CTE and High School Football Players of the 1950s and 60s

In the Wisconsin study, they looked at high school football players. I’m from Wisconsin by the way. And I grew up in the 50s and 60s. So they looked at high school football players who played in the 50s and 60s. They then looked at them at age 65 to see if they were having any cognitive impairment, compared it to the non-football players in that same era, and they did not see any differences. I think that it’s very clear that the high school football that we played in the 1950s and 60s is not even the high school football we’re playing these days. My brothers played college football in the 60s and I could tell you that they played eight games a season, they had two pre-season games and that was it. Then they went on to other sports. Now football is basically a 365-day-a-year game, and people practice constantly. It’s not restricted to the seasons. And the game has ratcheted up. I think everyone would agree that the game is more violent, it has larger players, they’re going faster, and just that the intensity of the game is far different than Super Bowl I and II if you go back and look at those films. I’m not an expert on it, but it looks like a very different game. All those guys running around, but not the collisions that we see, really every game at this time. So I don’t think it’s fair to say – I think it’s fair to say that if you played high school football in the 1950s and 60s, you may not get CTE. Fair enough. But what we’re concerned is about the current athletes. And we’ve seen a lot of it in the current athletes including someone like Aaron Hernandez, you know, very young when he died. Only a couple years as pro, and very, very severe CTE. This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to generous support from the Infinite Hero Foundation.