Since watching the 2015 film “Concussion” in my 11th-grade psychology class, I have been fascinated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease common among football players caused by repeated trauma to the head and can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem.
CTE has symptoms comparable to dementia, but with a much earlier onset. A person with CTE is often forgetful, experiences mood changes, poor judgment and increased aggression. People with CTE often experience suicidal thoughts and there have been several cases where men with the disorder have committed suicide or homicide after living with it. For instance, in 2021, former NFL player Phillip Adams shot and killed six people, including two children. He then killed himself after a standoff with the police.
More recently, in July 2025, Shane Tamura, a former high school football player, drove from Las Vegas to New York City’s NFL Headquarters, where he shot and killed four people before shooting himself. Medical examiners found evidence of CTE in an autopsy of Tamura’s brain and in his pocket there was a letter reading, “Study my brain please. I’m sorry.” Although Tamura did not play for the NFL, he targeted the institution because he felt they had been “concealing the dangers to players’ brains to maximize profits.”
CTE is as common as it is tragic. A 2017 study from the Boston University CTE Center diagnosed CTE in 110 of 111 former NFL, 48 of 53 college and three of 14 high school football players’ brains they examined. In 2023, Boston University’s CTE Center reported that they have now diagnosed CTE in 345 of the 376 NFL players studied. Many of the brains studied were donated by families looking for answers, so it is unlikely that the percentage of current football players with CTE is quite as high as in these studies.
However, it is undeniable that football players are at an immense risk for CTE. In a 2024 survey of 1,980 former NFL players, over one-third believed that they had CTE, due to symptoms they experienced consistent with the disease.
The NFL covers up the dangerous reality of the sport since they benefit from keeping beloved players in the game even after multiple head injuries. The organization knows that benching a starting quarterback or retiring a star player would decrease viewership, which would go against its goal of maximizing profits. Though the NFL pretends to put its players before financial gain, its actions prove otherwise. Ninety-two percent of players who sustain a concussion return to practice within a week and 69 percent of those who experience a loss of consciousness return in less than seven days.
However, CTE is not an issue isolated to the professional level. For instance, parents are often unaware of the risks they are taking by enrolling their elementary-age child in tackle football. It should not be acceptable for young, developing children to have their brains banging around in their skulls and laws need to be put in place to ban contact football teams until players are old enough to understand the impact of head trauma.
While parents have the responsibility to protect their children, the NFL is also at fault for advertising to kids. Marketing to children is often done through TV commercials, social media and video games like Madden. Perhaps the biggest source of advertising is through the NFL’s partnerships with Nickelodeon. Since September 2021, the children’s channel has run a weekly show each football season called NFL Slimetime, which features game highlights, player interviews and game predictions, appealing to children with cartoon mascots and other bright, enticing symbols. Occasionally, NFL games are broadcast on Nickelodeon, such as the 2024 Super Bowl.
All of this promotion doesn’t just make children football fans — it makes them want to play the sport.
While totally banning football for minors would be abrupt and unrealistic, it would make a difference to enforce flag football over tackle football until age 14 or older. Research shows that, on average, tackle football players aged six to 14 experience a median of 378 head impacts per season, while flag football players experience a median of only eight.
Many major mental and physical developments occur during preteen and early teenage years, making head impacts especially disruptive and dangerous to development. Fourteen-year-olds have a head-to-body ratio similar to that of adults, which makes impacts less damaging than they are to kids. Fourteen is also the age at which most children enter high school, where they gain experience under more credible coaches, play one game per week during the season and have enforced standards for safe helmets and contact limits. It makes sense to introduce tackle football at this point.
These same standards do not apply to children’s leagues. They are typically coached by a parent, have multiple games a week and there are no contact limits or standards for youth helmets, leading to more dangerous impacts on already fragile brains. While some worry that a later start will make for less skilled football players, flag football in youth builds many of the skills necessary for tackle football. If it became the standard to not play tackle football before high school, all players would be starting on a level playing field in high school.
Tom Brady, widely considered the best football player of all time, didn’t play tackle football until high school. This has potentially saved his brain, as a Boston University study found “the risk of CTE increases by 30% each year” and that a “player who starts tackle football at age five may have 10 times the odds of developing CTE than if he had started at 14.”
While adults are entitled to play professional football if they decide to, it’s morally hard to support the sport with the knowledge that people, especially children, are playing football unaware of the risk they are putting themselves in, when a symptom of CTE is becoming dangerous and violent.
The NFL has made changes over the years, but not enough is being done. CTE is acknowledged but severely downplayed by the NFL, and players’ brains need to be closely watched, not only after injury. More needs to be done to protect players — by informing them of the real, high risks they are taking, regulating youth football and shifting the uninformed culture around football.
Riley Lavrovsky is a junior majoring in psychology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.