Is football the moral equivalent of dogfighting?

Source: Collegiate Sports Medicine

Malcom Gladwell (of Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point fame) has an article in the New Yorker called “Offensive Play.” The subtitle is “How different are dogfighting and football?”
In dogfighting, the dogs are injured and suffer permanent damage. It’s becoming clear that the same is true for professional football players.
The damage Gladwell talks about is not the typical and obvious athletic injuries — sprains, dislocations, broken bones, and an arthritic old age. He’s talking about what happens when the brain is subjected to repeated traumas – high speed collisions with massive bodies. Gladwell estimates that linemen are hit in the head 1000 times in a single season. Over the course of a career, that could add up to 8000 blows.

Repeated blows to the head – not one or two incidents of concussion, but multiple blows, one on top of the other – produce a type of brain injury that leads to dementia. This is not the dementia caused by a disease such as Alzheimer’s. This type of dementia is a recent scientific discovery based on autopsies of the brains of athletes. There’s no longer any doubt that repeated head traumas produce permanent damage.

Gladiators, dogfighting, and the future of football

Now that we know the consequences, this raises a number of questions. Should we allow children to play contact sports in which they’re subject to repeated head injuries? Should these findings influence the future of football?
Gladwell, who is himself a football fan, wonders if the game can be modified to reduce the risk of permanent injury. But that leads to the question: If football became less violent, would the fans still be interested and would the profits and salaries be as large?
This is where the comparison to dogfighting comes in. Is our enthusiasm for football comparable to the entertainment provided by Roman gladiators? In light of this new evidence of injury, is football as morally reprehensible a practice as dogfighting?

Is it ethical to watch these injuries being inflicted?

The New Yorker provided an “Ask the author” web chat where Gladwell elaborated on these questions. Here are some excerpts:

QUESTION FROM QUAN: Malcolm, how much blame can we give to the team doctors that clear a player to play (especially so soon) after suffering a concussion? No doctor in his or her right mind would allow Tim Tebow to play two weeks after the concussion.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Here’s what I don’t understand. Why is the doctor working for the team? Can there be a more obvious conflict of interest? Wayne Crebet was sent back into a game after suffering a concussion–the latest in a long line–and he retired at the end of that season. And who sent him back in? The Jets team doctor. Oy.
QUESTION FROM RICK: Hi Malcolm. Do you think there is any correlation between the off-field problems that some active players face today (violence, weapons charges etc) with the mild onset of dementia or other effects of trauma from playing contact sports?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Great question. Dr. Cantu, who is one of the world’s leading concussion experts, told me he thought that there was an “undiagnosed epidemic” of brain injury-related pathology in ex-athletes. In other words, that a good deal of what we see and ascribe to a deficit in character or intelligence–criminal behavior, family breakdown, occupational failure–may be just be the residual effects of on-field impacts.
QUESTION FROM JAMES: There are a number of jobs out there that are going to cause a lot of health problems after years of doing them, bad backs, bad lungs, bad knees, etc. Professional football players at least make great money. And now they know they’re at a higher risk of dementia in later life–can’t we just say: play at your own risk?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Sure. But that’s why I came back–at the end of the article–to the idea that the moral responsibility here lies on the shoulders of the fans. Maybe–but only maybe–it’s ethical to pay someone a lot of money to do a job that carries a known and statistically significant risk of dementia. But is it ethical to watch those injuries being inflicted–for pure enjoyment’s sake? That’s where I get stuck…
QUESTION FROM DAVID: To address the comments related to violence in sports, what does the increased popularity of extreme fighting say about our society today and where do we set the level of a spectator sport being too violent?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Football is like dogfighting. Extreme fighting is dogfighting.
QUESTION FROM MIKE MURPHY: Your article raised a lot of questions about the impact of football on players. Do you think the exorbitant salaries and the money to be made by ownership, agents, etc, will preclude any meaningful reform in the way the game is played?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Not if the reform impulse comes from the fans and the players. I really think it’s up to the people in the stands to make plain their concern over this issue–and be willing to admit that watching a violent sport is not a morally neutral act.
QUESTION FROM PAUL MILO: I know people who won’t let their kids play football. While it’s obviously still very popular, do you think the sport may wither away somewhat for lack of players?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Absolutely. Listen. Everything we know about brain trauma says that the brains of young people–teenagers and below–are FAR more sensitive to injury than the brains of adults. We even know that there are a substantial number of concussions in Pop Warner football. What self-respecting parent would put their child in that kind of situation, once the dangers become well established?
QUESTION FROM JONATHON: I am a high school football coach. What do you feel is our responsibility as coaches on the younger levels? More education as to the nature of brain injuries? Better technique?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: That is the hardest question of all. I honestly don’t know. Both you as a coach–and, as importantly, people like me, who are die-hard football fans–need to consider the possibility that the game is irretrievably harmful. It’s way too early to decide that yet. But I think we have to commit to following what the science tell us–even if it means walking away from a game we love.

The New Yorker also provided a slide show with an audio voiceover by Gladwell.

Update 10/21/10:
NFL vows to crack down on dangerous, illegal hits after series of head injuries (The Washington Post)

The day after a Rutgers Universtiy student was paralyzed from the neck down while making a tackle on a kickoff return, a series of head injuries occurred in the NFL, affecting the Washington Redskins, Philadelphia Eagles, Cleveland Browns, and Detroit Lions.

A day after an unusual series of player head injuries shocked football fans and alarmed the sport’s officials, the National Football League vowed Monday to crack down on dangerous, illegal hits with more severe disciplinary measures. …

Sunday appeared to be one of the worst days in recent memory for player head injuries, though recent league-wide efforts to protect athletes may mean there is now closer scrutiny and more careful accounting of the blows. …

“It seemed like every time you turned around, there was another player on the ground for an extended period,” Anderson said. “We feel compelled to be aggressive and proactive. We don’t want another Darryl Stingley on one of our fields.”

Stingley, a wide receiver with the New England Patriots, suffered a broken neck in an on-field collision with Oakland Raiders safety Jack Tatum during an exhibition game in August 1978 and was left a quadriplegic. He spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair and died in 2007 at age 55. Tatum’s hit was legal under the sport’s rules at the time.

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