Football in Trouble?

[Tonus]

I can't remember the podcast it was on - perhaps "Straight Dope" - but part of the discussion was that football got more dangerous as protection got better due to some sort of risk threshold.

Yep. The better the equipment becomes at protecting the players from obvious injuries, the less vulnerable they feel, and the more willing they are to hit each other even harder. When players wore leather helmets and only a few pads, leading with your head was likely to result in a severe concussion if not a cracked skull or broken neck. But the equipment they use today is designed to absorb impact and cushion the neck, and players have no compunction about ramming each other with their helmets.

The problem, as Min mentioned, is CTE. Even if the helmet protects your skull and the padding protects your neck, the momentum from a violent collision will cause the brain to slam into the skull. Even on seemingly harmless hits, that causes damage to the brain which accumulates with each successive hit.

It's the reason why the highest incidence of CTE appears to be in defensive and offensive linemen, who are rarely involved in the high-speed ultra-violent collisions that lead to the most obvious injuries. But on each play, these 265-325 pound guys lunge at each other from about a foot away, slamming their helmets into one another as they jockey for position or seek to shed a blocker. They almost never come out of a game due to a concussion, but they're taking the worst beating on the field.