Yet the most significant player is the one who will be missing. Penn's Owen Thomas, a junior and a team captain, committed suicide in April at age 21. Researchers at Boston University found that he died with early stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease linked with cognitive impairment and depression primarily found in boxers and N.F.L. players. Owen was the first active college player to be found to have had the condition, which can be determined only after death.
Owen was very much like me. I was Harvard's captain last year; we played against each other in last year's game. We were both second-team All-Ivy defensive linemen. We were both studying business — Owen was enrolled in the Wharton School. His suicide and condition have left me unable to shake his memory.
When I go to Franklin Field on Saturday, it will already be the most heartbreaking loss of my athletic career.
I'm not claiming familiarity with the complexities of Owen's personal life. While I know the pressures and demands on an Ivy League student and football captain, I don't know the additional pressures and demands (and subsequent emotions) that Owen was dealing with. What I do know is the pressures and demands and emotions clearly felt inescapable, a sensation that is normal in varying degrees.
Concussions and other brain trauma on the football field do not cause someone to commit suicide. What they do cause are metabolic alterations that can lead to depression and contribute to changes in a person's outlook and decision-making — with the most disastrous and undoubtedly complicated cases perhaps ending in suicide.
To be around recently concussed football players is to know that this is serious brain damage. Their eyes seem glassy. They have trouble retaining short-term information. They appear tired and glum.
Having played football for the past 10 years, I've seen what a compilation of brain traumas can do to a person.
The solution is not to stop playing football. Football offers structure and discipline to players and builds communities in meaningful ways.
Fining or suspending players for helmet-to-helmet contact — which the N.F.L. has said it will now do earnestly — is not the solution either.
The hits probably causing most of the cumulative damage are too routine and hidden to be punishable. If they were, every lineman in the N.F.L. would be broke. For the same reasons, the traumas are rarely large enough for a doctor to know to treat them; Thomas developed C.T.E. without ever being known to have sustained a concussion in more than 10 seasons, from youth football through college.
The football community is now hyperconscious — as it should be — about concussions. Now it is time for us to be just as aware of the depression that can follow. Not all concussions lead to suicide, but they can and sometimes do. And football incubates these types of impacts. Although it differs from boxing, in which violence is the primary show, football has a brutality that some fans manage to ignore. It's part of the sport.
This should be the jumping-off point for changing the culture around depression and sports. If concussions can lead to depression and depression can lead to suicide, then even old-school football needs to be as vigilant in identifying and treating depression as it is with concussions.
We must create an environment where a football player — or any athlete — can walk into a training room and tell someone that something is wrong and that, no, this injury doesn't just need ice or a rubdown.
Depression requires attention, diagnosis and therapy. We need to foster an environment where athletes understand that depression, like a sprained ankle, is not their fault — and that we are all on the same side to help them heal.
Accomplishing this is everyone's responsibility. Casting football players as having "concussion-induced depression" only stereotypes and isolates them as their herd's black sheep, when the message should be that this condition is not abnormal at all.
I've had very serious heart-to-hearts with friends who thought about suicide. Some have a history of concussions, some do not. But either way, they needed help. When an athlete is suffering from depression, our immediate response shouldn't be, "Did you have concussions?" but rather, "Tell me what's troubling you."
Concussion research is a vitally important offense to advance what we can do to prevent these situations. Being emotionally available to struggling athletes is the best defense not to lose ground in the meantime.
Owen Thomas, my rival one year ago, died with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That is not the end of the discussion, but a very difficult beginning.
Carl Ehrlich was captain of the 2009 Harvard football team.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/sports/ncaafootball/13penn.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a27
