Alexander: Leigh Steinberg digs in on football’s ‘ticking time bomb’

Leigh Steinberg was representing NFL players in an era when TV announcers, instead of saying that a player had gone into concussion protocol as they do now, were just as likely to say he’d gotten his bell rung.

No, we didn’t know as much then about traumatic brain injuries as we do now.

“In the late ’80s, I’m representing half the starting quarterbacks in the NFL, and they keep getting hit in the head,” Steinberg said in a phone conversation last week.

“And we go to doctors and ask, ‘How many is too many whence you contemplate retirement?’ And they had no answers, because so much of what we know about the brain has come in the last 20 years.”

Information is more plentiful now, as is a greater emphasis on caution and prevention. Steinberg, through the launch of the Leigh Steinberg Foundation for Concussion, Traumatic Brain Injury and Brain Health earlier this year, intends to play a role in not only further increasing awareness of the effects of concussions but seeking answers that will help make football safer and safeguard players’ long-term health.

It seems like a tall hill to climb. But consider how far we’ve come, and how much we know now that we didn’t know then. The NFL released in January that concussions in the 2024 regular season had decreased 17% from the previous season and were the lowest they’d been since the league started tracking them in 2015. Changes in practice procedures, in when to remove a player from a game, and even in game rules – such as this past season’s change in the way players line up for kickoffs – have helped.

Yet it remains an issue at all levels of not only football but of any collision sport. One concussion is too many.

Thus, the foundation’s mission statement described its goal as “advancing the understanding, prevention, and treatment of concussions, traumatic brain injuries (TBI), and other brain health challenges.”

The roots of that initiative have come from conferences Steinberg has hosted over three decades to discuss the issue, bringing together his clients and experts in the field. He recalled one particular session in 1994 that included Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Warren Moon and Drew Bledsoe, among the players who listened to neurologists.

Among the topics discussed then, he recalled, were suggestions about changes in blocking and tackling with head-first hits, recommendations for the proper age to begin playing youth football, and a proposal that teams practice without hitting, “as they do in the Ivy League,” he said, and saving full contact for games.

Bennet Omalu, the physician, forensic pathologist, and neuropathologist who was the first to discover chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, after doing the autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, addressed Steinberg’s clients in 2006 and confirmed that three or more concussions were the point where the chances were greater that “you have an exponentially higher rate of Alzheimer’s, premature senility, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and depression,” Steinberg said.

“So I called it a ticking time bomb and an undiagnosed health epidemic. Those were some lonely days. The head of the NFL Brain Committee, a doctor named Elliot Pellman, went to ‘Sports Illustrated’ and called me a ‘fear monger.’ But we continued to explore.”

One of the purposes of those sessions, Steinberg told PBS’ ‘Frontline’ program in 2013, was to make sure his clients were informed of the most up-to-date information on “causation, long-term impact (and) potential ways to alleviate the whole specter of concussion,” as well as to “see if we could find a standardized regimen of diagnosis and treatment.”

“I’ve probably held 30 conferences,” he said last week. “We did a two-hour one at the Super Bowl this year. And one of the things we discovered is that there’s no focus on the subconcussive hit … Every time a lineman hits a lineman at the inception of a play, it produces a little bit of brain change. And so theoretically, you could have someone who played 10, 15 years of football in high school, college, and the pros who had 10,000 sub-concussive events, none of which have been diagnosed to the player, and none of which he’s aware of, because he just feels stunned.”

The Steinberg Foundation includes an advisory board with leading neurologists nationwide, and retired players like Moon, Earl Campbell, Brett Favre and Bruce Smith, “because the current (players) don’t really want to talk about it,” he said.

One goal is to raise funds to research a potential solution, and to determine methodologies that are better suited to protecting the brain and to help it heal and prevent swelling in the event of a traumatic hit. A potential solution is rTMS, which uses magnetic pulses to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. Another is neurofeedback, in which individuals are trained to improve their brain function.

Ideally, Steinberg said, the foundation will promote awareness of an issue that affects not only football players but those in other collision sports, as well as soccer players who head the ball. Another ambition, he said, is to help provide treatment in at-risk communities.

If you get the impression that there’s a sense of personal responsibility here, you’re probably right.

“I didn’t go into the business of representing professional athletes to lead them down the road to dementia,” Steinberg said. “And you know it’d be easier in a lot of ways to just ignore the issue, but we’re talking about athletes who are in denial. So when you have a discussion about long-term health, it’s just an abstraction.”

And his best allies in such conversations tend to be mothers, girlfriends, wives and others who have a stake in the matter.

“There’s not a lot of awareness about the danger and there’s not a lot of awareness about the long-term risks,” Steinberg added.

“So it’s one thing to know that you played football at different levels and when you’re 50 you bend over to pick up your kid and you have aches and pains. It’s another thing to not recognize that child.”

jalexander@scng.com