On Sunday, more than a 100 million people will watch the New England Patriots face off against the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LII. A good amount of those people will watch the game without thinking about the dire consequences of playing a violent sport like football.
There were 281 documented concussions in the NFL last season. Josh Begley, research editor for The Intercept, tracked down each one of those concussions and put it into one chilling video called "Concussion Protocol."
It's not an easy video to watch. But one that is crucial if you really want to full scope of what playing in the NFL is like. The video is cut in a very specific way, with the action going backwards.
"Representing this series of collisions in reverse and in slow motion or dragged time I hope to make strange what has for many of us become normative: the spectacular, devouring moment of a football hit that knocks a player out cold."
What makes this even more jarring is that these are just the reported concussions. Ex Baltimore Ravens Tight End Benjamin Watson tweeted that there is probably way more:
\u201c@joshbegley I assure you. This isn\u2019t even half of the concussions in the NFL this year.\u201d
Last year a Boston Brain Bank studied the brains of 202 former football players at various levels, from high school to college to professional. They found that 90 percent of those brains 177 brains had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, better known as CTE, the brain disease that has been closely associated with concussions and taking multiple blows to the head.
