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