Earlier today, the Pittsburgh Steelers President Art Rooney II announced the creating of the Chuck Noll Foundation for Brain Injury Research. The foundation is named after sports brain injury advocate Chuck Noll, Steelers head coach from 1969-1991, and administrator for the team for two decades after that. The Steelers are supporting the foundation with an initial contribution of $1 million, and the Foundation's Board of Director will include Merrill Hoge, current ESPN commentator and former Steelers running back who retired over concerns about football-related concussions. The medical advisory panel will include Dr. Julian Bailes, Dr. Regis Haid, and Dr. Joseph Maroon. These are names are all familiar if you've read League of Denial, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru (review on that book coming soon), one of the most popular books on the NFL and TBI.
It goes without saying that it's great to see people within the NFL making major efforts to help alleviate the concussion crisis overtaking the sport of football. The foundation's creation comes at an especially apt time, as Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones made some statements yesterday (in addition to other past statements) denying the link between football and brain trauma. I'm going on a tangent here, but it honestly blows my mind that there are still people within high places in the NFL who deny that CTE exists or that it is caused by football. Of course, there are debates within the field about how prevalent CTE is and what its underlying causes are, but those discourses are lead by medical doctors, not wealthy businessmen who clearly have vested interests that override the science. At the risk of alienating people politically, it's a lot like the global warming "debate."
Anyway, this move is an applaudable move by the Steelers and a great example of how the NFL, a multi-billion dollar industry, can start investing more of its own money to fund research on TBI.
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