The NFL keeps taking hits — on and off the field.
Jonathan Dwyer, the Arizona Cardinals running back, was arrested on Wednesday over allegations that he head-butted his 27-year-old wife — breaking her nose — and threw a shoe at their 18-month-old child.
Dwyer is the fourth NFL player recently arrested on domestic violence charges, with Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, and Ray McDonald also facing charges — and sparking widespread media coverage.
As a result, the NFL's overlooked domestic violence problems are getting increasingly scrutinized. While NFL players get arrested at just a fraction of the overall rate, their arrests for domestic violence are inordinately high — about four times higher that one would expect, controlling for their age and income.
Meanwhile, the NFL's concussion problem continues to be closely watched.
- Researchers at Boston University and the Sports Legacy Institute have documented ever more cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease that steadily destroys cognitive functions and leads to mood problems, in the brains of deceased NFL players.
- And the league has been grappling with a disturbing new report released last week that concluded 3 in 10 NFL players will suffer from at least moderate brain disease.
Is there a link between football players' concussions and their predisposition to commit domestic violence?
Writing at Forbes on Tuesday, I took a deep look into the existing evidence. Neurologists are agreed that head injuries can seriously harm how the brain regulates anger, and Penn professor and well-known "neurocriminologist" Adrian Raine acknowledged that a link between NFL players' head injuries and domestic violence is a "plausible hypothesis."
But no researcher has yet studied a direct relationship between concussions and NFL players' behavior. That's partly because there are many confounding factors. Starting when they're young, football players are cultivated for their aggression. And trying to hold onto a job in professional football — where many contracts aren't guaranteed — is inherently stressful, potentially leaving players on edge.
Also See: Does Football Make You Violent? Examining the Evidence
Since Tuesday, several other writers have begun to explore a possible link between concussions and aggression. At The New Republic on Wednesday, Naomi Shavin asked if head trauma has been found to make people violent. As Shavin writes, researchers often have found connections:
One famous study from 1986 looked at 15 death row inmates and found that all of them had experienced a traumatic head injury in childhood. A 1996 report looked at 279 Vietnam War Veterans who suffered penetrating brain injuries found that those with damage to a particular part of the frontal cortex demonstrated more aggression.
But as one doctor cautions Shavin, it's difficult to retrospectively look at a violent population — especially one that doesn't include football players — and come to a broad conclusion about a link between concussions and domestic violence.
Courtesy AP/Bill Haber
Linda Carroll at NBC News on Wednesday also examined the issue, finding agreement that head injuries can damage the brain's frontal lobes, which control against aggressive behavior. But some neurologists were skeptical that the NFL's concussion and domestic violence problems were linked.
For example, a doctor who had served as the Pittsburgh Steelers' team physician said that of all patients with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, he could only think of two athletes — wrestler Chris Benoit and a retired NFL player named Justin Strzelczyk — who appeared to become more violent after suffering brain trauma.
But the doctor's list ignores many football players who ran into trouble with the law, and were subsequently diagnosed with CTE after their death.
Junior Seau, the former NFL star who suffered from CTE and committed suicide at just 43 years-old, had been arrested on domestic violence charges several months after he retired. Dave Duerson, an All-Pro football safety who was diagnosed with CTE, was arrested for domestic violence too.
Even in players with CTE that were never arrested for domestic violence, controlling anger became an issue. Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver who suffered from CTE, died in the middle of a "domestic dispute" with his fiancee. NFL Hall of Famer Lou Creekmur, diagnosed with CTE, "suffered from increasingly intensive angry and aggressive outbursts" his family told researchers.
Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer, was the first football player to be diagnosed with CTE. And in the years leading up to Webster's death, he became increasingly angry and violent, his widow told PBS Frontline. "The governor on his anger was gone," Pam Webster said. "The anger was there, but you never knew when it was coming."
In one example, Pam Webster said:
I came home, and he was angry about something; I don't even remember at this point what it was. But he took a knife and slashed all his football pictures. They were all destroyed and gone, and broken glass. And they were all down.
And it wasn't Mike. Mike would have never done this.
Interviewer: And the violence toward you to the point where you were afraid of him.
Yeah, I was afraid. I didn't know what to expect. There was only one incidence of physical violence. But his anger was just so out of proportion to what had happened or what would happen.
Dr. David Hovda, an influential UCLA researcher who's worked with the NFL, told NBC News's Carroll that if there was a real link between head injuries and violence, it should show up in the national population.
"If concussions caused violent behavior you’d expect to see millions of people shooting each other," he said.
Hovda's quote, perhaps taken out of context, muddles the point. Yes, everyone suffers a few stray concussions — bonking your head on a kitchen cabinet, getting in a minor car accident.
The key issue is whether suffering repeated head trauma lowers a person's self-control. And while many pro football players haven't been diagnosed with concussions in the NFL, nearly all of them have been playing football since they were young and suffered repetitive, frequent blows that can add up over time.
And researchers know that those concussions can change a person. Even a pillar of the community.
Take Dave Duerson. After he retired from the NFL in 1993, he became a distinguished businessman. He joined the board of the University of Notre Dame. He was a friend of Barack Obama.
But publicly, Duerson's life began to crumble after he was arrested for domestic violence in 2006.
"My wife and I had an argument in South Bend, and, you know, I lost control for three seconds," Duerson said in an interview, several years before he killed himself. "That was a one-time event -- the most disappointing of my entire life."
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