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The Tampa Bay Buccaneers held high hopes for guard Arron Sears when they drafted him out of Tennessee in the second round of the NFL draft. Instead, he lasted just two years in the league before leaving football due to neurological symptoms. Now, his family claims, the 27-year-old Sears can no longer care for himself…

Professional lunatic Glenn Beck has argued—based on this article in the Wall Street Journal—that football helmets are evil, because they make players reckless and, eventually, crippled. It's pains me to say so....but he has a point.

Every year, there are tens of thousands of concussions on high school football fields and no standardized guidelines for dealing with them. That's the real scandal of the head-injury epidemic, writes Will Carroll, and kids have died for our neglect.

Ira Casson and David Viano, co-chairmen of the NFL's brain-injury committee and spiritual heirs to the quacks who cooked medical studies for Big Tobacco, have resigned. In response, NFL retirees forgot what they were going to say. [NYT]

With the brains of football players now a matter of national concern, writer Michael Oriard, a former Chiefs offensive lineman and a cultural historian, worries about both his own fate and the NFL's.

The NFL would like everyone to just calm down about all the brain-melting that they help create every Sunday, at least until they can finish their own personal scientific study that will be totally fair and not at all biased.

The doctor who sliced open the late Mike Webster's brain and determined that football can cause severe and debilitating brain damage has discovered the same sort of neurodegenerative disease in high school players. Are you ready for some Congressional hearing?

The NFL is slowly coming around to the idea that football can cause significant cognitive damage to its participants. Previously, this view was held by only players, fans, neuroscientists and those members of Western civilization not on the NFL's payroll.

A couple days ago, more definitive evidence that the professional helmet-smashing lifespan of an NFL player has detrimental effects on the human brain. It still probably won't change the way the game is played.