The NFL's CTE problem is worse than the new number says.
At least 24.5 percent of former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE. One in four. That's the headline. But here's the part the league will ignore: that number is a floor, not a ceiling.
The study, reported by Yahoo Sports and Pro Football Talk, used brain samples from the UNITE Brain Bank at Boston University. Those samples come from donated brains. That's the structural flaw. Not every former player's brain ends up in a lab. The families who choose to donate are making a decision. The rest? They stay unexamined. So the true figure could be much higher. A lot higher.
This is the problem the NFL doesn't want to face. The league's safety protocols have evolved. Rule changes. Concussion spotters. Better helmets. But the brains keep arriving with damage. And every study that depends on voluntary donation carries the same bias: the worried are overrepresented, the silent are invisible.
Twenty-four point five percent is the official number. The honest number is unknown and probably worse. The NFL should not read this as progress. It should read it as a warning that its efforts are not stopping the disease.
What happens next? More studies. More donations. More bad news. The league can keep pointing to its rulebook. The brain bank keeps pointing to the truth. And the truth is that the one in four is just the beginning.