In a pre-Super Bowl interview on CBS’ Face The Nation, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell repeatedly refused to acknowledge a link between brain injuries and football, even as a growing amount of research is making the link between the game and the development of debilitating cognitive diseases ever clearer and perhaps even overwhelming.

CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Goodell point blank if he would acknowledge the link between football and brain injuries. Goodell demurred: “That’s why we’re investing in the research. So that we can answer the question, what is the link? What causes some of the injuries that our players are still dealing with? And we take those issues very seriously.”

Later, Goodell again ignored the question. “We’re going to let the medical individuals make those points,” Goodell said. “We’re going to give them the money, advance that science. In the meantime, we have to do everything we can to advance the game and make sure it’s safe.” The NFL, he added, has not covered up the links between concussions and brain disease. Instead, “the NFL has led the way.”

Taken together, research has formed a strong link between football and degenerative brain diseases. NFL players are four times more likely to die from Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease than the general population, and recent studies have bolstered the links between football and degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has been linked to dementia, depression, and suicide. Other studies have shown that football players perform worse on cognitive tests than non-football players.

And the NFL has hardly “led the way” into concussion research, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Malcolm Burnley showed recently in a timeline of the NFL’s response to concussions. The first chair of the league’s concussion task force, formed in 1994, regarded concussions as an “occupational hazard,” and the league rejected the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines for returning concussed players to competition in 2000. It was still publishing research skeptical of the dangers of concussions in 2005; in 2007, it still claimed that research did not show that “having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly,” even though CTE had already been found in multiple dead former football players.

That’s not a history of leading the way. That’s a history of standing in the way. The league and Goodell have plenty of reason to continue standing in the way, given that acknowledging a link between football and brain injuries, as well as the league’s role in obscuring that link in the past, would open it up to legal and medical liabilities it doesn’t want and possibly can’t afford. It would turn the discussion from one centered around how to make football safer to one centered around whether football can be made safer. And that discussion would jeopardize the $8 billion (and growing) industry that is professional football. Goodell isn’t obstinate in the face of an increasingly clear reality because no link exists. He’s obstinate because acknowledging that link would threaten the business he oversees.

A day after the debate over the safety of football made it all the way to the White House, Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard delivered a dire prediction about the future of the NFL to CBSSports.com:

“Thirty years from now,” he said, “I don’t think it will be in existence. I could be wrong. It’s just my opinion, but I think with the direction things are going — where they [NFL rules makers] want to lighten up, and they’re throwing flags and everything else — there’s going to come a point where fans are going to get fed up with it.

“Guys are getting fined, and they’re talking about, ‘Let’s take away the strike zone’ and ‘Take the pads off’ or ‘Take the helmets off.’ It’s going to be a thing where fans aren’t going to want to watch it anymore.”

Last week, after researchers published a study further linking chronic traumatic encephalopathy to football, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates called it a death knell for football, though unlike Pollard, he predicted that death would come from the supply side:

There’s something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players–and maybe athletes at large–to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don’t know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)

After that, I don’t know how pro football can stand for long.

The irony about these two views — whether football’s death will be brought about by supply- or demand-side problems — is that if more research proves stronger links between CTE and the sport, football will likely have to choose the method of its death. The game can probably be made safe enough, by eliminating much of the padding and tackling, to keep kids playing at the youth levels. And as long as football remains a big business for colleges and the NFL, they’ll make an effort to protect players while presenting a product people will watch. The question, I think, is whether enough people will watch a game that actually protects the players.

Americans love the inherent violence of football. We love that it offers a chance to see two men larger, faster, and stronger than we’ll ever be crashing together in a moment of bone-crushing, brain-mushing gladiatorial glory. We love that “football at its finest” is a safety crushing a running back, that football’s “truest nature” is a defensive end leveling a running back so majestically that the poor sap’s helmet ends up 10 yards down the field. We hate that the NFL is trying to take that away from us, which is why every time a flag flies for a helmet-to-helmet hit, we yell that the league is “taking football out of football.”

It is becoming more and more evident that we can’t make football safer without radically changing the game itself. But the flip-side to that is that what Americans love most about football is exactly what makes it dangerous. So the NFL and the NCAA have a choice: stay dangerous, and risk kids no longer playing. Get safer, and risk creating a product that no one wants to watch. I side more with Pollard’s view than with Coates’, but either way, death seems almost certain, even if the method and the timeframe are anything but.

Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard leveled New England Patriots running back Stevan Ridley during the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s AFC Championship game, causing Ridley to fumble and leaving him motionless on the ground. That Ridley was hurt was apparent immediately when he ended up in the “fencing position” — arms and toes up to the sky:

The fumble came at a big moment. Ridley and the Patriots were down eight points with about 13 minutes to go, but the fumble gave the ball back to the Ravens, who promptly scored another touchdown and effectively sealed their trip to the Super Bowl. After the game, Ravens coach John Harbaugh called the hit “football at its finest“:

“That was the turning point of the game,” John Harbaugh said. “That was the turning point of the football game there on the 40-yard-line. It was just a tremendous hit. It was football at its finest. It was Bernard Pollard making a great physical tackle — just as good a tackle as you’re ever going to see in football right there. That just probably turned the game around right there.”

There’s no disputing the play was a turning point, and there was absolutely nothing illegal about it either. But that coaches view plays like that as football at its finest, and that players view injuries the way they say they do in Tom Junod’s excellent new Esquire piece, serves as a reminder that there is a significant gap between the concerns of people inside the game and those outside it about making it safer. If “football at its finest” involves leaving a guy motionless on the turf, I suppose I don’t have much interest in the finest points of the game.

ESPN and ABC News released a joint report this morning detailing what everyone already suspected about Junior Seau: that he was suffering from the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease caused by repetitive hits to the head that is linked to dementia and depression, when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest on May 2. Seau’s brain was examined by five brain doctors at the National Institutes of Health, who were able to examine it because the family donated his brain for research after his death.

There are plenty of things that stand out in this report, including the absurdity of the fact that Seau never reported suffering a concussion in his 20 years, or the fact that it doesn’t matter if he did. Players don’t need concussive blows to end up with CTE, they just need repetitive hits to the head. Concussions, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler has argued, aren’t football’s crisis. Football is football’s crisis.

What really stood out, though, is the effect CTE and Seau’s suicide had on his kids:

“It definitely hurts a little bit because football was part of our lives, our childhood, for such a long time,” said Sydney, a freshman at USC. “And to hear that his passion for the sport inflicted and impacted our lives, it does hurt. And I wish it didn’t, because we loved it just as much as he did. And to see that this was the final outcome is really bittersweet and really sad.”

Jake, a high school junior who quit football to focus on lacrosse, added: “He lived for those games, Sunday and Monday nights, you know? And to find out that that’s possibly what could’ve killed him or caused his death is really hard.”

Many of football’s defenders argue that hand-wringing over head injuries is senseless, because professional football players know the risks and choose to play the games anyway. Even if that was true, and it surely wasn’t for players of Seau’s era, the injuries don’t just affect them. Football, the game that dominated the lives of the Seau family for two decades, the game they loved, took away a father and a husband.

The game, the fame, the money, the adrenaline — is it all worth it? For many players, it might be, and it may have been for Junior Seau too. For his son Tyler, though, the answer is no. “Is it worth it? I’m not sure,” Tyler told ESPN. “But it’s not worth it for me to not have a dad. So to me it’s not worth it.”

At this point, you’ve probably seen the demolishing hit South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, one of college football’s best players, laid on Michigan running back Vincent Smith in the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day. Clowney, who would be a top five pick in the NFL Draft this year if only an arbitrary age limit didn’t force him to remain in college for another season, burst off the line and laid waste to Davis almost immediately, causing Davis to fumble and sending his helmet 10 yards backward in the process:

That hit, in short, is absolute football perfection, a combination of size, speed, strength, and total athletic dominance that, when brought together in one perfect moment, leads to the type of play that leaves fans, coaches, teammates, opponents, and announcers alike stunned beyond comprehension. It was clean, it was smart, it was beautiful. The two seconds between the snap of the ball and Clowney’s devastation were football at its absolute purest, as Dave Kindred pointed out at Sports On Earth:

I have no use for football’s jack-‘em-up fetish. I loathe the mentality that cheers a blindside block on a helpless defender whose eyes are locked on a kick returner. I have seen cheap shots and I have seen Darryl Stingley in a wheelchair. But what Jadeveon Clowney did to Vincent Smith was none of that. The old Michigan State coach, Duffy Daugherty, once said, “Football’s not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.” By that definition, Clowney’s tackle was as pure a demonstration of the game’s truest nature as we’re likely to see.

The very fact that the hit was a “pure demonstration” football’s “truest nature,” though, illustrates exactly what is so scary about the future of football: we’ve spent the last year focused on the threat concussions pose to the future of the game, but the real threat may be the game itself, the risk routine hits even less powerful than Clowney’s pose to the brains of the young men who step on the field each weekend. That, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler argued last month, “Football doesn’t have a concussion problem. It has an existential one.”

Clowney’s hit didn’t cause a concussion, and so it seems just a routine part of the game. But focusing on concussions as the major source of brain injuries in football, as Mahler argued, makes us think the problem can be fixed relatively easily. It makes it seem as if improving how we monitor concussions when they happen and eliminating head-to-head hits will reduce the amount of concussions and thus mitigate the risk of long-term brain trauma for the athletes who take the field. But recent research shows that it doesn’t necessarily take a career full of concussions to lead to the long-term cognitive problems many football players experience after retirement. Rather, chronic traumatic encepholopathy, dementia, depression, and other serious cognitive damage can result from the constant repetition of seemingly minor hits to the head — the kind that happen hundreds of times every game from the NFL level down to youth football.

“Calling the head-injury crisis a concussion crisis made it sound as if it stemmed from how the game is played, not from the game itself,” Mahler continued. It doesn’t take a concussion to damage the brain. It doesn’t even take a hit as devastating as Clowney’s. The routine plays, the beautiful plays, the most purely football plays — they all could be causing brain damage too. That’s a reality nobody wants to acknowledge, because if football’s problem is indeed existential, if the game doesn’t have a crisis but is the crisis, the future of football is in more peril than anyone thinks.

There are personal reasons that I’m averse to watching people fight each other. But the New York Times three-part series on Derek Boogaard, the former enforcer for the Minnesota Wild and the New York Rangers who died of an accidental overdose earlier this year, gets at the specific reasons I’ve always had such a difficult time watching men’s professional hockey, even though I like women’s hockey quite a bit:

There is no incentive to display weakness. Most enforcers do not acknowledge concussions, at least until they retire. Teams, worried that opponents will focus on sore body parts, usually disguise concussions on injury reports as something else. In Boogaard’s case, it was often “shoulder” or “back,” two chronic ailments, even when his helmet did not fit because of the knots on his head.

“I hid my concussions,” said Ryan VandenBussche, 38, a former enforcer who estimates he had at least a dozen concussions, none of them diagnosed. “I masked them with other injuries. I’m not a huge guy, by no means, but I fought all the big guys. And I certainly didn’t want to be known as being concussion prone, especially early in my career, because general managers are pretty smart and your life span in the N.H.L. wouldn’t be very long.”…

Boogaard likely had dozens of concussions before his death in May. No one knows.

Up to a certain point, I believe people have a right to do what they like with their bodies to make a living, and I understand the appeal of professional sports salaries, even on the lower end of things. But I think it has to be a genuine choice, and that players and fans have the right to know the risks involved in taking up a profession and what we support by watching it. I struggle with football, but at least the league is at least moving in the direction of treating concussions as something other than a necessary outcome of the game, whether it’s donating money for brain damage research or trying to enforce policies that give players time to recover from the injuries. And while there may be guys who hit hard, there’s a difference between landing a tough, solid tackle and taking off your helmets and gloves and fighting each other in bare-knuckle matches.

I can pay the price in football, and live with the effects, particularly as a fan with a platform to stand on top of and holler about rules and regulations and enforcement. I’ve found that I can’t live with the fights in hockey. And the NHL’s initial response to push back on the link between blows to the head and CTE, rather than thinking about curbing fights through increasing penalties or other methods, isn’t wildly attractive either. The question of whether there is, as NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, “an overwhelming appetite or desire to go in that direction” isn’t the only factor to consider when thinking about fights and head injury. The game as it is may work for some people. It doesn’t for me.

I love football, and I’ve come to love it even more over the years as the increasing demands of work and my life outside of it have made it the one sport I feel like I can follow in anything close to a comprehensive way. Football’s brought me closer to a lot of great men, and this year, playing fantasy for the first time (I wrote about that, and The League, for Salon today), I’m as excited for the season to start tonight as I’ve ever been. But I’ve also come to love the game at a time that coincides quite precisely with the beginning of Alan Schwarz’s masterful reporting on football and brain injury for the New York Times, my understanding and ability to appreciate football deepening simultaneously with the realization that to care for the game as it exists may require accepting that men are selling their future mental function for my entertainment.

As someone who is professionally both a progressive and a fan, as someone who cares about occupational safety and the ability of employees to reach agreements with their employers that make their work livable, football is not an easy game to love. The National Football League is perhaps the one area of sport where players would benefit from a dramatically stronger union than they’re ever likely to achieve. Some high, heavily conditional salaries serve to disguise the short average careers and the financial and emotional costs of giving up your body and brain to the game. The bodies and brains we pay to see battered in pursuit of glory are disproportionately African-American: 67 percent of the league was black in 2010.

I have a hard time with the idea that players don’t have the right to put themselves on the market, knowing all the risks. Troy Polamalu isn’t a stupid man, and seems determined to keep making tough hits no matter how much it costs him financially or physically. But, as Ta-Nehisi wrote last season, “In some measure, pro football is quite beautiful because it gives us human beings willingly giving up themselves for something they love. I don’t have any real way to relate to that…This is a separate question from the responsibility of the viewer. There’s no real reason why I have to sit and watch Hines Ward destroy his body.” I’m not quite at the point where I’m ready to stop buying. But I would like a way to be a more active, and activist, consumer, to demonstrate that I’d rather spend my money on a game that is consistently regulated and substantively dedicated to making itself safer. I’d happily, for example, pay a $1 per-ticket fee to donate to brain injury and helmet improvement research, or kick in some money through my fantasy league for the same cause. I’d like to purchase part of a solution as well as the status quo. And I’ll watch football this season as a way of reminding myself of my progressive values, rather than as a way to set them aside for an afternoon.

And as a side note, this may be the best parody of the disturbingness of football commentating that I have ever seen: