Chris Borland Doesn't Have to Kill the NFL to Make a Point

Former San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland's unexpected retirement on Monday night does not need to be a death blow to football in order to be significant.

There will be those who will want to use Borland's retirement to signal the sport's demise—the first major victory in a moral fight—but we're not anywhere near that. The game isn't on life support, or even really under the weather. The NFL will continue to make obscene profits for the foreseeable future, and there's nothing that Chris Borland's decision will do to change that.

And yet that does not diminish the important statement Borland made by retiring at age 24 after his rookie season with a promising career ahead of him, and as ESPN NFL reporter Adam Schefter tweeted out, a $540,000 salary for 2015. Certainly, not many jobs exist that would pay so much for six months of official work, as Schefter also noted. But at what cost?

Strip away the larger canary-in-the-coal-mine symbolism, and Borland's not-so-simple decision was momentous enough simply for what it is: a player not yet in his prime taking the initiative to learn about the long term effects of playing football, and retiring before facing any of them. Borland admitted he had not suffered a concussion while playing football—or at least was not diagnosed with a concussion—since high school. He was not suffering post-concussion symptoms, either.

But Borland figured out the realities of what the game could end up doing to his brain far quicker than the general public, which continues to consume football in monstrous numbers despite alarming accumulations of equally alarming evidence.

The scientific information continues to build, and yet it's easy to gloss over it because, well, we are not generally a society that likes to pay attention to science. Each report seems more daunting to understand than the previous one, and soon—like a sports version of the climate change discussion—it's just easier to ignore the whole thing.

Also, it has become habit to dismiss anecdotes from former players who continue to suffer brain damage from having played football because these players are no longer in our day-to-day discussions about the game. The NFL has done a good enough job of framing recent rule changes and equipment innovations as having largely improved safety—a mostly dubious argument—which then gives the perception that what happened to players 10 years ago is no longer relevant, or happened in a game that was somehow different.

But now, with what science continues to tell us, with what we've heard from former players, and now with this landmark decision from a promising player who looked at what possible miserable future lay ahead and chose to opt out instead, the following question for parents becomes more relevant than ever: Should you let your children play football?

And for NFL players the question that now looms is: For how long can I continue to risk the qualify of my post-career life?

"So P. Willis and Chris Borland? They know something that we don't?" wide receiver Brandon Marshall tweeted in reference to both Patrick Willis' and Borland's recent retirements.

That tweet in itself says enough about the atmosphere in which Borland made his decision. The information is there for everybody. Only the players seem not to have been made aware of it, whether by either a union that is supposed to protect them, or by a league that doesn't have an interest in informing anyone about the sport's real dangers.

The NFL must shudder to think that more young, talented players could follow Borland's lead, or that society could follow it in turn. On Tuesday, the league put out a brief statement defending their commitment to player safety.

"By any measure, football has never been safer and we continue to make progress with rule changes, safer tackling techniques at all levels of football, and better equipment, protocols and medical care for players," a league spokesman wrote.

Is football safer? Is it safe enough? By whose standards? It's quite telling—and damning— that Borland told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that he made his decision after seeking opinions and advice from concussion experts and former players.

Borland didn't turn to his employers, who are still asserting, in the ongoing NFL concussion settlement fight, that the neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) isn't connected to football. Nor did he turn to his union, which seems more concerned with fixing blame (and legal liability) on the league than attempting to help and heal its ailing active and retired members.

"I just honestly want to do what's best for my health," Borland told ESPN. "From what I've researched and what I've experienced, I don't think it's worth the risk."

An important part of retired player and player-safety advocate Sean Morey's recent candidacy for National Football League Players Association executive director was his assertion that the union—especially during DeMaurice Smith's six-year tenure—had largely failed in protecting players from long term physical harm. He further asserted that the NFLPA does not do enough to push for the enforcement of the game's current regulations.

"The absurdity of willful indifference perpetuated by the NFLPA, permitting NFL Physicians to ignore the return-to-play guidelines, makes our union a farce and puts our members at an increased incremental risk of permanent brain damage," Morey wrote in his candidacy platform letter.

The entire letter is a damning assessment of the NFLPA's efforts to protect its players from long term neurological harm.

Morey had personal experience with this negligence. A former special teams player who retired due to concussion symptoms, Morey had previously pushed for the creation of the Players Health Trust, an organization that would be run by players and independent scientists which would help identify and treat those with neurological damage and disease. The PHT initially had support of other players who serve on the union's executive committee, but was never implemented.

This, Morey argues, was just one of many instances that seemed to indicate a lack of commitment by NFLPA in protecting its members.

Perhaps the most ominous warning sign for Borland—and the entire player pool, really— of where the union really stands in the player safety debate was the re-election this week of Smith as executive director despite his pitiful track record. The message was clear: Players can expect more of the same.

Borland seemed ready to be done with all of it.

Borland's retirement almost certainly doesn't signal football's death. It doesn't have to. But perhaps it can signal the beginning of the end of the game as we know it. Football can evolve without dying, so long as it deals honestly with the risks that players like Borland currently are left to asses on their own.