Getting your bell rung.

Living in la-la land

Shaking off the cobwebs.

Seeing stars.

If you’ve followed football for any length of time, you know all of the euphemisms for concussions. As a sports writer, I’ve been guilty of using these not so clever terms, at least when relating a crunching hit I’ve seen. I’d like to think I haven’t done it in print. If I have, it won’t happen again.

I’m still going to have to catch myself, though. Not from typing those words. I can probably handle that with the backspace key. But I can’t swear that I won’t get a rush the next time I see a jarring hit on a quarterback or a receiver treading dangerous ground over the middle. I can’t guarantee I won’t join my buddies in shouting “OOOOOOOOHHHH!!!!” and high-fiving them the next time Brandon Meriweather crushes Terrell Owens. 

Testosterone doesn’t have a backspace key.

Hard hits are so integral to the manly culture of football that it gets dicey for fans when we start considering the consequences. And we are learning now that there are more severe consequences than we ever thought we knew.

Concussions have been in the headlines in the last week when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on football brain injuries. Prominent in the discussion was a study the National Football League is currently conducting on the subject. A New York Times story published Monday poked numerous holes in the study for “statistical, systemic and conflict-of-interest problems.” In other words, the NFL, an organization which treats its retired players shoddily and has lots to lose in finding a link between concussions and mental health issues such as depression and dementia, has about as much credibility in putting together a report on brain injuries as Anheuser-Busch has in commissioning a study on liver disease.

This should be a bigger story than it is, but then, every major television network, plus ESPN, has billions of dollars invested in the NFL through broadcast rights and countless other money making mechanisms. Meanwhile, the NFL continually dismisses (again quoting the New York times) “independent studies showing unusual cognitive decline in former players.”

Unfortunately, long-term studies on the damage done by football-related brain injuries don’t exist yet. A dozen athletes recently announced they will donate their brains to an ongoing Boston University study on the long-term effects of concussions. Among them is Sean Morey, whose brain will no doubt have the image of Moose Curtis burned into it from the year he spent playing football at Hebron. Former Patriot linebacker Ted Johnson, another donor, has memory and depression problems he links to multiple concussions he suffered from 2002 to 2005.

Hopefully, researchers won’t get to them too soon, like they did with former Pittsburgh Steeler linemen Mike Webster and Justin Strzelczyk, a University of Maine alum. They are among the most oft-used examples of players whose deteriorating mental health led to untimely deaths. Post-mortem examinations of both of their brains showed a condition similar to that found only in boxers with dementia or people in their 80s. Strzelczyk died at age 36 in an automobile crash while driving 90 miles per hour and going the wrong way on a New York freeway. Webster suffered from amnesia, depression and dementia and died of a heart attack at 50.

If stories like those give football fans pause, then consider how the parents of young football players must feel. Concussions are just as prevalent in youth and high school football, but they are talked about even less even though there is no NFL-like machine trying to suppress the evidence.

High schools have come a long way in recent years in dealing with concussions. Whereas an old high school coach would tell a player to shake off the cobwebs, most coaches today are more educated and more cautious about sending a child back into a game or practice when he’s taken a blow to the head. Teams now have trainers with them on the sidelines to evaluate players, and while players still feel pressure to get back on the field, most trainers have the backing of school administrators to overrule the few Neanderthals still wearing headsets who insist the player tough it out.

The management of concussions has come far, too. Most high schools now use concussion baseline tests such as ImPACT for athletes in all sports. The tests help physicians and trainers identify whether a player has suffered a concussion and check a player’s recovery from the injury based on pre-concussion evaluations. Twenty years ago, the coach would have the player follow his finger and ask him if he felt all right. Other advances have been made in preventing concussions with new technology in helmets and mouthguards.

Developing better equipment is great, although one has to wonder if we’d be better off going back to leather helmets from the days of Sammy Baugh, Bronko Nagurski and Chet Bulger. Part of the problem may be that players are too secure with their headgear and padding these days and are willing to take greater risks on the field. 

Hopefully, there are better solutions out there. The NFL and anyone else who cares about football would be wise to search for them, otherwise, in our rapidly evolving nanny-state of a nation, the Feds might not want to stop at just holding hearings on the subject.