Opinion: Am I a hypocrite for loving football despite CTE?

The author is a New York Giants fan who looks forward to the new season and to seeing young quarterback Jaxson Dart and wide receiver Malik Nabers perform in 2026. He does not expect them to match Montana and Rice, but after three pitiful Giants seasons, he sees reason for hope in the Big Apple. At the same time, he is disturbed by the eventual cost to many players he roots for and against: some will suffer dementia, and some will die by suicide. He wonders whether he is a hypocrite for still loving the sport.

The most recent evidence he cites is a British Medical Journal study finding that close to 25% of the nearly 900 former players who died between 2016 and 2021 had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that often leads to dementia and suicide. The actual figure may be much higher because the study relies on brains donated by athletes or their families. The author says he was not shocked; he has known about CTE for close to two decades and even co-wrote a book with sports agent Leigh Steinberg, who called the concussion issue a "ticking time bomb." That knowledge did not stop him from cheering when a Giants player crushed an opponent carrying the ball. What feels different now may be his age—he is inching, sometimes speeding, toward 70—and a recognition of the cost to everything in sports and life.

Certain he needed to talk to people who have spent their lives around the game, he first reached out to Bill Courtney, a high school football coach in Memphis and a good friend. Courtney was the subject of "Undefeated," which won the 2012 Academy Award for best documentary, and the author worked on a book with him. Courtney, 58, says he now knows what he did not know as a young man and young coach: the game as it is played today can kill people. Even so, Courtney believes he would not be as successful now—running a lumber company in addition to coaching—without the lessons he learned as a high school player. He also sees ways to make football safer, including not allowing kids to wear helmets and shoulder pads until sixth grade, changing tackling techniques starting in junior high, and training and certifying coaches to teach those techniques. He proposes that any headfirst tackle be a 15-yard penalty, with a second offense meaning the player cannot play anymore.

Courtney makes sense to the author, except that even if those tackling changes were implemented—requiring enormous will and cooperation from coaches around the country—any effects would not be noticeable at the professional level for many years. The author then spoke to Everson Walls, 66, a former defensive back for the Giants, though the excerpt ends at that point.