It is indeed true that more tests need to be conducted in terms of football injuries and the permanent risk to the body but to deny the affects of CTE completely is just irresponsible. Like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay isn’t quite ready to definitively say that playing football can absolutely lead to serious damage.
via ESPN:
“I believe this: that the game has always been a risk, you know, and the way certain people are. Look at it. You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin, it might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body … may reject it, where I would be fine. So there is so much we don’t know,” he told the Journal.
He also said that intimations that the NFL knew of post-career health problems for players in the 1960s or ’70s are “just not true.”
“I was there. I know that’s a lie. You know no one knew anything. The only thing we know and always knew is when you strap on that helmet and go out on the field, boy you know you are taking a risk, but the reward is something. It’s worth it,” he told the Journal.
Irsay said it was “absurd” to try to tie football to “suicides or murders,” and said doing so diminishes other problems, like addiction, that players face.
