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.

Football has corrupted America's universities

(In which I take on the football-industrial complex again.)

Big-time college football is no longer a sport. It's a very expensive entertainment industry with commercial sponsors, big-money television contracts, and highly paid executives. Its proponents have corrupted the mission of almost every university with a large football program, especially those in the NCAA's top division. It's time to acknowledge that this large, expensive entertainment business should be expelled from campus.

No, I'm not talking about Penn State. (Not this week, that is. I wrote about Penn State's scandal in a New York Times forum last week.) This week we have another scandal, which illustrates all too well how football will crush any forces that might try to rein it in, including university presidents. Here's the scenario:

1. Pay $2 million to buy out the old coach and hire a more exciting one, even though the team is having its best season in years.
2. Hire that new coach for another $2 million, who has now produced a losing season (2 wins, 10 losses), leaving games with even lower attendance than last year.
3. Because football is still losing money, get rid of 8 other varsity sports.

This is a bad joke, right? No! This is exactly what the University of Maryland just did. Last week, U. Maryland (where I was a professor until this past summer) announced it was eliminating 8 varsity sports teams to make up for the fact that football was losing too much money. I kid you not. Here's what they are cutting: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo.

The president of U. Maryland, Wallace Loh, issued a report that he sent to all students and faculty, describing the tortured reasoning that led to this sorry state of affairs. In it, he illustrates how he and his administration have completely lost sight of their real mission. Poor Dr. Loh: he came into the job only a year ago, with good qualifications to run a major educational institution, but no qualifications to run a football program. After all, why should he?

It's not because football is good for the university, despite the claims of some fans. Just to check, I compared the rankings of the top 25 football teams to the academic rankings of their universities. This graph shows the result.

As you can see, there is no correlation at all - the football team's ranking gives you no indication of the overall academic quality of a school.

So why cut eight other teams when football is failing? Dr. Loh explains:

"In a time of constrained resources, we have to choose: should we have fewer programs so that they can be better supported and, hence, more likely to be successful at the highest level? Or, should we keep the large number of programs that are undersupported compared to their conference peers?"

There you have it. We can't keep all these programs around if they're not winning! "Successful at the highest level" - such broken logic, such nonsense from the president of a major university, is almost enough to make me cry. Obviously, Dr. Loh thinks that "successful" means we beat the other schools' teams. But his own report says that a university's core mission is "education, research, and the arts." Did he evaluate these sports teams based on how well the students are educated? No: what matters is whether a team wins.

And of course there's money: if the football team wins, then the university can make money from oh-so-lucrative television contracts! Dr. Loh acknowledges this:

"If we believe—as I do—that intercollegiate athletics is an integral part of the college educational experience and not only commercialized mass entertainment, then we must come together to reform this financial model …. We have to reset the balance between academics and big-time athletics."

I'll say. But despite these nice-sounding phrases, Dr. Loh's "reform" consists of eliminating eight other varsity teams. Nothing about reigning in football's costs, and certainly nothing about making sure the players themselves get a good education and have a future after college. This is the essence of how big-time football has corrupted America's universities. We pay the players nothing, we give them a lousy education (many of them don't even graduate), and then the university spits them out and moves on.

I've heard the cries of protest from football supporters: football makes money! It subsidizes all the other sports! Oddly, even Dr. Loh makes this claim in his report, despite admitting that football at Maryland is losing millions of dollars per year. To this I have two responses:

1. Fine, let's suppose that football makes money. Then it will do just fine as an independent business. Get it out of the universities, and let each team pay fees use of the university's name, the stadium, practice fields, and parking on game days. Then the football club can pay its coaches whatever it wants, and it can pay the athletes, who are disgracefully paid nothing right now. And the university will still have its team, but without the corrupting influence of money.
2. So what if football does make money? Since when did universities run an entertainment business? Should they open casinos next?

So get football off our campuses. If athletes want to train for the NFL, let the NFL pay for a minor league, the way baseball does. Universities can have a team if they must, but make it independent, and let's stop the farce of having university presidents try to manage large, commercial sports programs. Let them get back to focusing on research and education, topics on which they actually have some expertise.

As for the athletes: let them play. They can play football if their studies leave them enough time. If they just want the exercise, they can go out for other sports that provide great physical training and far lower risks of injuries. They can try the track team, or maybe the swim team. Oh, wait….

[Note: for those who will criticize me as a football-hating weenie, I'll have to disappoint you. I grew up watching and loving college ball, before it become so commercialized. My father played varsity football all through college, and he taught me the game in our backyard.]