Football has found itself in the limelight, and not for something that anyone should be proud of. Amid the allegations of things such as domestic violence and murder, there has also been another controversy, concussions and other head injuries that have been obtained throughout the players’ careers.

After affected players and families banded together in order to advocate for their cause they have finally been heard, and the one billion dollar compensation for players with head injuries has been set to be approved. These advocates may have been fighting for a long time to reach this day, but the whole thing is ludicrous.

It’s tragic that these people have been forced to live with injuries that have impaired their lives and their capabilities, but it’s not like they went into the sport without knowing that there might be physical consequences. Maybe they didn’t know exactly what the long term effects would be, but they had to have known that they had the chance of getting hurt in some way or another. I’m not without empathy for them, I just don’t think that they should have gone after the NFL for compensation.

Not only did these adults choose to go into a dangerous profession, but it’s hard for me to believe that they didn’t know head injuries were prevalent in their career field. To me it’s kind of a dead giveaway that tackling people at high speeds, game after game, season after season, might possibly cause long term brain damage. Doesn’t that kind of seem like an obvious end result? This might be an upsetting conclusion, but it’s the truth.

If the players had been coerced into playing my stance on this topic would be different, however that is not the case. All of the people who received head injures while playing football in the NFL gave their consent to play, which is why a call for compensation is hard to believe. Since when do people get compensated for tragedies that happen because of something that they gave their own consent to. It just seems a little off to me.

It’s true that the NFL might not have been totally in the clear with this whole controversy either, maybe they knew more than they let on all along. Yet, either way the players were the ones who decided to play despite the risks, and now that something negative arose because of it they shouldn’t just be able to turn around and blame someone else. That’s just not the way the world should work.

In truth, the NFL probably agreed to pay the advocates of this cause off so that this whole controversy would just end. If that is really the case, maybe the obvious victims are in fact not the victims in this instance at all. Perhaps  they were the ones that were initially hurt by the sport, but if the NFL are the ones that are getting “coerced” in the end, who are the real victims? Some people may think that this payout is helping put the situation to rest, when it is really just reinforcing the fact that organizations like the NFL can be pushed into submission just so that they can put the bad times behind them.