Written by Everett Rosenfeld at CNBC.com
Dustin Fink gets worked up when he talks about football. An “unabashed” Denver Broncos fan, he clears his schedule to watch games, and he loves the memories of a lifelong passion that each play evokes.
But many games bring up another emotion, too, for Fink: He feels like a hypocrite.
An athletic trainer at a high school in central Illinois, Fink manages The Concussion Blog, which tracks and discusses issues of head trauma in sports and beyond. As he learns more and more about the potential long-term health problems associated with head collisions, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to watch football games, Fink said. But he can’t quite tear himself away.
“Football is a beautiful, violent sport that I will not stop watching until somebody probably dies on the field,” Fink said. “I question my profession and my professional ability: That’s what the sport does to you, it’s crazy — it’s like crack cocaine, right?”
Fink’s experience may ring true for some Americans. A spate of recent revelations about former football players suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — including former Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, and ex-Giant Tyler Sash — have done little to dim the immediate prospects of the National Football League.
More than 100 million people are expected to tune into the Super Bowl on Sunday, and playoff ratings continue to rise sharply, so experts say it’s fair to conclude that player safety concerns are not harming the NFL’s short-term business.
“This is the pre-eminent sports brand in this country, to the degree that it really blows everything else out of the water, and it does seem to be iron plated,” said Michael Lewis, a professor of marketing at Emory University. “My gut response is the NFL is fine, the NFL is resilient.”
Rick Burton, David B. Falk professor of sport management at Syracuse University, said he agrees that the concussion question doesn’t represent an existential problem for the NFL.
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