Cure For the Common Yes-to-Football Backlash Syndrome: A Dose of Matt Chaney

The hegemony of football-think is evident everywhere: in the passive solutions of parents who should know enough to “just say no,” and now in the intellectual backlash of writers who ain’t going to jump on no anti-football bandwagon.

Alexander Nazaryan of Atlantic Wire has an overview of the newest examples in “The Culture War Over Football,” http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/08/culture-war-over-football/68464/. I touched briefly the other day on one of them, by Max Boot of The Wall Street Journal.

The antidote for this new round of counter-attacks on behalf of the savage wars of peace, domestic variety, at the expense of our sons’ health and the gross national mental product, is Matt Chaney, the Cassandra of football harm. Chaney, author of the overlooked book Spiral of Denial, is readying a new article for ChaneysBlog.com; he uncovers 35 cases of football fatalities in 2012 that didn’t make the cut of the not-so-authoritative, though widely cited, list compiled by Dr. Fred Mueller at the University of North Carolina.

Here’s a preview from Chaney:

A teen football player dies suddenly in America, for reasons unrelated to collisions on the field, and the postmortem investigation produces more questions than answers-particularly whether the sport contributed mortally.

And so it goes for too many fatal cases of active football players, mostly juveniles, with the game’s possible link neither verified nor nullified because of two prime areas of limitation:

First, the reputedly “deficient” state of autopsy in America, especially for children, as part of the death-investigations system that a government report characterizes as “fragmented” and “hodgepodge.”

And, secondly, the equally challenged research field of football fatalities, funded in present form by game organizations and led by two men lacking medical doctorates and certifications, Fred Mueller and Bob Colgate, a professor and a sport administrator, respectively, who largely troll news reports for gathering incomplete data.

Thus the mortality rate of American football remains incalculable, despite those longstanding Mueller-Colgate statistics widely cited as epidemiology, including by the CDC.

Such holes in football-injury tracking are “known for years,” says Charles Yesalis, ScD, retired epidemiologist. “You have the problems articulated (regarding death investigations), but it goes beyond that. It’s often based on whether an autopsy is done. And even if an autopsy is performed on the athlete, there are a lot of times that it’s just not nailed down, particularly, regarding what’s the cause of death and the like. So there’s that issue.”

Meanwhile, the researchers aiming to quantify football’s risk and casualty face their own obstacles.

Beyond the few cases of collision fatalities tied directly to the sport, injury researchers typically rely on minimal data for judging whether a case was “indirectly” game-related, such as a cardiac death.

Anecdotal information and subjectivity can influence the record-keeping process, like coaches’ quotes and other bits from news items. In many cardiac cases that kill players, grieving parents declare football was not a factor; some families refuse to cooperate with researchers.

For player deaths involving autopsy, researchers Mueller and Colgate value official rulings, but local coroners or medical examiners, elected to the job in many jurisdictions, often do not go far in probing cause or link to football. Many coroners are incapable themselves and lack funds for contracting specialized follow-up that could shed light.

“You really have to start digging through the medical charts,” Yesalis suggests for strengthening a Mueller-Colgate study, although “the variability of (medical records) is scary when it comes to producing really solid research.”

“All this variability, of how the medical record (of a casualty) is written, how it is accessed or not by the researchers, and whether it’s clear that this event was precipitated and related to some sport activity-football, track and field, whatever-anybody who thinks the process is precise is very naïve and hasn’t done a lot of work with medical records, examining them for research purposes.”

This review of 35 players who died during 2012-see annotated cases below-demonstrates the problem: Determining death risk and casualty in vast American football remains a lofty goal, mere talk, despite the contemporary clamor for accurate injury reporting as part of establishing a “safer” game.

Indeed, Mueller and Colgate, funded by football and publishing from the University of North Carolina, qualify merely 15 of these fatalities as game-related for their 2012 report.