The Man of the Hour
Roger Goodell, sandy-haired and fit at 51, is the steward of the multibillion-dollar NFL juggernaut, having attained the job he dreamed about back in college. Over the first 4½ years of his tenure, he’s had to address numerous crises: Spygate; player discipline, most notably in the Michael Vick case; an epidemic of concussions; and the problem of how to keep players from maiming each other on the field. All the while, one thing has loomed very large over the commissioner: the shaky labor deal he inherited.
The Hits That Are Changing Football
Dr. Ann McKee, an associate professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University who has been studying the brains of deceased football players, wanted to illustrate the damage that repeated hits to the helmet can cause. This slide of a cross-section of a human male brain, magnified 100 times, showed scores, maybe hundreds, of tiny brownish triangular bits of a toxic protein called tau, choking off cellular life in the brain.