneath the helmets. The people who are sometimes bearing terrible consequences for all of our amusement.

32:34More with Chris Berube after this.

Decline in youth participation

32:42So I am back with Chris Berube. Hey, Chris. Hey, Roman. Are you ready to keep talking about some more depressing football stuff? Yeah. So let's do this. Because this story continues to unfold. Okay. So while I was reporting this story, a new study came out about CTE among football players. And we actually mentioned it in the episode. But I want to talk a little bit more about this study. Because it's actually pretty shocking to me when you start to dig into the statistics. So this study came out in the British Medical Journal. It was led by this associate professor at Harvard. But, you know, there were lots of researchers who worked on this together.

33:14And basically, they studied the brains of former NFL players who had died. And the big headline here was a minimum of one in four NFL players have CTE based on the results of this study. But the thing with that number is when you start to look into it, it's likely a pretty serious undercount. Oh, an undercount. Okay. So tell me why you think that. Okay. So here's where this whole thing gets bleak. So for the study, these researchers looked at 235 brains of former NFL players who died between the years 2016 and 2021.

33:48So 235 brains, 215 of them had CTE. That is not 25%. That is not. That is 91%. So why do they say 25%? So the reason they said 25% is because they didn't have access to every brain from every player who died during that period, right? So they only studied a few hundred brains. So of all the players who died from 2016 to 2021, they can confirm 25% of them had CTE. Like we know that part for sure. That's what the study shows.

34:19However, given how common we've discovered CTE is among former football players, it's pretty likely at least some of the players they didn't study also had CTE. Yeah. And that would make the percentage of players much higher than 25%. Oh, my God. Like a lot higher. A lot higher. And also to clarify, that's not to say 91% of NFL players who died during that period had CTE. Right. There's likely some bias, like the families who donated these brains may have had their suspicions that their loved ones had CTE, right?

34:50But even with all these caveats in mind, that number is still really striking. Like 25% is still a really high number, even if that does seem like an undercount. You know, I feel like when I first heard of CTE in football, it seemed like it was potentially this like existential threat to the game. Like, but, you know, what's confusing to me is it just feels like football is more popular than ever. Like, it feels like it was barely a speed bump. Yeah. No, it's true. And I mean, a lot of people in my life watch football, to be honest, and they're aware of CTE. It's not like they don't know.

35:21And last year, we saw pretty much record numbers of people tuning into NFL football. So this is a stat that really boggled my mind. Of the top 100 most watched TV shows last year in the United States, 83 of them were NFL games. So the Oscars, which is like, for me, that's the biggest TV thing every year. The Oscars had 18 million viewers and the Super Bowl had 126 million viewers. Yeah, it's the cornerstone of all television at this point. It's the most probable thing that exists. Yeah. And here's the really interesting thing with all of this.

35:51So despite this popularity, right, more people are watching professional football, participation in high school football is actually down across the United States. So according to the National Federation of High Schools from 2009 to 2023, there was a 9% decrease in high school football participation. Those numbers are interesting because they actually were lower at one point and they came back up recently. But regardless, we are seeing a decline in participation. And there are other statistics that show the decline is a lot bigger in blue states.

36:22Yeah. So the bottom line here is that people are still watching professional football. But when it comes to putting their own kids in danger, like a lot of parents are just not enrolling them in football programs. And what makes all of this uncomfortable for me is the argument is like, you know, I wouldn't enroll my kid, but these professionals, they know what they're getting into. Right. Yeah. That said, this sport is majority black in terms of who plays. Because it has a lot of players coming from poor communities in the American South, which means despite these dangers, you have lots of people who are playing because it's a chance to make a lot of money for their family.

36:58Right. So these incentives are really skewed, especially in these places where you don't have a lot of other big economic opportunities. So on the question of declining participation, like what is the NFL doing to address that? Well, a few things, because you can think about this as like it's not an immediate problem for the NFL. There's still lots of people who want to play football. But down the road, it might become more of an issue as fewer people enroll in football. So, of course, they're investing in safety. We talked about helmet testing is one thing they're putting a lot of money into. They can make the game safer.

37:28Maybe more kids will be comfortable playing. Then the other thing is the NFL is now investing really heavily in flag football. Oh, yeah. I played flag football. It's great. I mean, it's basically that's I mean, well, I mean, I played it casually. Yeah, I played it casually like in junior high, you know, and this is not your sideline. This is not what you're doing. It is not. But essentially, it's all the same sort of things of football, you know, but they're just instead of tackling, you have a little like tassel of fabric on you and, you know, you grab it from somebody. And that means that they're down. That's right. That means the play is stopped dead.

37:59Right. And like nobody wears helmets in flag football. You're not supposed to like bang heads together. Obviously, you're not supposed to tackle people. So it's a much safer way to play a version of football. So the NFL is is really investing heavily in high school flag football. Like they now sell these NFL branded flag football kits that you can order for your high school. I've seen signs outside of a bunch of high schools that say, like, we have a flag football team. And there's like a little NFL logo on the poster. And the other thing is the NFL is now trying to make professional flag football a thing. So their all star game, the Pro Bowl, the last couple of years, they made the Pro Bowl into a flag football game.

38:34Because they realized, like, players did not want to get concussed playing at the all star game. That just seems like a really pointless waste of time, like at an exhibition game. Absolutely. So the last couple of years, it was a flag football game. Ultimately, they just canceled the Pro Bowl altogether. They're like, this is not worth doing anymore. Got it. And then last year, the NFL invested $32 million in developing a professional flag football league. So we're going to see this soon. Like the week of next year's Super Bowl, they're going to have a flag football showcase. They're going to show off some of the athletes in this new league.

39:06And then in 2028 at the Olympics in Los Angeles, they are going to have men's and women's flag football. And they're making a big deal of flag football as a way to get more women playing the sport. So we're seeing flag football on the rise. And you have to imagine, like, that is largely about safety concerns for younger players, right? Like, that's why they are promoting flag football as this alternative to tackle football so heavily. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're one of the biggest sports fans I know of. Do you think flag football really has a future?

The future of flag football

39:36It's a tough one. I don't know if people are going to watch it in comparable numbers to one of the big American sports. I actually talked to Chuck Klosterman about this. So, you know, Chuck Klosterman, he's an author. He wrote a book called Football earlier this year. I love that book. Yeah, it's a great book. I think he's a big football fan, but he also writes about all the safety issues. Like, it's really worth your time if you care about this. And I asked him about flag football, and he was, like, pretty skeptical about the prospect of that becoming a big sport.

40:06I don't think that you can look at something that, you know, is popular in this very specific way and sort of make this decision that we're going to strip away some elements of it and just hope that the other part can absorb everything else. I don't know if that's the case. So Chuck argues that most people do not watch football specifically as a blood sport, but that without the violence, it would be a very different kind of game. I think subconsciously there is an understanding that that risk is part of it, that the reason what we're seeing, the things we say we like, you know, the athleticism, the strategy, the competition, the emotion, all of those things are sort of dependent on the fact that this is a risky, dangerous game.

40:52Football is the thing where there has to be some level of risk for the rest of it to seem meaningful. I do think that is right. There's something about the risk adding to our sense of the athleticism. And if it wasn't there, then maybe the athleticism would be devalued in some way. It is real. It's really a dilemma. Well, that was a really dark episode, Chris.

41:19Yeah, I'm having a great headspace after reporting this one. I guess I'm just going to go back to like jetpacks or pyramids or something again after this. That sounds great. You have that free reign to just go do something fun with yourself after this. Thank you so much. Thanks, Robert. I appreciate it.

41:4199% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. Edited by Delaney Hall. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and APM. Fact-checking by Graham Heysha. Noah Cohan's book about the history of football helmets will be out next year from Oklahoma Press. When it becomes available, you should really check it out. Kathleen Byshynski's book is called No Game for Boys to Play, The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. Chuck Klosterman's book is simply called Football. And finally, George Visker also has a book out.

42:13It's called Facing Giants, My 38-Year Battle. These are totally worth your time, and we will have a link to all of these on our show page at 99pi.org. And special thanks to all the researchers and football players who spoke to Chris for this episode. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars.

42:45The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

43:17Thank you.