Nate Jackson on the "genius" of football players

Former NFL tight end Nate Jackson has a very good piece up on MMQB that I highly recommend. It covers not just the effects of concussions but also football's allure and the sense of loss once a career ends.

I also wanted to call your attention to a parenthetical aside he throws in. It is a bit off topic, but I think it is an important point that we casual observers of sports often overlook:

"(And make no mistake, it is the athletic mind of the athlete that connects the dots; brilliant performance artists, the lot of them, mistaken as dummies because they never learned to file a report or calculate a spreadsheet. But try visualizing an explosively violent and incredibly intricate physical task, and then DOING it with your two hands, your body, your limbs, your connections, the synapses, the will and the fire, in real time against the most dominant members of the species. That’s genius too.)"