Brett Favre is working to ban youth tackle football
Hall of Famer Brett Favre played football for most of his 48 years, including 20 in the NFL. But he’s not encouraging youths to follow the same path, even his grandchildren. In fact, Favre would like to put an end to youth tackle football.
He supports a bill in the Illinois state legislature, the Dave Duerson Act to Prevent CTE, which would ban anyone under 12 from playing tackle football.
Duerson is a former Bears safety who was diagnosed with CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and committed suicide. CTE is a degenerative brain disease that has, to date, been found mostly in athletes who incurred repetitive brain trauma.
Pro Football HOFer Bret Favre backs #DaveDuersonAct to end tackle football for kids u12. "The state level is a start, but we have to adopt this plan and all do it together. The body, the brain, the skull is not developed in your teens and single digits" https://t.co/fwqhhtAzDK
— Chris Nowinski, Ph.D. (@ChrisNowinski1) June 20, 2018
Favre would like to see a similar bill at the federal level.
“The state level is a start, but we have to adopt this plan and all do it together,” Favre said in an interview with the Daily Mail. “The body, the brain, the skull is not developed in your teens and single digits. I cringe. I see these little kids get tackled and the helmet is bigger than everything else on the kid combined. They look like they’re going to break in half.”
In his playing days, the three-time MVP and Super Bowl champion fears he suffered “thousands’ of concussions,” according to a recent article in the New York Daily News. He has also experienced memory loss and wonders if he has early stages of CTE.
“You would never come out of the game for a concussion because nobody thought concussions were that bad,” Favre told the Daily Mail. “It was a matter of toughness. You didn’t come out of a game because you were dinged, you saw stars, or fireworks are flashing — which are all results of a concussion, as we know now. Ear ringing, kind of like the dinner bell dining, that should be a wake-up call: You just suffered a severe brain injury.”
In addition to his opposition to youth tackle football, Favre is also an investor in a new drug that’s in development to treat concussions.
The drug, Prevacus, is a nasal inhaler designed to deliver steroids to the brain immediately after a possible concussion.
“This drug is specifically aimed at controlling the effects of an acute concussion in that first two weeks,” the drug’s creator, Dr. Jake VanLandingham, told the Daily Mail. ‘As a result of that, it will prevent CTE from ever happening, so we can control the acute pathological cascade.”
Former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner and U.S. Women’s soccer star Abby Wambach are also investors in the drug.
“Concussions aren’t going away,’ Wambach told the Daily Mail. ‘These things are going to occur. Now you could actually have something that helps with the healing process.”
Favre, Warner and Wambach said professional sports leagues should take an active role by funding concussion research, for the greater good and the good of their respective sports.
Favre told the Mail he doesn’t even encourage his grandsons to play football in the backyard, let alone in a youth football league.
“Maybe that’s selfish. But what are the odds of him becoming the next Brett Favre? What if he plays one year, gets a major concussion, and is never the same. I would feel horrible,” he said.
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