Curran: Fears rise over trauma to NFL players’ brains - NFL- nbcsports.msnbc.com

Description

Former Kansas City quarterback Trent Green, shown here during a 2006 game, was one of several NFL players who dealt with serious concussions during their career.

If you think you’ve read it all before when it comes to the aftereffects of concussions on NFL players, think again. It's worse.

Studies have shown that fighter pilots can black out after feeling five Gs of force over 20 seconds. Yet NFL collisions — while they last only milliseconds — can impart close to 100 Gs of force. And linemen, Bailes points out, are “probably getting 20 to 30 g’s to their helmets on every play when they clash.”

That men playing at the highest level in the country’s most popular sport could wind up drooling, addled husks of themselves before they turn 50 all thanks to the hitting we celebrate, well, that’s not something we all want to focus on. So we’d rather not spend a lot of time focusing on the role pro football or repeated blows to the head may have had on Mike Webster living in a box, Terry Long drinking antifreeze, Andre Waters shooting himself in the mouth, Justin Strelczyk driving his car into a tractor-trailer filled with corrosive materials or Chris Benoit murdering his wife and son and then killing himself.

Original URL

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/32986562/ns/sports-nfl/

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/32986562/ns/sports-nfl/