Trent Dilfer Doesn't Believe In Climate Change, Or The Link Between CTE And Football

Former NFL QB and talking head Trent Dilfer—a man who once told Colin Kaepernick to “be quiet and sit in the shadows”—has struck again with some of his Good Stuff. This time, it’s regarding both climate change and the link between football and CTE.

This journey starts with some comments made by UNC head coach Larry Fedora, who was proudly dismissive of the notion that football and CTE could be in any way connected. Fedora went on to say that “our game is under attack” and that he fears when football has to inevitably change, like it, “our country will go down, too.”

That sentiment was somehow echoed in a poorly reasoned op-ed by Yahoo Sports’ Eric Adelson. That blog was then tweeted out by Trent Dilfer:

A study done at the Boston University CTE center found that 110 out of the 111 brains of former NFL players they examined tested positive for CTE. Another study this year reviewed 246 brains of former football players at all levels— 211 had CTE. Tyler Hilinski, Chris Henry, Junior Seau, and several other former professional football players were posthumously diagnosed with CTE after they committed suicide. Even the NFL’s head of health and safety has acknowledged the connection between playing football and the development of CTE.

Oh, but there’s more from Dilfer. Next, he replies to a follower that equates this issue to climate change—a subject whose breadth of research makes it quite possibly the quintessential argument against his breathtakingly simplistic “Association is not causation” stance. Out of thousands of surveyed scientific papers that provided an opinion on climate change, fucking 97.1 percent agreed that humans cause global warming:

It’s no surprise that a guy who couldn’t read defenses also can’t read basic scientific facts.