A parent may want to read the fine print — even though it's probably written in invisible ink — before they sign up their kid to play youth tackle football.
The kid is going to take about 300 hits to the head each season. The technical term is "head acceleration hits exceeding 10Gs." That's not good. By comparison, a low-speed rear-end car crash causes an impact between 10G to 30Gs.
You can double the number of hits to 600 in high school. In college, it spikes up to 1,000 head hits a year.
The long-term effects dovetail into a concussion and CTE conversation involving the NFL. The league seems to have a Man Down crisis just about every week. Most recently, former Miami Dolphins star linebacker Nick Buoniconti told his story through his foggy lens of depression and declining health.
He is one of the fortunate sons whose greatest blessing became a curse. For him, the cumulative hits add up to about 50,000, and the likelihood of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) a progressive degenerative disease of the brain.
Researchers have found that 96 percent of deceased NFL players and 79 percent of all football players they studied in autopsies exhibited CTE.
"The more we're learning about CTE, the more clear it is that youth tackle football was never meant to be," said Christopher Nowinski, author of "Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis" and an authoritative source on sports and head trauma.
He's taken a few blows himself, as a former collegiate player and pro wrestler. He once felt the seismic sting of a shot to the chin from the boot of one of the Dudley Boyz, Bubba Ray, in a WWE match in 2003.
He forgot the script, and then started throwing lamps in a hotel room, followed by a puking fit. Concussion, one of at least five he can document.
His job description now is to gather as much evidence as he can, and try to convince people about the horror that awaits if someone plays a lifetime of contact sports.
Not nearly enough parents are listening. Most, in fact, are tuning out.
A recent study revealed that a total of 1.23 million youth ages 6-12 played tackle football in 2015, up from 1.216 million the year before, based on data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.
We'll pause for the obligatory eye roll from some people, who will decry the "wusstification" of football. The same folks who hearken back to the days when the best medicinal approach to a wound was a spit of saliva.
But the reality is that Nowinski and other folks aren't wussies. They played the game. They know better.
"Kids shouldn't play tackle football until junior high for a few reasons," former Dolphins running back Larry Csonka wrote in a recent blog. "In many cases, they are not well coached and, more importantly, not properly equipped. A child running around on a Pop Warner field with a sloppy helmet isn't cute to me ... it's an outrage!"
Csonka was a bad hombre back in the day. He was named the 10th toughest football player of all time in an NFL Films production that aired in 1996.
There's no wimp factor here. Just someone who at 70, has learned the cumulative and brutal impact of the game.
There's a compromise here: Flag football. It's much safer, still exposes kids to the game, and chances are great that they won't walk away from the game in a fuzzy haze. Heck, I still play, even though I am an AARP card-declining, old man holdout.
"Our position is that youth football shouldn't exist, and in high school, families should make the best decisions for themselves," Nowinski said.
The players who stand to reap the greatest benefits from this are the elite ones. About 93 percent of high school players will never play another season in their life. But those who move on to higher levels bear the scars of a game they love.
"Many of us from that era are now paying the price," Csonka writes.
The payouts shouldn't start when you are a kid.
About the Author
