I’m not shocked anymore, and that’s the part that scares me: a new study published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal, conducted by researchers at Mass General Brigham and Boston University, found confirmed CTE in a quarter of NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. The actual scandal isn’t the number. It’s that nobody had to look very hard to avoid a bigger one.
Researchers examined 878 former players who died in that six-year window. Only 235 families agreed to donate brain tissue for study. Of those 235, 215 came back positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a rate of 91.4 percent among the players anyone actually checked. Run that against the full population and the CTE study found a confirmed rate in a quarter of dead players: 24.5 percent. That’s the floor. The researchers said so themselves, estimating the true rate could run as high as the high-90s once you account for who gets tested in the first place, and why.
The part worth sitting with is the one every headline is going to skip for something cleaner: 643 players never had their brains examined. Not tested and cleared, just never tested. The NFL controls who gets tested the same way it controls everything else that might embarrass it, by declining to build the machinery that would find out, then treating the absence of proof like proof of absence. A quarter-confirmed rate on a self-selected sample of already-worried families isn’t a conviction. It’s a preview.
That selection bias runs one direction, and it isn’t the direction that helps the league. Families donate brains because they watched somebody change: mood, memory, the ability to recognize their own kids, and went looking for an explanation afterward. The players whose families never noticed anything, or never had access to a brain bank, or didn’t want to know, are sitting inside that gap of 643. Nobody’s claiming all of them are clean. The BMJ study, led by Dr. Daniel Daneshvar with Boston University’s Dr. Jesse Mez as co-author, says plainly that 24.5 percent is a floor, not a ceiling.
Roger Goodell’s decade, condensed, sounds like this: the game has never been safer. Repeat it on enough NFL Network broadcasts and it stops functioning as a claim and starts functioning as weather. It survived every hit, every retirement at 32, every settlement, because it was never a factual assertion in the first place. It was bullshit wearing a headset. The league’s actual position, in writing this week, is that it “continuously strives to make the game of football safer” and is “committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust — and expanding — set of resources.” Read it twice. It doesn’t deny anything, because there’s nothing in it to disprove.
The NFLPA, to its limited credit, skipped the euphemism, calling the findings “a sobering reminder that football carries real risks” while reaffirming its own commitment to player safety. Sobering is a hell of a word for a quarter of a workforce turning up dead with a disease nobody can diagnose until the autopsy. I’d have reached for disqualifying.
Adam Schefter had the study making the rounds Tuesday, which is about as close as this gets to a national conversation before the next roster cut buries it:
https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/2092240156401054190
It’ll get a news cycle, maybe two, and then do what every one of these studies does: nothing, because the people positioned to build a mandatory, independent brain-donation registry are the same people whose annual revenue depends on nobody building one. It’s the same institutional reflex you saw when the league sat on the commissioner’s exempt list that never got used, content to let the appearance of a process stand in for an actual one.
I keep waiting for the number that finally moves somebody, and I’ve stopped expecting to find it. Not because the players don’t matter, they’re the only part of this that does, but because the league has spent two decades proving it can absorb any statistic as long as it’s the one collecting it. It still can’t tell you how many men who played it walked away with their brains quietly failing, because it never checked on 643 of them. That’s not an oversight. That’s the business model. Until somebody outside the league office decides who gets tested, “the game has never been safer” keeps being true in the only sense the NFL has ever needed: nobody with the authority to check has been allowed to prove otherwise. Maybe that’s fitting for a league that also wants you paying for ten subscriptions and a grand a season just to watch the games, pay up, shut up, and trust the guys counting the brains.
