College football continues to corrupt our universities. At least we could pay the players

More than ten years ago, I wrote that it was time to get football out of our universities because the sport was corrupting the universities’ mission. Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback about that, but I’ve continued to make this point, both here at Forbes and in The New York Times.

This weekend, I watched a college football game for the first time in years. I was struck by how much worse things are–and by worse, I mean driven by money.

Don’t get me wrong. Football is entertaining for its millions of fans, and college football is extremely popular, especially for those who live in cities without a professional team. I’m not so naive as to think people will give this up.

The problem is that major college football is a professional sport where everyone makes money except the main participants: the players. Worse, the players are being told by their coaches, assistant coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents that they’re getting a great deal. We give you free education! And you get to play football for our great team, and everyone will cheer for you!

If this is really so great, then why don’t the coaches work for free? College football coaches are paid multimillion-dollar salaries, usually far higher than anyone else at the same university, even the university president. The average salary of NCAA Division I coaches this year is $1.75 million, and some coaches make over $10 million. In most states, a football coach at a public university is the highest-paid state employee.

But the players get zero. This situation, to put it bluntly, is unethical. Universities with large football programs are profiting handsomely off the unpaid labor of their own students.

Universities have been told this before. In 2011, civil rights historian Taylor Branch wrote a ground-breaking cover story in The Atlantic titled “The Shame of College Sports,” As Branch wrote then:

“Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.”

That was 11 years ago. The situation has only gotten worse.

What’s striking about watching a college football game on television, as I did this past weekend, is the degree of commercialization of the sport. The game is interrupted constantly with advertisements from sponsors, and the stadiums are decorated with ads as well. ESPN has a large, professional team of announcers covering every aspect of the game. The television work is highly coordinated and professional, with many cameras covering every angle of every play.

There is a LOT of money in college football.

I listened to interviews with some of the (winning) players after the game. They were excited, and they praised their coaches and fellow teammates as they were supposed to. They seemed to believe that the game they’d just won was supremely important, and that their performance (an upset victory) was meaningful and even “historic” (as one player said).

But it wasn’t. Football is just entertainment.

What’s especially sad, to me, is that nearly all of these players are getting short-changed on their education. They spend most of their time on football for a good portion of their year, despite the laughable pretense by the NCAA that these are “student athletes.” They’re athletes, certainly, but they don’t have time to be students, not during football season. The universities (and especially the football coaches) just don’t seem to care, despite their continual protestations to the contrary.

Only 1.6% of college football players make it into the NFL. Or to put it another way: at the end of their college years, 98.4% of college football players will be spit out into the real world, with poor job prospects because they didn’t focus on their education.

And it’s actually even worse than this. We’ve learned in recent years that football carries serious risk of permanent neurological damage, due to repeated blows to the head that happen to many players. It’s a violent contact sport, and the ever-greater size of today’s players has made it much more dangerous than in its early years in the mid-20th century. (I wrote about this too, back in 2019.)

Universities could start to fix this unethical situation by paying the players what they’re worth. Here’s one idea: if universities are seriously concerned about the education of these young men, they should separate their football programs from their education programs. Teams could pay to license the university’s name, hire and pay players, and pay fees to use the football stadiums. (Football fans claim that the sport makes a profit, and if this is true, the teams should do just fine in this scenario.) The athletes could be offered full 4-year scholarships that they could use after their playing years were over, or perhaps in the off seasons, so that they would be able to truly focus on their education.

But meanwhile, as The Atlantic‘s editors put it over 10 years ago,

“the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves.”

Pay the players. That’s the only way to fix this.

College football season is starting up. Why do universities support a sport that harms their student athletes?

For those of us in academia, September means a new school year, and all of the excitement and energy that students bring as they return to campus. Strolling around, you can feel the energy in the air.

September is also the beginning of the college football season (in the U.S.). For many students, alumni, and other fans, watching the game each week is one more fall activity they look forward to.

But now, thanks to a rapidly growing body of new research, we know that football can severely harm and even kill its players. Not right away, but years later, through a brain disease called CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This is a frightening disorder that gradually destroys brain cells, causing memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, and progressive dementia. Many former players die very young, in their 40s or 50s, after first suffering for years.

CTE is caused by repeated blows to the head, events that are common to football. It has grown worse in recent decades as the players have gotten bigger and stronger. Improvements in helmet technology haven't helped, and they might even have made CTE even worse, because the helmets allowed players (by their own admission) to use their heads as battering rams.

Two years ago now, a large medical study of football players' brains showed that an appallingly high percentage of those players had CTE. In that study, Boston University scientists led by Jesse Mez and Ann McKee found CTE in the brains of 110 out of 111 former NFL players (99%), and 48 out of 53 college players (91%).

As the BU scientists themselves pointed out, the former players and their families may have suspected something was wrong, and that may have motivated them to participate in the study. Thus the extremely high proportion of deceased players showing CTE in this study is certainly an overestimate. But as I wrote at the time:

"is it okay to ask young men to play football if the risk of permanent brain damage is only 50%? What if it's just 10 or 20%? Is that okay? Is football that important?"

Clearly, the answer should be no. University presidents are constantly, even obsessively, worrying about the safety of their students. Campuses have many programs in place to protect students from crime, from sexual harrassment, from emotional distress, and more. And yet every fall, they willingly–no, enthusiastically–subject the 100 or so students on their football teams to a serious risk of lifelong, life-threatening brain damage. This simply should end.

For an especially poignant story, watch this short video about Greg Ploetz, who played on the 1969 national championship football team at the University of Texas, and who died in 2015 after years of worsening dementia:

As his daughter says in the video,

"If [today's football players] knew what he went through, and what we went through as a family, there's no way that people would decide to keep playing." 

Perhaps universities could take a cue from former Baltimore Ravens player John Urschel, widely considered the smartest player in the NFL, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT while simultaneously playing pro football. Two years ago, Urschel quit, because he was worried that brain damage would destroy his ability to think clearly. And just one week ago, Indianapolis Colts' star quarterback Andrew Luck retired early because football had "wrecked his body and stolen his joy."

Brain damage may be happening to much younger players too. A study from the University of Washington last year found that 5% of youth football players aged 5-14 had experienced concussions each season. Three years ago, a mother sued the Pop Warner youth football organization after her son committed suicide at age 25. An autopsy showed that he had CTE, and the mother argued that his brain damaged was caused by his years playing youth football. The Pop Warner organization settled the suit for close to $2 million, but other lawsuits have been filed since.

As I and others have written, football and its promise of big-money television contracts has corrupted our universities. While universities build ever-bigger football stadiums and pay coaches exhorbitant salaries, they force the players to play for free. Now we know that players face a much more direct threat: long-term brain damage.

Let me ask university presidents this question as bluntly as I can: how much brain damage is acceptable for your football players? If your answer is "none," then it's time to get football out of our universities.

How much brain damage is too much? NFL players head for the exits.

The smartest player in the NFL just quit.

Not because he was unable to play, and certainly not because of his age–he's only 26. No, Baltimore Ravens' player John Urschel decided to quit because the risk of permanent, irreversible brain damage is just not worth it.

Urschel is a very smart guy. He's currently pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT, one of the best and most demanding science universities in the world. Until this summer, he was (impressively) balancing his studies with being a full-time NFL player.

But when Dr. Ann McKee and colleagues published a new study showing that 110 out of 111 former NFL players had suffered serious brain damage, Urschel could no longer pretend he wasn't putting his future at grave risk. McKee's study, the largest study yet of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), showed alarmingly high rates of CTE in college and high school players as well (91% of former college players).

Let's get one point out of the way: everyone involved with the study, including Dr. McKee, knows that it was biased. The scientists examined brains of deceased players that had been donated to the study because family members–or the players themselves, before they died–suspected something was wrong. So perhaps the true risk of brain damage is lower than 99%. Maybe it's only 50%, or 20%. Do young men playing football want to take that risk?

John Urschel isn't the first player to quit because of the growing realization that football may cause irreversible brain damage. In 2015, San Francisco 49ers player Chris Borland retired at the age of 24, and in 2016 Kansas City Chiefs player Hussain Abdullah retired at 30, both over concerns about concussions and brain damage.

The NFL has been denying or downplaying the risk for years. A few years ago, after the suicide of former player Junior Seau, they announced a $30 million partnership with the NIH to study the risks of football on the brain. As results started coming in, showing that the risk was far more serious than most people knew, the NFL backed out of the deal with $16 million still unspent.

Meanwhile, the chorus of warnings has been growing steadily louder from the medical community. Last year, a former team doctor and a former football player and coach wrote in JAMA that

"unless there is a way to reduce the number of TBIs [traumatic brain injuries] caused by the sport, football will remain a threat to the brains and health futures of the players, including impaired cognitive function and reasoning, memory loss, emotional depression, and other sequelae that profoundly erode quality of life."

Earlier this year, a study out of the CDC reported that "3 high school or college football players die each year from traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries that occur on the field," most them as a result of being tackled during games.

Over the years, football players have grown ever larger (the average NFL lineman today weighs over 300 pounds) and the intensity of the violence on the field has grown with them. It's not just in the NFL, either: last year, three high school teams in the state of Washington forfeited their games against a local team out of a legitimate fear that players would be badly injured by the opposing team's 300-plus pound linemen. Their fears were justified: the human head simply wasn't built to withstand the repeated blows that players endure.

All players might do themselves a favor by listening to John Urschel. He explained his decision–and his abiding love for the game of football–in a lengthy interview on the Freakonomics podcast a couple of weeks ago. That interview should be required listening for young players, and even more so for parents who might be dreaming that their sons have a future career in football.

Will this be the end of college football? The risk of brain damage is startlingly high.

Parents send their kids off to college with high hopes and great expectations. Universities, in turn, have a responsibility to provide an education in an environment that supports and also challenges the students.

Universities are not supposed to encourage activities that may result in permanent brain damage.

And yet, they do. As revealed in a new report by Jesse Mez and colleagues from Boston University, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a shockingly high number of former football players, from both college and professional teams, suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) later in life, likely as a result of their years playing football.

The study authors looked at 202 deceased former football players whose brains had been donated for research, and found that 87% of them had some degree of CTE. The highest rates of CTE were among former NFL players, which affected 110 out of 111 players. CTE was nearly as bad in college football players, though, with 91% of them (48 out of 53) suffering from CTE.

Over half of the high school players (27) had "severe pathology." The authors noted that in deceased players with severe CTE, the most common cause of death was neurodegenerative disease. As they also explain:

"There is substantial evidence that CTE is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease."

In other words, CTE is a death sentence.

The authors of the study stated their conclusions carefully, noting that the study was not randomized, and that players and their families may have been motivated to participate because they were concerned about a possible link between football and CTE. Nonetheless, even if the risk of CTE is much lower than found in this study, universities should be taking a very hard look at the risks that they are exposing their students to.

Or to put it another way, is it okay to ask young men to play football if the risk of permanent brain damage is only 50%? What if it's just 10 or 20%? Is that okay? Is football that important?

Readers of this column know my answer: no. College is not about football, and if it disappears completely, universities will be just fine. The University of Chicago eliminated its football program in 1939, and brought it back in decades later as much-reduced program, now in NCAA Division III. The university itself has remained a powerhouse, routinely ranked in the top universities in the country academically.

As I've written before, football is corrupting our universities, blinding them to their true mission (education and research) in the pursuit of a profitable entertainment business. University presidents seem helpless to stop or even slow down the enormous machine that is big-time college football. For example, in 2015 the University of Maryland (where I used to be a professor) paid millions of dollars to buy out the football coach, so that he could quit a year early and the university could pay millions more to a new coach. Ironically, Maryland had done exactly the same thing in 2011 to buy out the previous coach, at a time when the entire state had hiring and salary freezes in place. None of these actions benefitted the university or its students.

All the while, universities pretend that they are educating the players. Here's a quote from Bleacher Report's interview with star UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen:

"Look, football and school don't go together. They just don't.... No one in their right mind should have a football player's schedule, and go to school."

This from one of the top college football players in the country. (On this topic, Taylor Branch's 2011 exposé in The Atlantic is particularly worth reading. Or this article by a disillusioned former Michigan fan.)

Universities now face an ethical dilemma far more serious than merely taking advantage of athletes' skills to entertain football fans and pay inflated salaries to coaches. The JAMA study reveals that by running a football program, universities are not just robbing young men of four years that might be better spent getting an education and preparing for life: they might be robbing their students of life itself.