Concussion is bound to give the NFL a massive headache, focusing on the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu and his discovery of CTE, a common disease found in football players.
For the last few years, the NFL has taken on a whole lot of controversy surrounding just…so many different topics. Domestic abuse, drugs, deflated balls…and in many of these situations, it’s been common for the NFL to just handle incidents in the worst way possible. One topic that’s come up recently and quickly has been the discussion of concussions in the NFL. There’s no denying that concussions are clearly not good for a human being, but they’ve been so common in football that for a long time they were afterthoughts. If you had a concussion, you wouldn’t tell anyone — you’d just go out there for the next play and continue doing your thing.
But then information began to leak out about the true dangers of concussions. And that’s not something the NFL wanted people to know about. It was Dr. Bennet Omalu who first identified that chronic brain damage was a key factor in the deaths of some of the most well known NFL players. The disease is known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which forms in the brain due to concussions and head injuries. Concussion, starring Will Smith as Dr. Omalu, is based on the work performed by this bravely intelligent man trying to do what’s right and trying to fight against what’s basically an American superpower in the NFL. The NFL has worked hard to denounce the work of Dr. Omalu…but I’d say in the end they’ve failed. After all, they are making a movie about it. And that could be bad news for the NFL.
Concussion is written and directed by Peter Landesman and stars Will Smith, Albert Brooks, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Paul Reiser, and Luke Wilson. Concussion will be in theaters December 25, 2015.
