The 52nd Super Bowl on Feb. 4 will be one of the last to feature a generation of players who can reasonably claim they didn't know about the dangers of repeated head trauma when they started playing.
In his or her three-year playing career, a Junior Pee Wee player today (should they be reading the news) has been exposed to more coverage of brain damage and football than the Super Bowl's oldest starter, Tom Brady, could have seen, total, between when he was born in 1977 and drafted in 2000.
Between the Junior Pee Wee player and 40-year-old Brady, there's a generation of football players who have made pivotal life choices about the sport in a decade in which the conversation has changed, with each cohort being better informed than the last. The youngest starter in this year's game, 23-year-old Patriots linebacker Elandon Roberts, would have been exposed to more stories about brain injuries and football during four years of high school alone than were published in the 22 years before Brady made the decision to go pro.
That makes Roberts part of the first wave of NFL players with enough information available to make more informed health decisions about whether to play in high school, college and the pro leagues, assuming they had the time and opportunity to consult it.
For this post, we're assuming the players who started in the conference championships will also start the Super Bowl. We're using a count of Washington Post and New York Times articles that mention "brain damage," "brain injury" and "football'' as a rough estimate of media coverage, because they're searchable in a consistent format and over a time period long enough to cover all current players.
The chart below shows how many such news stories a person of a given age could have seen, had they been paying attention. We included Junior Pee Wee players because it's a pivotal moment in the decision whether to play football - that, and all other categories, can be assumed to be measuring parents' exposure and general cultural awareness as well as a player's specific reading opportunities.
The chart likely overstates coverage in the '80s and '90s, when there were myriad stories about brain damage in accidents and among "punch drunk" boxers which mentioned football in an oblique manner. That may be balanced by an overall increase in the number of newspaper stories published later in the time period.
Compare the age curve in that chart with Feb. 4's Super Bowl starters, whose average age is nearly 28. On average, they were born in 1990 and were already finishing high school just as the New York Times published Alan Schwarz's front-page story, "Expert Ties Ex-Player's Suicide to Brain Damage From Football."
The research that would change our understanding of that brain damage, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, wouldn't hit the mainstream until a typical Super Bowl starter had already committed to the sport.
Forensic pathologist Bennett Omalu's initial description of the disease in a football player was published in 2005, but not many prospective football players would have been reading the journal "Neurosurgery."
The scattered early stories wouldn't give way to the flood of coverage we see today until the following decade.
Even coverage of concussions, which have been part of the medical lexicon for the sport's entire history, has changed. Concussions are traumatic brain injuries typically caused by a blow to the head. They can be difficult to diagnose, as symptoms vary and may take hours or days to appear. In the beginning, they were reported as just another football injury, despite alarm bells.
When Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, then 38, retired in 1980 after a season in which he suffered five concussions, The Washington Post reported that he downplayed, in a news conference, the role of neurological examinations in his decision:
"Nothing said I should not play," Staubach said, adding, "if that's the only reason, I wouldn't retire because of it. Injuries are part of football."
At the same time, his wife, Marianne Staubach, a former nurse, told The Post, "I'm afraid if he had decided to play another season and he went down with a head injury, I probably would just come unglued right in my seat for fear of the worst."
For the next 20 years, views like Marianne Staubach's would be infrequent in concussion stories, which focused on players' short-term availability on the field, not their long-term health. That wouldn't change until CTE research hit the mainstream, which was after most Super Bowl starters had chosen to pursue college careers.
We're in the first stages of a generational shift. The younger players in Super Bowl 52 could have at least been aware that there's something called "chronic traumatic encephalopathy" and that it's tied to football and other contact sports.
Each subsequent class of players has been exposed to more and better coverage. In the decade since CTE first made headlines, a growing body of research and reporting has proved its deeper ties with brain trauma and football. The depth and breadth of the risks is becoming clearer.
Today's incoming middle school athletes have spent their entire lives in a universe that is aware of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Regardless of what steps youth football organizations and the NFL take, the conversation around the sport has gained another dimension. The generation trying out for every level of football now will be making a better-informed decision than players in the Feb. 4 Super Bowl did.