Dec 13, 2016 3 min read

Aperson can get a concussion playing tennis, or golf, even. It’s more likely, of course, in sports such as soccer and hockey. But when it comes to dishing out head injuries, no sport does it like football, and a growing number of health experts are questioning whether parents should be putting their children in the crosshairs for getting concussed.

Recently, Dr. Richard Besser, a pediatrician who is the ABC News chief health and medical editor, questioned the future of football in light of an ever-growing base of knowledge regarding the potentially devastating health consequences of playing the sport.

“We know how valuable organized sports are. It teaches teamwork and leadership and winning and losing and physical fitness,” Besser said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “But the big concern about football is the risk to the brain. We have two sons, and we did not allow them to play football. As a pediatrician, when I’m talking to parents, I say sports (are) great, but I recommend something other than football.”

Playing football subjects participants to the risk of a wide variety of injuries. Some are relatively minor. Some are serious, such as a dislocation of a joint or the tear of a major knee ligament. But even those injuries can be fixed. Brain injuries often cannot.

Besser said he’s not in favor of banning football. He instead talked about reducing the risks.

“If you look at all sports, there’s a risk of concussion,” he said. “Football is highest, mainly because participation rates are really high. But lacrosse, ice hockey, girls soccer (are all sports where young athletes can have) concussions. It’s not about eliminating all risk. It’s about saying, are the risks playing football acceptable and are there things you can do, if you’re going to have a football program, to lower those risks?”

Besser suggests that younger children play flag football rather than tackle football, and that the organizations that run the sport for older youngsters require that tackling in practice be strictly limited.

Certainly, that could, as Besser notes, reduce the risk of concussions, but by how much? Tackling is only one element of the game in which concussions can occur. Everyone in this neck of the woods knows the story of Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, whose life was destroyed by head injuries he suffered as a player. As an offensive lineman, Webster wasn’t being tackled or tackling anyone. But on every offensive play, he was involved in a collision, and in many cases, it is that type of repetitive hitting – smaller collisions, over and over again – that creates lasting, irreversible damage.

Football brings great enjoyment to many who play the game and millions who watch, but it cannot be denied that it also is inflicting great misery on some participants, often years down the road. Some will die young because of the injuries to their brains. Others will take their own lives. Which players will be affected? That’s the rub. There’s no way to know.

Football is, inherently, an unsafe game. It can be made safer, but never safe. Parents have to make the decision about whether they want to roll the dice and hope that their kids won’t be the unlucky ones. We would hope that, with all the evidence now at our disposal, more of them will decide they simply can’t take that kind of a chance.