The Game Takes Another: Remembering Aldon Smith and Why We Can't Keep Ignoring What Football Does to Its Warriors

You know, I've been around this game a long time. I've watched men do things on a football field that seem almost impossible, watched them hit each other at full speed and then get back up and do it again on the next play. That's football. That's the beauty of it and that's also the cost of it, though we don't always want to talk about the cost. But this week, we lost a man who was one of the best pass rushers I've ever seen, and I need to talk about it honestly, the way a real fan should, because Aldon Smith was special and his story matters to all of us who love this game.

Aldon Smith passed away at 36 years old. That's young. That's too young. That's a man in the prime years he should've had ahead of him, with grandkids to watch grow up, with memories still being made, and instead his family is left to wonder what happened and what role his brain might have played in his death. They're donating his brain to medical research. That tells you something right there about a family that's trying to make sense of a tragedy by potentially helping the rest of us understand it better. That's grace. That's the kind of thing that should humble all of us.

When Aldon came into the league in 2011 as a first-round pick for the San Francisco 49ers, the football world knew they'd seen something special step onto an NFL field. Now, let me tell you something about pass rushers, because I've got a lot of respect for how hard that job is. You're lining up against 300-pound guys whose only job is to stop you. You're trying to get to a quarterback who's about forty yards away, and you've got maybe three seconds to do it. You've got to be strong, you've got to be smart, and you've got to be relentless. Aldon was all three. He was a kid who understood leverage, who knew where he needed to be, and who had this almost supernatural ability to diagnose what was happening and get to the ball carrier.

In 2012, his second year in the league, Aldon had 19.5 sacks and made the All-Pro team as a rookie defensive end. Nineteen and a half sacks. You know how hard that is? You know how many hits to the head that represents? You know how many collisions that is with the biggest, strongest men on the planet? I'm not talking about normal tackling. I'm talking about explosion, violence, controlled aggression at the highest level. He was doing this over and over and over again. In 2013, he had another 14.5 sacks. The guy was a force of nature. He was in his early twenties, his body was a temple, and he was one of the three or four most dominant pass rushers in all of professional football.

But here's where the story gets complicated, and this is where we have to be honest as fans. Aldon struggled with off-field issues. He had suspensions, he had arrests, he had times when it looked like he was throwing away his career. Now, I'm not here to judge anybody. Lord knows I don't know what demons he was fighting, what was going on in his mind, what he was dealing with that we couldn't see from the stands. But I will tell you this, and this is important, that sometimes when we see a guy making bad decisions, when we see a guy getting in trouble, when we see a guy whose life seems chaotic, we don't stop and think about what might be going on with his brain. We don't think about whether the hits are changing who he is as a person.

That's what this donation of his brain to medical research is all about. His family is saying, "Maybe something that happened on the football field contributed to this. Maybe the hundreds of collisions and tackles and blocks contributed to what his life became." That's not an excuse for anything anybody did. That's not letting anybody off the hook. That's actually something more serious than that. That's asking us to look at what we know about brain trauma and what we're not doing about it.

I love football with my whole chest. I've loved it since I was a kid. I love the strategy of it, the way coaches like Tom Landry and Chuck Noll and Chuck Swanson, God rest him, could see things three moves ahead. I love the athleticism of it, the way these guys can run and jump and feel the game. I love the brotherhood of it, the way a team becomes something larger than the individuals on it. But I can't love football and pretend we don't have a problem with how our players' brains are being damaged by this game. That's not honest, and this game deserves honesty.

We've known about CTE for years now. We've seen the research. We've read the stories about Junior Seau and Dave Duerson and all the others. We've heard from families whose loved ones played this game, took repeated head trauma, and then changed in ways that scared them. Became angry. Became impulsive. Became people they weren't before. Now, I'm not saying that's what happened with Aldon. I don't know that. His family doesn't know that yet. But the fact that they're asking the question, the fact that they're willing to donate his brain to find out, that matters. That matters to all of us who care about this game and care about the men who play it.

Here's what gets me about Aldon Smith's story. He was a young man. He was talented beyond measure. He was doing what he loved at the highest level of professional sports. And somewhere along the way, things got hard. He had problems. He didn't play for a while. He came back and had some good moments, played for a couple of different teams, tried to find his way. But the point is, he was a human being who was dealing with things, and we didn't have the framework to understand whether those things might have been connected to the job he was doing, to the repeated trauma his brain was experiencing.

You know what football taught me? Football teaches you accountability. Football teaches you that you've got to take care of your teammates, that you've got to look out for the guys next to you, that the team is bigger than any individual. Well, if that's true, then we've got to take care of these guys whose brains are getting knocked around week after week. We've got to be serious about it. We've got to fund the research. We've got to keep improving the protocols. We've got to listen to the players and their families when they tell us something's wrong.

Aldon Smith was one of the greatest pass rushers to ever put on a uniform. He made plays that made you jump off your couch. He made quarterbacks uncomfortable. He changed games. He was a star, and he was just getting started when all his talent was on display. That he's gone now, that his family is left wondering, that his brain has to be studied to understand what might have contributed to his death, that's a loss that extends way beyond his family. That's a loss for all of us who love this game, because it reminds us that we've got an obligation to take this seriously.

This is why fans should care. This isn't about politics or blame or any of that. This is about the fact that the men we watch and cheer for and love are putting their bodies and their brains on the line every single Sunday. They're doing it because they love the game, because they're competitive, because that's who they are. The least we can do is make sure we're doing everything we can to understand the risks and to protect them. We can love football and demand better at the same time. We have to.