America's national faith, football, isn't just being tested. It's being doused with a big, icy, Gatorade bucket of reality, science and litigation that Joe Football, along with the NFL, NCAA, and American high schools, doesn't want to hear.
Who can blame them? It's like being told that Santa Claus isn't real.
A series of studies, lawsuits and now the movie Concussion are that bucket of bad news: football causes brain damage. Sometimes irreversible brain damage that, at a minimum, leads to cognitive impairment, and, at a maximum, destroys players' brains. It can lead to self-medication, alcoholism, domestic violence against family and friends, and suicide not just in NFL players, but in hundreds of thousands of men who have played the game in high school and college.
There is no helmet, no change in the field surface, or any other easy fix.
There is no cure.
The NFL and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have, to their marketing credit, elevated their game beyond entertainment to tribal, almost religious status. It is the game that owns Saturdays, Sundays, Monday nights, and is rapidly claiming Thursdays.
Football, before video games and the movie and television biz caught on, learned to channel our culture's primal love of tribalism and our thirst for violence into the modern national pastime.
The intoxicating blend of brutality and ballet, elevated to operatic epicism by decades of NFL Films' official pigskin propaganda pieces, and the convenience of television have transformed a sport of men crashing into each other at high speed to move a ball 10 yards or more into the epic combat of Roman legions doing battle on snowy Sunday fields, channeled local and regional rivalries into flat-screen fodder for football fanatics.
Teams are town. Teams are tribe. The yellow and gold of Green Bay. The red-and-black of Tampa. Gator nation. Trojan nation. Friday Night Lights.
Year-round there are millions of American birthdays, bachelor parties, beer busts and bridal showers where the Monday-morning quarterbacks, alcoholic beverage of choice in hand, gather in some corner, or around a big screen, to glorify and vilify heroes and bums, and celebrate the glory of it all.
"Did you see the hurt he put on that guy?! They had to carry the quarterback out."
"Brady had to know what the equipment guy was doing. That's why the [expletive] wins all the time."
"They don't pay enough for good players. And that [expletive] they paid all the money to stand on the sidelines can't call a game worth..."
Football has become a financial juggernaut. If the sport were a country, it would be roughly the 57th richest nation in the world by GDP. It has created a $45 billion NFL machine. Forbes estimates that the NCAA's top 20 teams are worth about $1.7 billion and took in $1.3 billion in revenue last year just on television, tickets, and concessions. Team merchandise, a huge income category, is lumped into other college merchandise sales and not counted, or the number would be substantially higher.
There is not a published number for how much revenue sponsors of NFL football generate from reaching its 185 million fans, but given the billions that they pour into the league and the NCAA, it is a number in the billions.
$93 billion is gambled illegally on football. 75 million people will spend $70 billion playing fantasy football alone.
All that stands between all of that power and money, and complete collapse, is the human brain.
The release last week of the Will Smith biopic Concussion, loosely based on the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist who discovered the brain disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in the autopsy of Pittsburgh Steelers legend and Hall of Famer "Iron" Mike Webster, did the unspeakable: It reminded us that these gridiron gladiators, big and tough as they are, all have an Achilles heel: their brains.
The brain is a free-floating thing inside the skull. Nothing, no "magic helmet" or other contraption, can hold it in place. The NFL put up $10 million to create one. Riddell, the company that came up with the "better" helmet, is still being sued for making false claims about the product.
Reducing contact or eliminating certain types of hits doesn't fix the concussion problem either. Players hitting the ground hundreds or thousands of times in a season have their brain sloshed around being flipped end-over-end in the air, and other more basic forms of contact in practice and in game situations might do as much damage than head-on contact because of the repetitions of them.
Xlntbrain defines it best: "A concussion may occur in any or all of the following scenarios: Head to head contact, head to object contact, head to ground contact, head to body part contact and non-head contact due to sudden change in direction, i.e. Whiplash."
This has been a big icy Gatorade year for Joe Football.
In September, a seven year study by Purdue University of high school football players was released that shows that more than half of the players suffer damage to their brains over the course of a season.
"We are seeing changes in brain activity even without a diagnosed concussion, even without any sign or symptoms showing up and that that occurs in a large population of our subjects," Clinical Professor of Health and Kinesiology Larry Leverenz told Reuters.
At the other end of the career, Frontline reported in September, 2015:
Researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University have now identified the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in 96 percent of NFL players that they've examined and in 79 percent of all football players.
The NFL's billion dollar player settlement in April, 2015 was attention-getting, and the coming legal and insurance storm for the NCAA and High School contact sports based on that settlement could cost football at all levels more than a trillion dollars in damage.
Will Smith and a feature film may finally be getting through to audiences in a way that HBO Real Sports' Head Games (2010), the PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial and ESPN's Fainaru brothers' book of the same name could not.
Movie fans as a whole who paid to see the movie tend to love it, and find it eye-opening, but, to be fair, many went there with that intention.
MISTERMARCUS852 on Fandango writes: "Very good movie that makes you have new found fear for anyone playing the sport. If I had a son, I don't think I'd let him play after seeing this."
Fan Danny L at Rotten Tomatoes says: "Football is a bloody brutal sport of warriors and, as such, suffering wounds, both minor and extreme, is part of the entire package."
Millions who will not bring themselves to see the game though are reacting as you might expect when the faith is threatened:
On an NBC News Facebook post about the film, James Mark Anderson writes: " it's part of the f****** game, NBC get over it, its not A sissy sports!"
And this from Facebook fan Julio Villalobos: "Who cares.. let them keep going at it..lol"
Then there are the deniers. Finger pointing at helmets, artificial turf, and the optimistic notion that somehow a "cure" can be found.
mct137 on Reddit comments: "I don't believe in getting rid of football (or any sport), but as I said I am sure there are ways we can minimize risks while still keeping the game competitive and fun."
For the most part, the commentary about the movie in social media is supportive both of the film and the discovery by millions that CTE is a "real thing." At the same time, millions more people who love the game won't be able to get their heads around the devastation that the head trauma the game causes has no cure.
Ironguard on Reddit: "[P]eople have gone retarded. They want to see massive hits by monsters in pads but for some reason disassociate the injuries that come with it."
Like all good religions, football is all about belief when facts are inconvenient. The only thing bigger than the NFL is the insurance industry. So the only thing that really could stop football is if the payouts for players injured, particularly in high school sports, reach a level where insurers will not provide liability coverage to high schools and colleges.
"The N.F.L., which generates about $9 billion a year, may be equipped to handle these legal challenges," notes Ken Belson of The New York Times. "But colleges, high schools and club teams may be forced to consider severe measures in the face of liability issues, like raising fees to offset higher premiums; capping potential damages; and requiring players to sign away their right to sue coaches and schools. Some schools and leagues may even shut down teams because the expense and legal risk are too high."
There's a minute on the clock, reality has the ball on the five yard line, and it's only second down.
Hut, hut.