Invisible Injury

Ever since Junior Seau propelled the horrors of chronic traumatic encephalopathy into the general public, we’ve repeatedly heard a singular narrative from those in charge of the sport of football: The sport is safer than ever. But how do we know that? At the college level, we’ve never seen those raw numbers. And so Season 1 of Why Don’t We Know set out to find the answer. Are there really fewer concussions than there were a decade years ago? We asked 100 public universities across the country for their aggregate numbers — broken down by sport — for the past ten years, and if they didn’t have data for ten years, we said, that’s ok, give us as many years as you have. The answer is really unsatisfying. We still don’t know if head injuries are truly declining, and the reason we don’t know is that more than one third of the major universities that we asked — major conference powerhouses in the Big Ten, Pac 12, SEC — they don’t know either. They don’t know because they’re not tracking it.