Only 27 when he committed suicide, researchers found advanced brain disease in former tight end.
Aaron Hernandez just became the most dangerous man in the NFL.
A strange statement to make, given the former New England Patriots tight end is dead and had spent the last four years of his life not on the field but behind bars for murder. But the revelation Thursday that Hernandez had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) when he killed himself will shake the NFL to its core.
As it should.
The NFL could easily absolve football when it was players in their 60s and 70s whose memories and personalities were disappearing, turning them into people their loved ones barely recognized when they died.
Still can’t say that there’s a link, the league often says. We need more research, is a favorite talking point.
The number of former players with those telltale dark spots on their autopsied brains has piled up – 20, then 50, now more than 100 – and still the league plays dumb. Even when it was Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, taking their lives in their 40s and 50s because their addled brains were already making their lives hell and they knew there was more to come, the NFL managed to tap dance around responsibility.
Tragic, but there are still so many unanswered questions, we’ve heard too many times.
That’s not going to work now, though. Hernandez was just 27 when he died, yet his brain was so diseased that researchers from Boston University found he had Stage 3 CTE. There are only four stages. He also had “early brain atrophy and large perforations in the septum pellucidum, a central membrane,” BU said in a release.
That isn’t normal. Yes, more research is needed to find out why Hernandez and everyone else gets CTE. To learn how many hits are too many and at what age it’s safe to play.
But if the NFL doesn’t see this as a tipping point in the PR war it’s been waging against science, it’s not just deceitful, it’s delusional.
Hernandez helped the Patriots win a Super Bowl when he was alive. He’s going to make a far greater impact on the NFL now that he’s dead.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour .
