Colts owner Jim Irsay must not have received the memo.
In an interview with Sports Business Daily, Irsay failed to recognize the very serious nature of CTE and its effects on players. When discussing the safety of the NFL, he had this to say about the dangers of life after football:
What’s absurd to me, is that quote.
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Football itself is not a disease, but placing the world’s best athletes on a field to run full-speed at each other and collide certainly isn’t healthy. If common sense isn’t enough to make you realize that, there’s plenty of proof like the deaths of Mike Webster, Junior Seau and Dave Duerson to name a few. In fact, Duerson purposely shot himself in the chest so his brain could be donated for research; research to prove to guys like Irsay that this is a very dangerous sport.
In the same article, Irsay says he doesn’t want to turn football into “a pillow fight,” and says there are injuries in other sports such as bobsledding. The problem with that logic is that bobsledding is nothing like professional football. There isn’t repetitive trauma to the head and brain in bobsledding like there is in football.
Maybe Irsay was just trying to push for more awareness about addiction, considering he battled a painkiller addiction himself. But if that’s the case then he clearly went about it in the wrong way.
