I’m a football fan who’s been lucky enough to make something of a living writing about it, and I know former players who made great lives and have even won championships in the NFL. But I’m deeply ambivalent on days we get the kind of news we got Tuesday. Researchers at Boston University announced that Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot in November, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
On the night he died, Kneeland was reportedly clocked driving more than 145 mph, and the Texas trooper who got behind him says he ignored his flashing lights and kept going. Kneeland crashed his car and fled the scene of the crash, and about an hour after he texted a group chat goodbye, his dead body was found in a portable restroom. He was 24.
The whole story is horrific, but Kneeland’s young age makes it even more so.
The whole story is horrific, but Kneeland’s young age makes it even more so. He had been a model citizen, with no history of arrest and no disciplinary issues either in the NFL or at Western Michigan University. He was drafted in the second round of the NFL draft in 2024, but he didn’t even live through his second professional season. His demise at such a young age and at such an early point in his career suggests that there isn’t an acceptable amount of football as far as the health of a player’s brain is concerned.
Despite the publicity surrounding the 2015 movie “Concussion” and the NFL’s legal battles with its players union over damage to players’ brains, many people still associate CTE with NFL retirees who have had long careers. Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers center from the 1970s and ’80s, died at age 50 in 2002, and his death and the research that followed was featured in “Concussion.” Legendary San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau took his own life in 2012 at age 43, and NFL retirees Dave Duerson and Ray Easterling, who had mental health issues they couldn’t explain, did the same thing as Seau. They shot themselves in the chest, presumably so their brains could be preserved for research.
Researchers have said for years that CTE is cumulative. It can take hold while players are in their prime and progress as violent collisions accumulate. Kneeland’s autopsy found that he had Stage 1 CTE. Stage 4 is the worst.
In a statement Tuesday, Kneeland’s family (including his girlfriend, Catalina Mancera) said the player’s postmortem diagnosis “provides important context about some of the struggles he may have been facing.” They said they hoped their statement would raise awareness and “help people understand what NFL and other high contact sport athletes might be struggling with.” In that statement, his family said they would “continue to remember Marshawn with compassion for the person he was, rather than defining him by the final moments of his life.”
It remains to be seen what impact, if any, Kneeland’s death at such a young age will have on parents of children and teenagers who want to play. We know that past stories have had at least some effect. In August, ESPN conducted a survey of 546 men who had played at least one game during the 1988 NFL season. A quarter of them said they believe tackle football should be banned before high school.
And it’s not just former players who are concerned. Although football remains the most popular sport for high school boys in the U.S., a 2023 Washington Post analysis found that in Texas, a hotbed of youth football and a state known as a pipeline to the NFL, football participation had dropped about 12% over the previous decade. The newspaper found that between 2006 and the time of its report, participation in high school football had fallen 17%, “a larger decline than any of the other top 10 most popular boys’ sports.”
People can know the risks of playing football and still find it an acceptable risk to take.
Chris Edmonds, who played high school ball in western Pennsylvania, college ball at West Virginia University and in the NFL for the Cincinnati Bengals in 2002 and 2003, told me Tuesday that he sometimes has to watch old tapes of himself to remember some of the best moments of his career, like sacking Eli Manning and Michael Vick in college.
“It happened, but I don’t remember,” he said. But the 48-year-old Edmonds, who undergoes periodic cognitive tests arranged by the NFL Players Association, does remember what happened to Chris Henry, who played at West Virginia and for the Bengals after Edmonds did. Henry fell (or perhaps jumped) out of the bed of a moving pickup truck being driven by his fiancée, with whom he was arguing. Henry, who was 26, was the first active player found to have had CTE.
But people can know the risks of playing football and still find it an acceptable risk to take. That’s why we can be sure that even if the news of Kneeland’s demise discourages some people, there will still be many families who decide on playing.
Chris Henry Jr. is a receiver at Ohio State University. Chris Edmonds’ son Jorden Edmonds, a five-star recruit, will play cornerback this fall at the University of Alabama. “I always knew that I was going to pay more than we got paid for playing the game,” Chris Edmonds said. “I just don’t talk about it to him. Jorden worked his ass off to get to where he got. I’d be a hypocrite, because that’s what I did.”
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