Did you know that many men who play football suffer from brain damage? Even young men, 18 years old or less, can show the beginnings of dementia as a result of their love of the game.

The culprit here is repeated blows to the noggin, which no amount of plastic or padding can sufficiently absorb. During a routine drill or game, players in the NFL often collide with other players, head-first, with the force of an unrestrained body hitting a car's dashboard after a crash at 25 mph.

The accumulation of all those collisions is causing depression, anxiety, severe memory loss, abusiveness, and many other unglamorous effects in more retired football players than your local sports page is likely to report. Fortunately, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker magazine, did just that in a recent article that makes a strong case for football being a lot more like dogfighting than you probably ever realized.

In dogfighting, dogs are selected for their "gameness" -- that is, their willingness to repeatedly jump back in the ring despite the certainty that they'll be hurt. Football players are rewarded for the same behavior, which is cultivated from the beginning of their days on the high school varsity team. Is football the human equivalent of dogfighting? And if so, how should we react? The similarities between the literal dog-eat-dog world of dogfighting and the figurative one of football don't stop there, Gladwell reports, and anyone dreaming of NFL stardom would be wise to read his article.

One young man, it seems, didn't have to. Myron Rolle, a 22-year-old rising football star decided to forego the NFL draft for a Rhodes Scholarship. Now, instead of bashing his head on the football field, he's using it to study at Oxford University, moving towards his ultimate goal of being a neurosurgeon.

But Rolle's cranium (and many others like it) isn't out of the woods just yet. He still intends to have his time on the field, and wants to re-enter the draft when he returns from England next year. I hope he reads Gladwell's piece before he follows through -- his star is too bright to be dimmed by just a few years of professional self-destruction.

So if you're a football fan and are planning on watching tonight's NFL game, take a minute to consider what the players are sacrificing in order to be on the field. Sure, they may achieve a few minutes of glory on the gridiron tonight, but at what cost? Their memory? Their health? Is it worth it, or is it time we reconsidered the violent nature of this sport and our national support of it?

[Image: New Yorker]