ESPN Football Analyst Walks Away, Disturbed by Brain Trauma on Field

By artappraiser on Wed, 08/30/2017 - 6:05pm |

By John Branch @ NYTimes/Sports, Aug. 30

LONG BEACH, Calif. — If Ed Cunningham had not already seen enough, he would be back in a broadcast booth on Saturday afternoon, serving as the color analyst for another top college football game televised on ABC or ESPN. It is the work he has done each fall for nearly 20 years.

But Cunningham, 48, resigned from one of the top jobs in sports broadcasting because of his growing discomfort with the damage being inflicted on the players he was watching each week. The hits kept coming, right in front of him, until Cunningham said he could not, in good conscience, continue his supporting role in football’s multibillion-dollar apparatus.

“I take full ownership of my alignment with the sport,” he said. “I can just no longer be in that cheerleader’s spot.” [....]

URL:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/sports/espn-ed-cunningham-football-concussions.html