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My middle son loves football. He loves to watch, manage his fantasy team and play in the back yard. He really wants to play on an organized team too. But we won’t let him.

The whole brain injury business is the driving factor in our decision. And we tell our middle boy that. He disagrees.

Today as he was searching for the sports page I offered the front page and a story about a former Viking who died a few years ago. Died in his 60’s. When he died his diagnoses was ALS but his brain was also donated to scientific study. As it turns out his death wasn’t caused by ALS, he didn’t have ALS at all. His symptoms, and eventual death, were caused by accumulated brain injuries, all sustained during his career as a football player. As we’ve always told our son, his brains were basically scrambled.

You’d think the prospect of early death and increasingly disabling brain trauma would be enough to convince a kid that a future in football is inherently flawed. It isn’t. He thinks he’s invincible. He also thinks he would specialize as a punter and that middle school football couldn’t possibly scramble his brains. To which I thought, “Oh crap, he’ll be in middle school next year.”