Football Brain (from the archives)
Let's revisit my journey through the NCAA's concussion settlement medical questionnaire.
Football’s back in season, but thanks to the rapid warming of the planet, the crisp fall air that signals its return may be gone for good. But who needs weather when we have ambient media and marketing to remind us?
With that, I’m going into the archives to one of my more popular early posts. Although NCAA athletes can get paid for their likenesses now, I thought it worthwhile revisiting firsthand the contempt the NCAA has for its athletes. If you’ve read this one, tune out (but still think about me). Thanks for being here, hope you’re not too hot.
Feeling a mild headache after my first live contact in football practice was a regular occurrence…
..When I first felt them playing in grade school, I said nothing: I wanted to maintain a tough football façade and not lose face with my coaches, local dads with paunches and desk jobs. Once in high school, the headaches became a quotidian part of practice, ingrained into the experience in the same way you knew there’d be water to drink and grass to play on.
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It was only after former NFL players started killing themselves that serious attention was paid to the issue of concussions in football. It turns out that banging your head for years on end can cause symptoms such as depression, anxiety, early-onset Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other brain malfunctions. That attention eventually made its way to the NCAA, the governing body of major college athletics. In resolving the issue, the organization moved with the same urgency most of us devote to scheduling our next dental checkup.
In response, a bunch of former athletes ended up pissed and filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA. On August 13th, 2019, a settlement was reached in the suit between the NCAA and current and former NCAA student-athletes. Claimants stated that the NCAA had:
…been negligent and breached its duty to protect current and former student-athletes by failing to adopt appropriate rules regarding concussions and/or manage the risks from concussions.
As part of the settlement, all qualifying current and former NCAA student-athletes will receive, among other benefits, medical monitoring around concussion symptoms.
Those same headaches accompanied my Slipknot (RIP Joey Jordison) hoodie and Nintendo64 as I made the journey from high school football hobbyist in Colorado to 40 hour-a-week football amateur for the Yale University Bulldogs. This makes me a qualified participant in the settlement outlined above, contingent upon answering 150 or so medically-related questions.
Rather than spout a mundane take on the potpourri of ways the NCAA has botched its handling of concussions in its most profitable sport (several of the largest NCAA football programs generated over $150 million in revenue in 2019), I thought it would be enjoyable to walk you all through the line of questioning that stands between me and receiving the NCAA’s minimum medical treatment.
About 30 or so of the questions were of the true/false variety. Several of them felt slightly strange, but made sense when contextualized by concussion symptoms. For instance:
For every one of the above, another question would present itself to make you wonder if the NCAA wasn’t trying to undermine my sanity itself:
I started to think the NCAA wasn’t evaluating whether I was experiencing concussion symptoms, but rather, trying to limit my access to credit and flammables. Considering thousands of people who’ve never played a day of sports in their lives believe children are being trafficked around the world in office cabinets, the question above seems to have more to do with a lack of critical reasoning than it does with the lingering effects of concussions.
The other portion of the questionnaire was a series of multiple choice questions that asked you to reflect on the last decade of your life in the following manner…
…As in, are things the same, or much worse than they were ten years ago?
You were provided a prompt or a sort of daily activity and had to respond using one of the four selections above. Here’s a sampling:
These were easy, I was cruising to a primo score that proved my brain worked flawlessly. Then out of nowhere appeared a delightfully anachronistic take on how the NCAA imagines daily life:
The NCAA had sown doubt in the verdant pastures of my mind. I couldn’t remember where I’d even left the checkbook, let alone how to balance it. I pondered if I should’ve been balancing it all along and for years I’d been shirking some key part of my adult responsibilities. If I’d been balancing my checkbook over the years, could I be writing this from my Tesla, rather than a Macbook?
Other questions spurred me to think more broadly about the world and my place in it:
Thoughts on salvation oozed into my inner monologue. What if the NCAA is right and fate's determined by phone number? If it’s that simple, can I put my sleepless nights worrying about god’s wrath to bed, knowing it’s completely random? Is AT&T god? Is Verizon god? Is omnipotence in telecom-polytheism correlated to market share?
Other questions were more literary in nature. My reading of the below is that our dancing shadow is our inner child, which sees the sun set and yearns dance without its aid. As we grow older, rules and norms slowly lock our shadow out, restricting our access to the joyousness of youth.
Thank you NCAA for the reminder to let the bliss in.
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Song of the week: A jubilant celebration of our lord, using a mundane adjective. ‘He’s Alright’ by Jasper Street Co:
