Few, if any, owners in the National Football League have a voice that carries more weight than Dallas owner Jerry Jones. Between the length of his tenure as an owner, the championships that his team has won ever since he took over, and the fact that he owns the Cowboys, Jones’ is one person whose opinion matters.
Unfortunately, Jones has a bad opinion. It is a popular opinion among some football people, one that denies the existence of something that has been proven as a fact. This opinion holds that there is no link between playing football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, more commonly known as CTE. In fact, Jones (incorrectly) thinks that saying there is any kind of link between the two is “absurd.”
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told reporters it's absurd 2 say there's a relationship betwn CTE and playing football,saying not enough data
— Daniel Kaplan (@KaplanSportsBiz) March 22, 2016
https://twitter.com/BartHubbuch/status/712394308113055744
By now, enough information has been published to say with certainty that there is some type of relationship between contact sports like football and CTE. There have also been a few recent breakthroughs with regards to CTE – from a scientific perspective, it looks like doctors may be able to test the brains of living people and check for the disease, and as for the NFL’s stance on CTE, the league’s senior vice president for health and safety admitted that there is a link between the game and the disease last week.
So it’s kind of crazy that Jones would straight up say that it’s absurd to acknowledge that there’s a link between football and CTE. Even if he said that the jury’s still out on this issue, that would be a relatively not terrible stance compared to flat-out denial, even if it would be wrong.
Of course, Jones owns the Cowboys, so we shouldn’t be too surprised. As we all know, the Cowboys aren’t always good at acknowledging indisputable evidence of something.
