The Other Fifteen

Here’s a stat for you: the average life span for a professional football player is 55, 52 if they are a lineman.  Digest that for a bit.  That’s more than 20 years taken off of their life expectancy compared to the rest of the population.  While much of that has to do with linemen being overweight, and the rest of them becoming overweight once they stop training as athletes, a sizable portion of the cause for early death among NFL players is the constant concussions and other hard hits to the head that they suffer over the years.  Those hard hits lead to brain damage, dementia, serious depression, bouts of suicide or violence, etc.  Here are two wonderful pieces of reporting on the subject from The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell and 60 Minutes’ Bob Simons.