Arlington, TX – October 2, 2012 – Cowboys Stadium: Lance Briggs (55) of the Chicago Bears during a regular season Monday Night Football game
(Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images)
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. Symptoms can found in those who have played football, though CTE cannot currently be diagnosed in living individuals.
The 36-year-old Briggs is documenting how he lives with the early stages of CTE in a new, four-part series with digital platform Sqor – an in-depth video platform for athletes and teams. This series will be the Sqor first original production.
“You’re not supposed to do the things that we’re doing to our bodies,” Briggs said. “We’re grown men, and we run at each other at full speed and we collide. We get back in the huddle; we go get back out there. And we do it over and over and over again. And we do it for 60 minutes.”
Briggs is trying to stay active. In the Sqor trailer for the series, he says it is important to “keep feeding my brain.” He does this by taking classes to get his bachelor’s degree, doing sideline reporting and commentary for CSN Chicago and has his own Lance Briggs Show.
Briggs will be participating in a roundtable discussion at Sqor Media Center in Baton Rouge, La. on Wednesday – which is Brain Injury Awareness day – with Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. The trailer for the Sqor show came out last week and additional episodes will air over the next few months.
Sqor CEO Brian Wilhite said in a statement that in the future, viewers can expect Sqor to dig in to deep subject matter like in it is doing with Briggs’ story. He said that he would also like to see the experience be multi-dimensional.
“That includes live events, custom merchandise and, most importantly, fan engagement,” Wilhite said in the press release.
The Briggs series will be available on the Sqor app, which is available on iOS and Android.
“Football comes down to a choice – you understand the dangers and the harm,” Briggs said. “If that young man or whoever it is wants to play football, there will be football. Health issues are something that go hand in hand with a sport like this.”
