Children should not be recruited into tackle football by the NFL due to concerns around CTE, a new survey in the United States has revealed.
The NFL has spent more than $100 million to recruit children to youth tackle football since 2000, and the Super Bowl often features advertisements focused on recruiting children and their parents through brands like NFL Play Football.
However, in a poll conducted by the Samford University Center for Sports Analytics in collaboration with the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF) found that because of CTE concerns, 71 per cent of the 1,311 Americans polled believe it is inappropriate for the NFL to recruit children to tackle football.
“When he started playing tackle football in fourth grade his dream was the NFL,” said Greg Tuerk, father of former NFL and USC offensive lineman Max Tuerk, who died in 2020 at age 26 after struggling with severe mental health challenges.
“He was so proud to achieve that dream, but we believe it cost him his mental health.”
After his death, researchers at the Veterans Affairs-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation (VA-BU-CLF) Brain Bank diagnosed Tuerk with stage 1 CTE.
Other findings include:
• 72 per cent of Americans believe tackle football should not be introduced until at least age 14
• 77 per cent believe NFL players are “well-educated on the long-term risks associated with repeated head trauma, such as CTE.” However, that number drops to 41 per cent for high-school football players and 27 per cent of youth football players
- Those surveyed agreed it is primarily the responsibility of parents to ensure children are protected from CTE, yet only 31 per cent agree that parents are well-educated on the risk of CTE.
The family of Max Tuerk wants to make educating parents across the country a priority.
“Now that the risks are well documented and we know the potential consequences, we need to educate parents about the risks associated with playing tackle football before high school,” said Greg Tuerk.
Dr Chris Nowinski, founder of CLF, has previously spoken to NR Times about the importance of protecting children from head impacts and the risk of CTE, calling it “insane” to allow young people to play by adult rules.
“To all my former colleagues at the NFL: please stop recruiting young children to play tackle football,” said Pro Football Hall of Fame member Mike Haynes, also a former NFL vice president of player and employee development.
“If children wait until age 15 to play tackle football like I did, future football players will have a dramatically lower risk of CTE and will lose nothing in terms of developing the skills that could one day provide them a career playing professional football. It’s the right thing to do.”
The poll also revealed that 69 per cent of former tackle football players, and 77 per cent of Americans overall, support state governments banning tackle football for children before age 12.
Since 2018, bills have been introduced in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and California to ban youth tackle football, but none have yet succeeded.
A 2019 study of 266 deceased former football players from the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank found the more years someone plays football, the greater their odds of developing CTE.
Odds increase by 30 per cent per year played, meaning they double every 2.5 years. As of 2021, sixteen of the first 65 high school football players studied at the Brain Bank have been diagnosed with CTE.
More Americans than ever are now worried about CTE in football, with 93 per cent of those surveyed believing CTE is “certainly or probably” a serious public health issue. That number has increased from 87 per cent in a poll conducted in 2016.
