We don’t yet know for sure that concussions produced the physical and emotional problems that contributed to wrestler/football player Kosta Karageorge’s suicide at Ohio State University. But while we’re all thinking about the question, recall this 2012 New York Times story about an already accomplished young wrestler who decided he’d had one too many hits.

A charismatic athlete from Minnesota who was pegged by some wrestling experts as a future Olympic medalist, [Jake] Deitchler retired in January [at age 22] because of the cumulative effects of about a dozen concussions.

Deitchler sat out a year and a half before wrestling briefly last fall for the University of Minnesota, when symptoms like fogginess returned…

… Deitchler still has short-term memory lapses. But his symptoms are not as severe as two years ago, he said, when he drove his moped on the wrong side of a street near the University of Minnesota, and fell asleep at a youth meet where he was supposed to be coaching.

“His concussion problems were really bad, and I didn’t know what was going on,” said Brandon Paulson, Deitchler’s former coach and the co-director of PINnacle. “He was forgetting everything. He was forgetting to show up to practice. He was really messed up.”

… Deitchler deferred acceptance to Minnesota to train in Greco-Roman full time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Though bothered by headaches, nausea and blurred vision, Deitchler kept wrestling. “I didn’t have necessarily short-term memory problems,” he said. “It wasn’t really affecting me too bad.”

Things worsened in 2009 after he enrolled at Minnesota. In the first month of practice, a senior trying to escape a hold drove his head into Deitchler’s chin. “I was just in a daze, and it didn’t go away,” he said. “It lasted months.”

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From an article this morning in the Washington Post:

One study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in January of this year, found that repeatedly-concussed teens are three times more likely to develop depression. A separate paper, published in PLoS One last spring, suggested that teens with a history of head injury are at “significantly greater odds” of attempting suicide and “engaging in numerous violent behaviors.”

… One study, published in Clinics in Sports Medicine in 2005, analyzed 71 athletes who had either contemplated or committed suicide over the last several decades. Nearly half were found to be football players. More than 60 of the athletes were men. And the median age was 22. One such player was a Duke lineman named Ted McNairy, who committed suicide years after playing. [The paper went on to say:] “Of the 1.5 million high school players in the United States, 250,000 have a concussion in a given season. … Concussions on the field are probably underreported, both because they can be subtle, and because of football’s ‘rub-dirt-on-it ethos.”

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From an article in The Daily Beast:

Should CTE be found, Karageorge will join Andre Waters, Ray Easterling, Dave Duerson, Terry Long, Junior Seau, Paul Oliver, Shane Dronett, and Jovan Belcher in an ever-growing list of athletes with CTE who took their own lives and were wracked by memory loss, disorientation, cognitive issues, mood and personality changes, and crushing depression.

And yes, this is the point where we mention that even the NFL admits that nearly three in 10 former players will develop some form of debilitating brain injury in their lifetimes as a result of playing football. Concussion-related illnesses are usually presumed to be an issue for older, retired players, but Karageorge’s death at age 22 would set that myth aflame.

Then again, you would hope that notion would have gone the way of the dodo bird after a 29-year-old soccer player was found to have CTE after his autopsy, and an Olympic wrestler retired at 22.

… The treatment of concussed players in college football made headlines earlier this season when the University of Michigan’s athletic director, David Brandon, resigned in large part over Head Coach Brady Hoke’s mind-boggling decision to send a clearly concussed quarterback back out onto the field.

Ohio State’s football coach, Urban Meyer, or Athletic Director Gene Smith must be made to pay a similar price should it be found that Karageorge was already suffering from some form of traumatic brain injury when he committed suicide, or if the school’s policy was in any way negligent.

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From a comment thread in the OSU newspaper:

How many of these sad stories must we have before universities [acknowledge] the contradiction between educating a brain while traumatizing it?

Whether authorizing the payment of a modest stipend to student-athletes in order to ensure their continued loyalty or penalizing academically noncompliant programs to remind fans that college sports are not simply a farm for professional sports, the NCAA will do whatever it can to preserve its extremely marketable illusions. Absent organizing myths that appeal to casual fans, public interest in a spectator sport will dwindle. A purely cynical atmosphere is bad for business… Revenue-generating college sports will endure as an ungainly appendage to American universities until the precise moment when its costs outweigh its benefits. That day may come sooner rather than later. A chain of unfavorable legal decisions, culminating with a massive judgment award in one or more of the 65 concussion-related lawsuits pending against the NCAA in state and federal courts, could accomplish what a long tradition of media outrage has not been able to: the effacement of a puzzling 100-year marriage between research universities and high-end athletics. Should the plaintiffs prevail in some of these cases, payouts to injured athletes could run into the millions or perhaps even billions of dollars, rendering athletic departments insolvent and unable to continue subsidizing athletic exhibitions of any sort.

While UD agrees with Oliver Bateman that absolutely nothing will change about university revenue sports (beyond these sports plantationizing [Don’t think it’s a word? Look it up. – And I use it because Taylor Branch calls the revenue sports-mad university a plantation.] our universities yet more than they’ve already been plantationized), she disagrees about the cynicism thing. What more purely cynical atmosphere can you think of in current American culture than professional revenue sports? Professional football, professional basketball, professional baseball… I mean, baseball — are you kidding me? UD barely follows baseball, and every year it’s a race to the bottom to see which component – players, owners, agents – can out-cynical the other. Cynicism is part of the American Master of the Universe mystique (watch the game players in this film) and a national hero like Nick Saban or Bob Knight or Johnny Manziel or Cam Newton is a hero because he’s cynical, not despite the fact that he’s cynical.

(Sports like cycling are definitely bringing up the rear in the matter of sports and cynicism in America. What brought down Lance Armstrong would never bring down a baseball player. Not a really good baseball player. Eventually we’ll come to revere cyclists for their cynicism in the same way we revere other sportsmen for their cynicism.)

There’s no reason to think the illusion of student athletes is what makes university revenue sports profitable. The most profitable university programs are the most professionalized, the most nakedly cynical. These programs will fail – if they fail – due to financially crushing personal injury lawsuits.

College fans only care about the same thing professional fans care about: winning. You’ll find a few rows of drunks freezing their asses off in the stadium waving their school colors, but everyone’s laughing at them.

Even the drunks aren’t in it for whatever the old school thing means. They’re in it to get disorderly.

It’s not the sports program which is an ungainly appendage to the university, but the university which is an ungainly appendage to the sports program, and the university is ungainly because by definition it cannot be purely cynical (it’s a non-profit, and people like Charles Grassley are watching). It can be very cynical indeed, as Gordon Gee made clear when he made the mistake of going public with the absolute cynicism he brings to the concept “university president.” (‘When asked in March 2011 whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, a grinning Gee said: “No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.“‘)

Many presidents of our present-day Penn States know they owe their job to the politezza of the coach. They are very very very cynical. But unlike Gee they keep it to themselves.

It’s behind a New Yorker pay wall, but you might want to part with six bucks to enjoy Jay Martel’s brief Guide to the Top Bowl Games.

Here’s its last paragraph. The rest of the piece is along the same lines.

The E-Z-Does-It Catheter Cotton Bowl

This may be the marquee bowl game, with the undefeated Texas State College of the Pacific Homicidal Maniacs setting their sights on the No. 1-ranked Tallahassee University Khmer Rouge. These two college programs consistently rise to the top of every major statistical category including early-onset Alzheimer’s, so expect a real donnybrook. The media-day disclosure that every player on the Maniacs, except for the placekicker, sustained a concussion last week – even though no game was scheduled – sharply raised the level of anticipation for this clash.

There’s also news on coaches:

Lodi State made news last year by firing the former coach Chet Bracker after three losing seasons and paying him the remaining six million dollars on his contract to leave. This decision raised eyebrows, especially when Bracker came back and had to be paid another twenty-two million dollars to leave again.

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UD thanks Jeff.

Why is the argument here —

There is demand for minor league basketball and football, but there’s no need for it to be tied to universities, or for the leagues to abuse their workers. By spinning off these profit centers, universities could return to their educational missions, and treat athletics the way the NCAA’s Division III does: as an amateur activity to complement students’ education.

— so totally appalling to everyone? Just return to amateur, complementary football at universities, and if Americans seem to need more professional football teams so badly, form them. Why will this idea never fly?

It will never fly because it’s much more titillating to get your professional-level violence pure. It thrills you more, you’re more willing to pay for it, when you’re doing it, as it were, with a virgin. Not a wage-slave, exclusively-on-field, businessman, but – the heart begins to pound with the phrase – a student-athlete.

There’s an irresistible attraction here. You’re seeing the very first concussion, the initiation of the body into its brokenness. College is beautifully, irresistibly, caught up with youth, innocence, and bonding (the players aren’t individual, commercially transacting, agents; they’re unpaid members of a team), and those values – along with big-time football violence – can only enter the field with the big-time college team.

Why are luxury boxes full of excited businessmen in their fifties the real money-center of university football? Why are the mega-boosters with tens of millions of dollars in football donations, from T. Boone Pickens on down, old guys who’ve devoted their lives to the acquisition of wealth? Couldn’t they content themselves with the New England Patriots, etc? Indeed, why do people like Pickens and Nike’s Phil Knight get so involved with the team? Why couldn’t they get involved with the Patriots?

Because they love their alma mater? What a weird way of showing your love for your university. But like the latest football booster financial criminal – see this post – they all say the same thing. I want to show my gratitude to my university for giving me the academic skills to be a big success. Therefore, I’m giving my money to… the football team! Why not the library, if it’s about what the school gave you academically?

Because the library’s abstract, and anyway no one uses the library anymore. With the team, it’s all out there, a screaming brightly colored physically intense televised spectacle in which people not only pay attention to you but maybe even worship you, the way Oklahoma State worships Pickens and Oregon worships Phil Knight.

These motives go so deep that the reality of significant portions of some of these teams being composed not only of non-students, but criminals, doesn’t faze these men in the slightest. When they look at them play, they see deeply committed members of the student body who love the school as much as the old guys do. Students in the stands seem to see the same thing, strangely enough, even though the players tend to be totally isolated from the rest of the campus, living in their own dorms, taking their own special classes, and working out in their own gyms.

None of it matters – the corruption of the whole big-time university football enterprise, the high-profile bullies on the teams (and among some of the coaches, from Bobby Knight to Mike Leach), the university president and the board of trustees playing with themselves while their university gets shot to hell by the boosters and the coaches… None of it dims the peculiar fantasy the university football enthusiast is after.

So it’s got to be the university, and it’s got to be big. Until the age for entry into professional football is lowered and serious players don’t bother with universities, you’re going to watch the process whereby universities become Penn State or the University of Miami or Florida A&M happen over and over again.

Universities sometimes forget, in thinking about the benefits of big time sports, this one: Guaranteed permanent employment of a large, high-profile legal staff.

The bigger your athletic program, the more likely it is that, like Texas Tech, you’re currently being sued for tens of millions of dollars in a case followed by the national press.

It’s all about coaches. Lots of coaches are fine and upstanding. But if you keep hiring new ones long enough, you’re almost certainly going to end up with a drunk, a sadist, a loser, a guy who doesn’t know how to cheat without getting caught, or a quitter.

The quitter’s always leaving for a job that pays more. The sadist wallops his players real bad. The drunk gets caught plastered inside his Porsche. Even though you give the loser most of your endowment, he can’t win a game. And you know you’ve hit the bottom of the coaching barrel when the guy can’t even cheat like all the other coaches without getting caught. Only a death wish can explain that.

So all these guys sue, see. Or you sue them. I mentioned Texas Tech. A judge just ruled that TTU’s latest legal desperation move ain’t gonna work:

A judge says former football coach Mike Leach’s lawsuit over his firing from Texas Tech can move forward.

State District Judge William C. Sowder on Tuesday struck down the university’s claim of sovereign immunity from the lawsuit’s breach of conduct claim.

… The university fired Leach on Dec. 30, two days after it suspended him amid allegations he mistreated a player with a concussion.

… [Adam] James has said his coach twice ordered him to stand for hours while confined in a dark place during practice.

But here’s one other thing to keep in mind about big time university sports and constant expensive high-profile litigation: Fans love it. It’s an expected accompaniment to the story on the field, another game to follow. You gotta pay to play.