Item: The NFL’s response to the study was to roll out apologists for the sport, using “It’s not the worst thing,” Rationalization #22, as its justification.

• ‘This is probably the safest time to be playing the sport of football’: Concussion expert explains why viral CTE study may not be as scary as it sounds”

Item: Similarly frustrated with the refusal of Americans to abandon a sport that kills people is John Branch, who has been trying to get the CTE scandal through Americans’ thick heads for over a decade. He writes in part,

“Twenty years into its C.T.E. era, the N.F.L. is more popular and profitable than ever. Revenues rise even as the math becomes clearer for the once immeasurable price paid in brain damage sustained by football players…We are living in an era of cognitive dissonance, sociologists said. How many C.T.E. cases, they wondered, are too many for fans’ collective consciousness? What would it take to quit watching, or to quit sending children into the scrum? How many irreversibly damaged brains in the N.F.L. would turn away the masses?…By any standard of workplace safety, C.T.E. is an epidemic. There may be no industry that does so much damage to its workers. And we know that the damage sometimes also reaches teens who play the game just for fun…Yet millions of children continue to play tackle football. American universities spend billions of dollars on it — higher education leaders knowingly fostering a sport that leaves some of its students addled with a neurological brain disease. The pipeline of players, an inexhaustible resource, keeps flowing toward the N.F.L.

“And fans keep cheering.

As I have documented on Ethics Alarms, I decided to boycott football, especially the Super Bowl, many years ago. Admittedly, as a professional ethicist I am obligated to hold myself to a higher standard, but not actively supporting a corrupt business that knowing kills people is hardly exemplary ethics.

Meanwhile, NCAA rules now force schools to pay college football players, adding to tuition costs and warping the purpose of higher education, not that it isn’t warped already. That income is now inspiring players who have played in NFL camps to return to college football teams, which in at least one case, saw them received with open arms.

The entire football culture at all levels is literally ethics-free.