I’m not sure why a few NFL owners have suddenly felt the urge to speak publicly about football’s relationship to CTE, but somebody in the league office should probably tell them to stop.
First we had Cowboys owner Jerry Jones telling reporters that it’s “absurd” to think that there is a link between playing football and CTE, and now we have Colts owner Jim Irsay saying some very weird shit to the Sports Business Journal. Here’s the weirdest of it:
I believe this: that the game has always been a risk, you know, and the way certain people are. Look at it. You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin, it might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body … may reject it, where I would be fine. So there is so much we don’t know.
This is an interesting analogy, if just because we here see an owner portraying football as he’d like it to be seen: as something beneficial which may, in certain rare cases, cause harm. One could pick a different, more accurate analogy, of course—“Look at it. You bash your head into a wall as hard as you can every day, I bash my head into a wall every day ...”—but go too far that way and you might have difficulty convincing anyone that football is, as is, pretty much just fine.
[SBJ]