How Damaged Are NFL Players' Brains?

Somewhat unrelated but when I was in school and still naive (sophomore year - US equivalent), at the insistance of my house boxing captain (went to a boarding school that had 5 houses/residences), I took up boxing as a sport because it looked fun, and I thought I could win my weight category. Long story short, some senior went on a crazy diet, and entered my weight category, and as luck would have it, I was the one drawn to fight him instead of the other three that I could have drawn against.

On the day of, though we had protective head gear, mouth guards, and other such stuff, this dude banged me up pretty bad for three one minute rounds that was allotted for our bout. At the time I was happy that I wasn't knocked out (we had technical knockouts if one dude was getting banged up pretty badly), but in retrospect that would have been a better outcome.

For the next few days/weeks, though I looked normal, my head felt swollen, and it would pulsate randomly when I put my head down on a pillow or try and take notes (similar the the feeling when trying to find your pulse on your wrist times.10). The school doc gave me some pain killers, but even when not on them, my attention span was gone and I couldn't stay focused at all for the next few days. Foolishly I boxed again next year, but was better at defending my self, so wasn't hit much.

I recently graduated from 4 years of college, and looking back it had a significant affect on my memory/retention my junior and senior years of school, and my focus was never the same and god knows what else was damaged. Perhaps I am attributing my decline in academic performance to that single incident, when there could be a bunch of other reasons (correlation doesn't imply causation), but if I could take those three minutes back at the cost of a year of my life, I probably would.

I recently saw a TED talk[1] by Amy Cuddy, a professor @ HBS, on an unrelated subject, where she talks about suffering head trauma in a car accident, that resulted in her having to take significantly longer to graduate college, because of the accident's affect on her mental cognition.

[1] http://www.ted.com/speakers/amy_cuddy.html

Correlation does not prove causation. It most certainly can imply it. I think it absolutely does imply it here. It is not like head injuries are not known for impacting memory, etc.

There exist team sports that are not contact sports, though.

Absolutely shocking that Malcolm Gladwell's initial declaration that football is unequivocal brutality does not play out as clearly in actual data.

Go with the data, right. The data shows that NFL players have damage, not the average high school player.

That's like saying, "Studies show that the top 0.01% of hackers are suicidal, so don't do computer programming!"

I've played other team contact sports (Basketball & soccer), but really football was the best at making me resilient. There's no comparison. The benefits outweigh the risk for 99.9% of players, & for the elite who go on to the NFL (0.1%), then the risks may outweigh the benefits.