Late Washington State QB Diagnosed with CTE

By: Kyle Langston 
Twitter: @kylelangston49


Five months after the death of Washington State quarterback Tyler Hilinski, his parents announced on the The Today Show that the 21-year-old had been diagnosed with the degenerative brain known as disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The results from the Mayo Clinic’s autopsy revealed, among other things, that Hilinski had the brain of a 65-year-old. This from a player who had reportedly never missed time due to a concussion, providing more evidence to the idea that CTE is due to repetitive sub concussive impacts.

         
This just one of the many incidents reported on the heels of a JAMA report concluding that 91% of former college football players suffered from CTE. This number can be misleading, since the sample was of brains donated because the person had shown symptoms of CTE, but it still is a nod towards the epidemic plaguing the football world.

        
According to the Concussion Legacy Foundation, CTE is "a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma. In CTE, a protein called Tau forms clumps that slowly spread throughout the brain, killing brain cells." This explanation displays just how much of a disease CTE is. The effects do not stop when a player quits football, rather they can continue to worsen until stage four symptoms such as depression, aggressive tendencies, and language difficulties become present. While there are methods to slow the disease's progress, no cure has been found. 

          
Here we have a quarterback, who is by all measures the most protected player on the field, enduring enough minor blows to the head to cause a young man to end his life. The news that CTE is caused by these sub concussive impacts should be even more mortifying, because while concussions can be tested for and treated accordingly, these sub concussive blows are clinically undiagnosable and occur on potentially every down of every game from high school all the way to the NFL.

          
The CTE epidemic is one that cannot be ignored. At its conception, CTE was thoroughly dismissed by the NFL. There were even "scientific" teams put together by the NFL to research and disprove the findings of Dr. Bennet Omalu. This team was composed of just about every type of doctor besides a neurologist. Not surprisingly, the team concluded that CTE need not be worried about in football players. The only other time in history such a blind eye has been turned to science is when cigarette companies similarly hired a group that concluded consumers actually benefited from smoking their product. 

          
Since then, the NFL has had to retract its statements and admit the very real problem its employees face on a weekly basis, and the NCAA quickly followed suit. Current and former college football players have began to speak out on the issue at an exponential rate. It is up to the vastly wealthy NCAA to devote more resources towards creating a safer product.

           
While many may counter that high school players should just simply stop playing, the fact of the matter is that Division 1 FBS schools alone hand out over 10,000 scholarships a year. For many of these students, this is their only way to pay for school, and having to shut down NCAA football as a whole would be detrimental to the lives of many young athletes.

           
Thus the burden falls on the corporation, whose revenue topped 1 billion dollars in 2017, to invest in its future of its product and donate a significant portion of its earnings to making the sport safer for the athletes making them the money. Through countless rules and regulations the NCAA has made it apparent that player well-being is not at the top of their list of priorities. This is an opportunity for them to change the narrative and provide for the athletes that they have benefited off of for so long.