have you personally suffered through any possible cte issues (if you're comfortable sharing that)? have you noticed people you played with killing themselves at a statistically improbable rate?

have you noticed changes in your sons abilities to think clearly in-season?

Most of the work done by our brains happens beneath our surface of consciousness. We process millions of bits of information per day through our five senses, and in doing so we form relations to our thoughts and memories, sifting through the realms of logic and imagination; it is truly amazing that we are not all completely insane and can complete even the simplest of tasks.

Likewise, most of the football-caused damage to the brain is compartmentalized outside of where we experience daily life. That is why Emmitt Smith is able to form sentences (ha ha) on television and seems genuinely happy. There's a chance he'll live into his 80s and beyond, and maybe he will show few external symptoms of CTE. But it is certain that beneath the surface he is eroding every day, and the statistics are not in his favor that eventually the disease will reach his conscious life and destroy him.

The "how do you feel?" question asked to football players is erroneous, and the corruption that allows it to reverberate is woefully sad.

i played from when i was 7 years old until i was 16 in miami florida. in high school i started playing swimming and waterpolo and never looked back. i played in a semi ghetto area, (sunniland its called, sunniland sundevils) we would play people like liberty city, ghoulds, gwen cherry, orange park, which were traditional ghettos with kids who forged birth certificates and stuff to play. then we'd also play the hispanic ghetto teams, hialeah. and the white preppy teams, coral reef. sunniland was seen as sort of the middle of the two, with mostly poor and middle class black and white families in homestead.

the hitting drills i remember as a kid were:
a) meat grinder: two people are laying down facing opposite one another, coach blows the whistle and the two people would get up, turn around to face each other and run full steam into one another from about 10 feet (there was a ball carrier and a tackler but it was more about the hit.)
b) bull ring: form a circle about 30 feet in diameter, one man in the middle. going around the circle, the person on the edge of the circle would run into the man in the middle. you would perform this for every person, for each member of the circle.
c) unknown: you would make two lines, parallel. the head of each line would run straight on opposite flag/slant routes (like a DB covering a WR) the WR would catch the ball and immediately get laid out. this drill absolutely blew. it was basically learning to get hit over the middle in football as a receiver.

there are dozens more, those are just the ones i remember most.

i remember hating hitting drills. and coaches called them exactly that, hitting drills. at least in my leagues they did. they weren't tackling, or technical drills, they were drills designed to numb you to getting hit. during drills that created space between players and made them run into each other i remember hoping that they made the distances shorter so the hits wouldn't be as bad.

by highschool the drills became more technical and less just hitting for the sake of making noise of making a big hit. but they still had stuff like that in highschool.

what's worse is, at least at younger ages. coaches reward things like the sound of the "pop", so the sound the hit makes. as you probably can intuit, that sound comes from the helmet hitting the helmet. which is the opposite of what should be done. that coupled with the "color of your helmet" (what color your helmet was came from the paint on other helmets rubbing off onto yours.)

ultimately the hitting **** sucked. but i loved playing football nonetheless. not as much as waterpolo, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't enjoy laying people out occasionally or laying the occasional blindside block while somebody was running down field unawares (i played tight end.)

i'm not super scared about CTE. i don't ever have headaches or prolonged symptoms. i think part of that is i was sort of smart about hitting drills when i was young (i would edge closer to the person i was about to hit, or i would take an edge when i could and lead with my shoulder because i remember hating the feeling of helmet on helmet.) another part is just swimming/waterpolo afterwards which was basically non contact on the head (waterpolo is actually probably more violent, just not in a ****ed up life altering way.)

As a former noseguard, Lol.

Don't believe the hype. The peaks for suicide rates in the US are men around 20 and men over 60. Those suicides you mention might just be the typical suicides of people of that age. "from CTE" is a big reach. Being from Pennsylvania, more likely they got molested.

http://www.bu.edu/today/2010/cte-fou...otball-player/

http://www.footballdangers.com/youth/eric-pelly/

gfy

Those are the kind of highly technical links that I trust unquestioningly.

That some kid who hung himself had brain disease associated with head injuries does not prove much.

There's very little evidence out there for the claim that high school football leads to brain damage. Almost all the evidence about CTE comes from the heavily biased sample that consists of people who died early and were known to have had multiple head injuries.

Look at>
http://www.bu.edu/cte/files/2009/10/...eview-2014.pdf

Made the cardinal sin of feeding the trolls.

Should have known better.

At any rate, I'm deranged. Whether it's from playing football or just bad genetics or lousy upbringing I'll never know.

i saw a video, didnt watch it, simply saw the headline that said: 98% of former nfl players that died and were tested for brain disease were positive for it.

???that **** cray

Those were players who reported having the symptoms of CTE.

On the subject of CTE, you should check out this documentary heres a link. https://youtu.be/bFHHM39iiTo. Before seeing this I had no idea what CTE was.

Hey Poundingtheunder. I’m
38 and I played football from pop warner at about age 8 until was 21 in college. I dealt with a lot of the same things you did I’m sure with “getting your bell rung”. I was undersized but played safety and was a devastating hitting for my size. I’d Lead with my head constantly. Getting headaches during practice was a common occurrence, I remember countless times having to go home and “sleep off” the headache. I got first concussion year 1 In pop warner. It was obvious and I had a pounding headache all night long, my parents woke me Up every 2 hours. I been knocked out cold Once in HS ontop of countless other less severe concussions. I finally stopped playing at 21 but from 19-30 I trained boxing and MMA and was Kod once doing that and had several nights of ponding headaches and difficultly seeing (blurry, white spots) after taking a hit and sparing and I’d go home and “sleep it off”. This stopped around 30 after that 2nd KO. I knew it wasn’t good and I had to stop. Now I just train BJJ.

Now at 38 I recognize to Myself that I have short term memory issues, I leave the stove on constantly, and I’ll get up to do a minor task and as I start walking to do what I intended on doing I forget what I had gotten up. My temper / impulse is an issue. When I’m at work or out in public I’m very much in control. When I get around loved ones and my guard is down I sadly snap at them and it’s undeserved, and for sometimes just speaking to me. I hate myself for that. But it’s like for no good reason I’ll get Worked up Fast and words are coming out of
My mouth before I can stop them. Normally I’m fine, we’ll liked, a leader at work. But when this happens and it does weekly I feel terrible. Sleeping isn’t a real issue, I stay up late but get my hours sleep. Unnecessary Anxiety is a constant. I’m calm and cool on the surface but inside I’m running w anxiety During the week on and off. You’d never know by looking at me. I don’t get headaches or anything. My biggest issue is getting pissed off too easily. I won’t bring this up to anyone because A. I don’t want the Cop out, there’s nothing anyone can do for me and I have to be more accountable. B. I don’t want to start accepting I have a Problem. I don’t want to give CTE a Foothold or control over my life. But I am concerned. I’ve just taken so much brain trauma in my life. I’m a fighter by nature.

Well that’s a Bit about me. Just came on here to vent basically. Be good.

yea you probably have mild CTE. good thing its not severe and you can still function. mild cte still sounds awful tho.

This isn't necessarily true, there may be lots of things someone can do for you. You should see a doctor and be open and honest about what you're going through. No idea why you searched out a years-old post on a pker forum about CTE, but not a good sign!

You should also stop fighting people, probably.

Here's a good article on CTE that brings a bit of science into the conversation. LINK