Barack Obama and Donald Trump disagree on pretty much everything.
Climate change.
The Iran nuclear deal.
Russia.
Curiously enough, you can add concussions to the list of areas that divide the current president and president-elect.
Both Obama and, to a lesser extent, Trump have made public statements on concussions in sports, especially when it comes to whether athletes should come out of a game or shake off the injury and return to play.
During the eight years of the Obama administration, the attention paid to concussions has grown exponentially, although that's not exactly the president's doing. Under heightened scrutiny from fans and the media, the NFL and NHL established and revised their concussion protocols. With a growing number of high-profile cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), not to mention the dramatization of the issue in the Pittsburgh-filmed movie "Concussion," it was inevitable that Obama would have occasion to weigh in on the issue.
Perhaps his most telling statement:
"I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football," Obama told The New Republic in early 2013.
He stated that sentiment even more strongly in a profile in The New Yorker, in 2014: "I would not let my son play pro football," he said.
Even still, Obama does not curb his own NFL-fandom because of the concussion issue. "These guys, they know what they're doing," Obama said in The New Yorker piece. "They know what they're buying into. It is no longer a secret. It's sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?"
He expressed more concern for college players: "I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they're grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies," he said in The New Republic interview. "You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That's something that I'd like to see the NCAA think about."
Obama knew Dave Duerson, the former NFL safety who committed suicide in 2011. Duerson shot himself in the chest, preserving his brain for research, and was later found to have CTE.
"And when you think about the toll that NFL players are taking, it's tough," Obama told Bill Simmons. "Now, the problem is, if you talk to NFL players, they're going to tell you that that's the risk I take; this is the game I play. And I don't know whether you can make football, football if there's not some pretty significant risk factors."
Obama's most extensive remarks on concussions were in May 2014, when the White House played host to the Healthy Kids and Safe Sports Concussion Summit. At that meeting, he confessed that he likely had experienced concussions as a young football player.
"Before the awareness was out there, when I was young and played football briefly, there were a couple of times where I'm sure that that ringing sensation in my head and the need to sit down for a while might have been a mild concussion, and at the time you didn't think anything of it," he said. "The awareness is improved today, but not by much. So the total number of young people who are impacted by this early on is probably bigger than we know."
Still, he emphasized that concussions are not just a football problem, and said it is critical for kids to keep playing sports even as he advocated for heightened awareness around brain injuries.
"We have to change a culture that says you suck it up," he said. "Identifying a concussion and being able to self-diagnose that this is something that I need to take care of doesn't make you weak _ it means you're strong."
It is on that latter point that Obama and Trump most disagree. In October, a woman at a Trump campaign rally in Lakeland, Fla., fainted. But she soon returned to the event, prompting Trump to compare her response, rather favorably, with the NFL's concussion protocol.
"That woman was out cold, and now she's coming back," Trump said, per The Washington Post. "See, we don't go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussions _ 'Uh oh, got a little ding on the head? No, no, you can't play for the rest of the season' _ our people are tough."
Though concussion symptoms can lead to long-term issues, most concussion symptoms resolve themselves on their own within weeks.
And conventional wisdom, along with recent research, suggests that being removed from play is not a matter of being tough, but rather getting better health outcomes. In September, researchers at UPMC and three universities published a study finding that young athletes who continued to play immediately after a concussion took longer to recuperate from the injury and had a more problematic recovery.
Trump's statement does not appear to be an off-the-cuff comment. During a rally in Reno, Nev., in January, Trump lamented the state of professional football, arguing it had become "soft."
"Now they tackle. 'Oh, head-on-head collision, 15 yards,'" Trump said, according to The Post. "The whole game is all screwed up. You say, 'Wow, what a tackle.' Bing. Flag. Football has become soft. Football has become soft. Now, I'll be criticized for that. They'll say, 'Oh, isn't that terrible.' But football has become soft like our country has become soft."
And in 2013, before he was a presidential candidate, Trump took his complaints about the league to Twitter:
"Referees are destroying the enjoyment of NFL games. Slowing down the fun. Big shots. Jets game is ridiculous!"
But it gets weirder than that, and of course there's a Pittsburgh connection. One of Trump's attorneys in Florida, Herman J. Russomanno II, also has sued the NFL, representing players who thought the league deliberately misled them about the dangers of concussions. Russomanno worked with Pittsburgh lawyer Jason Luckasevic on those lawsuits, which were later merged with others part of a class-action settlement.
