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“In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players,” the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu said. “I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. […]

Three days after he collapsed from heatstroke at practice in 2008, 15-year-old Max Gilpin became one of at least 665 boys since 1931 to die as a result of high school football. Here’s what made his case different: The Commonwealth of Kentucky tried to prove Max’s coach had a hand in killing him.

They tell stories about girlfriends, wives, drinking and sex. They wrestle and play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. They share music on iPods and check football scores on BlackBerrys. They debate evolution and chase chickens. They argue over comic-book heroes and then tell more stories about sex. During a six-day mission in Afghanistan with Delta […]

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 […]

John Madden has burst upon the American scene as few others in sport, but contrary to his bull-in-a-beer-ad image, he loves nothing more than good quiet conversation, and his skill as a communicator is the key to his success both as a football coach and as a broadcaster.

Football dealmaker David Canter on what he knows before the mock drafts, how he pits teams against each other, and what kind of a stomach you need to make it in the sports-agent game

In Parkersburg, Iowa, it was a high school coach who led the townspeople out of the rubble of a tornado, showed them how to live a Christian life and brought honor to a football field he mowed himself. What they can’t understand is why Ed Thomas was gunned down by a former player

Seattle is leading the charge to make soccer into an American sport. If “we” don’t do it, who will?

How different are dogfighting and football?

The oldest field player in the NFL is Brett Favre. The second-oldest is Jeff Zgonina. He’ll never make it to Canton, but he and players like him are the soul of football.