Lance Briggs said he enjoyed every minute of football even though the physical consequences were severe. But he knew that going in.
“It’s a type of high I can’t explain,” Briggs said of his playing years in a Sqor video trailer. “And football players get it from those collisions. Those eight to 10 seconds of pure aggression, violence and finesse and calculation and angles. You know, I didn’t feel like I was in the game until I had a good pop. Either I got popped or I popped somebody.”
Those pops added up. Briggs, who played 12 years in the NFL as a linebacker for the Chicago Bears and played college football at Arizona and high school ball before that, is experiencing the early stages of living with symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a progressive degenerative disease that affects people who have suffered repeated or severe head trauma.