The 74-year-old head coach of the University of San Diego football team begins a conversation on concussions in football with a pronouncement of perspective.

“I played during the dark ages,” Dale Lindsey said.

There were no facemasks when Lindsey first pulled on a hard leather helmet in middle school.

He suffered, by his count, six concussions.


And to be sure, spending any time at all with the man who played in the NFL from 1965 to ‘73 is cause to hope to be nearly as mentally and physically agile as he is in his eighth decade.

Lindsey occasionally demonstrates a dismissive air about the relationship between football and long-term brain trauma. But he is no Neanderthal. He is knowledgeable about the science of concussions and said he won’t compromise his stance of not allowing one his players who has been “dinged in the head” to continue playing that day.

“Nobody is going to be permanently damaged here for a football game,” he said.

The scary fact, however, is no one can say that with any authority.


And across the USD campus, there are those who wonder how long it can be pretended that anyone can.

So it was that the Faculty Assembly of the College of Arts & Sciences at USD, whose monthly meetings often delve into the tedium of bureaucracy, was the occasion of a spirited 35-minute discussion on the prudence of an institution of higher education sanctioning an activity that may be dooming its participants to debilitation.

At the behest of three faculty members, a non-binding resolution was proposed to ban USD’s highly successful football program.

“As faculty members, one of our primary duties is to safeguard the well being of our students,” history professor Kenneth Serbin explained of the trio’s opposition to football on the basis of its purported links to long-term brain trauma. “… We believe playing tackle football, especially in (light of) the scientific evidence, is a danger to our students.


The vote was not close — a 50-26 defeat with 30 abstentions.

Even had the resolution passed, there would have been many more steps before it had any chance of leading to the abolishment of football on the campus. School President James Harris is on record saying he supports the football program and that the concussion issue is “complicated” but that he is open to further discussion pending new information.

“I think we are at the end of the road,” associate professor of psychology Nadav Goldschmied said of the effort put forth by he, Serbin and physics professor Daniel Sheehan.

Maybe. For now.


But it is not impossible to believe that one day we would look back and tell about the time the psychology professor, the history professor and the physics professor walked into a meeting.

And it wouldn’t be a joke.

Is it so absurd to think that universities, where the chief aim is to improve minds, could someday not too far in the future decide they can’t be party to an endeavor that has the unfortunate side effect of harming minds?

Remember, there was a time the world didn’t look twice at a pregnant woman sipping wine. Even more recently, inhaling smoke filled with toxins was not seen as all that ridiculous of a behavior.


“We would hope this would spark other universities to follow in our footsteps,” said Serbin, who believes this was the first vote of its kind on any college campus. “We don’t see the vote as a total loss. We see the vote as a starting place.”

For the record, these educators are sounding the alarm on a sport they respect for its abundance of redeeming qualities.

Especially as it is played at USD, even the most strident believers that football is a danger to those who play it would acknowledge the game provides lessons in perseverance and teamwork that are difficult to replicate even in other sports.

The Toreros, who don’t award football scholarships, graduate their players at a greater rate than the general student population. While they are highly competitive in the Football Championship Series level, having just won their fourth consecutive Pioneer Football League title and made their third FCS playoff appearance, it is a source of pride among coaches that players sometimes miss practice for required classwork.


“We have a model intercollegiate football program,” Athletic Director Bill McGillis said. “… Performance is important while focusing on outstanding academic achievement.”

The problem, as the professors see it, is this, in the words of Serbin: “If you don’t have a healthy brain you cannot enjoy those experiences.”

For Sheehan, it got to be too much for too long. He would on occasion over the years see football players in his class with their heads down, unable to concentrate.

As a physicist, he began looking into the effects of head collisions in football, conducting his own research and absorbing the growing number of studies that indicate head trauma inherent to football causes long-term damage.


There is, famously now, the recent Boston University study of 111 brains of deceased NFL players in which the degenerative brain disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy was found in 110.

The same researcher found CTE in 48 out of 53 (91 percent) brains of football players who stopped playing after college, and almost half of those exhibited severe pathology.

The NFL and others have dismissed this and other studies as subjective. And perhaps that will prove to be the case. But what if it’s half-right. What if 45 percent of college football players end up with CTE and 28 percent of those exhibit severe pathology?

For the professors, this data, even if it needs more replicable study, cannot be ignored. To them, those sanctioning football might not have the inherent evilness of Big Tobacco, but the results of their complicity is just as devastating.


“We are pretty dumb,” Goldschmied said. “If you see two people banging their heads repeatedly against each other, this is likely to bring about danger, sickness. It’s so obvious. Now we have scientific evidence, we have something to back it up. … This is not a healthy game. This is a dangerous game. It is clear. There is no gray area here.”

Where McGillis, Lindsey and so many others almost unfailingly point out research that says football results in fewer concussions than girls’ soccer, basketball and volleyball, Sheehan counters that the rules of those sports can be sufficiently altered to greatly reduce head trauma. Football is a collision sport played by increasingly large men who are increasingly strong and are running increasingly fast into each other.

“The laws of physics are stringent, and they make it very difficult for football to be safe without head impacts,” Sheehan said. “You either slow the game down or outlaw head impacts. … In 20 years, football as we know it will not exist, I don’t think. Too much is being known.”

That is a thought taking hold in many corners, including within the NFL.


The sport’s future most likely hinges on as-yet-unrealized advances in helmet safety.

Perhaps technology progresses as rapidly in developing “safe” helmets and/or helmets that can measure the force of hits to the head as it does with mobile phones.

An incredulous Lindsey said this: “We have sent men to the moon. You mean to tell me there isn’t some dude out there who can’t figure this out, that could make something would give us more protection?”

Those of us who love and appreciate football can only hope.


Otherwise, time is running out — if not for football itself, then for people who sanction the sport to continue to not address the very same questions posed by the psychology and physics and history professors.

kevin.acee@sduniontribune.com