Colts owner Jim Irsay compares football risk to taking aspirin

The ongoing issue of safety in the NFL is very complex, as is the problem with concussions and the risk players run in playing football.

But we can all agree that comments like this, from Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay to Sports Business Journal's Daniel Kaplan, don't help the league's plight:

“I believe this: that the game has always been a risk, you know, and the way certain people are," Irsay told SBJ. "Look at it. You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin, it might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body … may reject it, where I would be fine. So there is so much we don’t know.”

 

Let's sum up some of the madness.
 

• NFL commissioner Roger Goodell responded to a question about NFL safety before last season's Super Bowl with a strange comparison. "There is risk in everything," Goodell said. "There is risk sitting on the couch."

 

• Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones downplayed the scientific findings that have found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of many dead football players. He said there isn't enough research to draw an absolute conclusion between CTE and football.
"That’s absurd," Jones said. "There’s no data that in any way creates a knowledge."
 

• Irsay compared the dangers of football to the dangers of taking aspirin.
 

There's a legitimate message from each man. Goodell talked in that press conference about the rewards of football outweighing the risk. In many ways that's true. Jones clarified his comments later to say that he was explaining there isn't enough data to draw a definite link between football and CTE. That's true too, as medical professionals told Yahoo Sports' Eric Adelson. Irsay made many comments to Sports Business Journal that made sense, such as it being an inherent risk to play football but playing the sport is worth it.

The problem is, their message gets lost with statements that make absolutely no sense, like comparing the risks of playing football to the risks of taking aspirin.

Or, of fairly disrespectful comments like this one from Irsay to the Sports Business Journal.

“To try to tie football, like I said, to suicides or murders or what have you, I believe that is just so absurd as well and it is harmful to other diseases, harmful to things like … when you get into the use of steroids, when you get into substance abuse, you get into the illness of alcohol and addiction," Irsay, who has talked about his battles with alcohol and drug addiction, said. "It’s a shame that gets missed, because there [are] very deadly diseases there, for instance, like alcoholism and addiction. That gets pushed to the side and [a person] says, ‘Oh, no. Football.’ To me, that’s really absurd.”

To say that it's "absurd" that football might have played a role in the suicides of players like Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and Andre Waters is downplaying the issue in a dangerous and hurtful way. We don't know conclusively if football and the effects from playing it caused them to turn to suicide. But we don't know that it didn't, either. The NFL has had some great players kill themselves after they were done playing the game, and it's probably not the smartest move to blow off the idea that they did so because of what happened to their brains from playing football.

It makes sense that Goodell and the owners extol the virtues of football and downplay the dangers. It's understandable and there are good arguments to back up their stance. But can we please quit comparing the dangers of football to sitting on the couch and taking aspirin, please?