Marv Levy Quotes

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.

The NFL should be more worried about pensions than CTE.

While we know, on average, that certain positions experience more repetitive head impacts and are more likely at greater risk for CTE, no position is immune.

As a physician, I'm somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

I think, a lot of guys, when they get, you know, those hits or those concussions, they think, 'OK, well, I'm just going to kind of play through it here for the short term, and it's going to get better.' I would venture to say probably 100 percent of the guys that played my sport in the NFL have been there.

As long as we're having contact and as long as there are collisions, there's going to be head injuries. What the long-term consequences are of that, we're beginning to learn, and that definitely will have an impact on the game as we know it.

I'm concerned about the future of football, because we have paid a lot of attention to concussions. We are more aware of concussions. But it's really the repetitive minor injuries, the ones that are asymptomatic that occur on almost every play of the game, the sub-concussive hits: that's the big problem for football.

They're on the right road, but there's a long way to go on concussions, not only in the NFL, but college football, high school football and all football.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

I'm learning how to prevent my brain from getting worse than it is after suffering a career worth of concussions playing football.

Over the course of my 13-year career, I've had a lot of concussions, and yet, because I'm no longer competing or suffering from concussion symptoms, I felt like I was in the clear. The reality, though, is that I get concussions far more easily, and my symptoms last far longer than ever before.

Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we're also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.

My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?

No, no, I don't watch football. The last time I tried watching was the last Super Bowl. The problem I have is, you know, the graphic nature of my imagination; when I watch and see them meeting head onto head, helmet onto helmet, what flashes through my mind is what's going on in their brains. It's like torture to me.

I would bet you that even though people think I absorbed an inordinate number of head injuries, I'd say relative to the number of guys who have played this game, I would say that my head injuries were relatively small.

Whenever anybody has talked about concussions, they immediately talk about me and Steve Young.

We're hoping that there is large-scale recognition that CTE is a risk when playing football.

The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players.

When I played for the Steelers and I got my bell rung, I'd take smelling salts and go right back out there.

Concussions happen. If not on every play, then they happen like every other, every third play, you know.

I am not stupid. I am a very bright guy. I know that in the fighting game, you get people who get brain damage and do themselves long-term harm.

It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

While the U.S. government is unlikely to ever limit the number of football games, plenty of parents are refusing to let their children play the sport due to the risk of head injuries.