It is always admirable to see someone put his money where his mouth is, but people really need to step back and take a deep breath on this whole football/CTE thing. It's a real issue with some troubling implications, no doubt, but we still don't have good answers to some really important questions, namely:

1). How common are neurological symptoms in former football players? What percentage of former NFL (or college, or high school) players have neurological problems at age 50, 60, 70, or 80, and how does this figure compare to the American male population of that age at large? Knowing this would allow us (and, more importantly, the young men making decisions about playing football) to at least roughly quantify the degree of long-term neurological risk involved. Having "some signs of CTE," while clearly alarming, is not the same thing as having a significant cognitive impairment--just like not everyone with "some signs of arteriosclerosis" will end up having a heart attack.

2). What will be the impacts of the changes that have been made in recent years to address this issue? In the last fifteen years or so, we have seen rules changes, practice modifications, increased concussion awareness, and equipment improvements. Will those changes significantly improve the long-term neurological prognosis for players today, compared to those who played in the 1970s and 1980s?

3). Are there further changes that can be made to mitigate risk, like not beginning tackle football until high school or modifying/improving equipment? It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, where we either pretend like there's no problem or we boycott football.

4). How do the risks of long-term injury in football compare to those in other sports? Every sport has some degree of risk--where will we draw the line in terms of what we can't, in good conscience, support?

People who have a knee-jerk anti-football reaction in response to the CTE issues need to think about all of these questions--none of which have good, clear answers yet--before they just start rooting for the demise of the game that we all love.