Bob Costas Argues Football At War With Nature

During a FOX Sports Radio interview Saturday afternoon, legendary broadcaster Bob Costas disputed the notion there’s a media war against football while arguing the sport’s violent nature is a fundamental problem.

“In spite of all the game’s appeal and all the virtues of the game,” said Costas, the host of NBC’s Football Night in America, “common sense and evidence lead me to the conclusion that football has an existential problem, a fundamental problem with the very nature of the game.

“During all the controversies of the last couple of years, whether it was Deflategate or the bullying scandal in Miami, Bountygate in New Orleans, domestic violence or whatever it might be, you always heard people in the media and some football people say, ‘We hope to get our focus back on the field.’ But it’s when you get to the field, you find football’s single most significant and ongoing problem, because that’s the very nature of the game itself.”

Last week, the New York Times published an editorial from Dr. Bennet Omalu, the man who discovered CTE, that argued people should not play football until age 18. ESPN broadcaster Danny Kanell tweeted that there’s a media war on football, which sparked a debate about the media’s role in the concussion discussion.

“There’s no war on football, and, if there is, football is winning it in a rout,” Costas said. “It remains by far, not just the most popular sport, but it is the single most popular audience aggregating thing in all of American pop culture. But many people who enjoy football and admire football, players and like people in the game, nonetheless are aware of what’s going on. You’d have to truly be unaware not to realize that football has a fundamental problem with the nature of the game.”

The problem, in Costas’ view, is brain trauma.

“You can’t play football at the level in which it’s played at the highest levels of college and the NFL without a substantial level of players suffering some sort of brain trauma. That isn’t just my opinion, it isn’t just Bennet Omalu’s observation, it’s what the league has already directly acknowledged in the suit brought against them by some 4,000 plus former players. They’ve already directly acknowledged that somewhere between 25 and 30 percent – that’s the NFL’s estimate – of players will sustain some measure of brain difficulty subsequent to their playing careers.”