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S1 00:18 [music] Our next speaker, I want to give a shout-out to him for two things. First of all, we had another speaker that actually dropped from the program about a week and a half ago, and so we were frantically looking for someone, and this is the first person we called, and he said, "Absolutely. I'll be there. I'll do whatever you need to do." And so we really appreciate that when we have somebody that actually steps up and does that. And for those of us that are on the A&M system side, anyway, 10 years ago next week on Thanksgiving Day, this individual led the Aggies to a victory over the top- ranked Texas Longhorns at that time. So this seems to be-- for our YouTube people that are watching, we're sorry. Y'all beat us before, too. So please join me in welcoming to the stage Mr. Stephen McGee [applause]. S2 01:07 Thank you. Thank you. Well howdy. S3 01:12 Howdy. S2 01:13 Thank you, Dr. Sheffield. I now know that I can cancel my order for my wife's Viagra for Christmas [laughter]. It's always good to know. The irony of me being in front of you. I'm definitely the dumbest person here, so if you think you're going to learn something today, you're wrong [laughter]. You're going to get to laugh at all my follies in life. In fact, here's my first slide. It's "Where's your head at?" If you didn't know, I was an English major and so I learned well here. I got my Aggie edjumacation and I think one football player here recently said he majored in eligibility [laughter]. So I'm going to do my best not to embarrass Dr. Thornton, who had me in class as well. So, today, I want to talk about this CTE study, right? Everybody's reading it in the headlines. This was the headline on CNN. "99% of former NFL players have found in a study to have CTE." And I read that. I can remember my wife coming to me and saying, "Man, I think, baby, you have CTE as well. We need to go get you checked out." And I said, "No, baby, that's just selective hearing, that's not CTE. All right, I just choose to block you out." But you know, people don't realize. They think football players, they're dumb. They don't know anything. S2 02:27 So now I want to talk a little football with you, all right? So here's cover two. Your NFL is a basic 4-3 defense. You got two deep safeties. You got a corner force in the flat. You got your Sam and your Will linebacker. They got the hook/curl zone. You got your Mike in the middle. Now you love to attack that four cut, that deep end, 17 yards. He's going to break and you're going to hit that guy right in the hole around that Will linebacker, two yards inside the numbers, man. 7-step drop, one hit, boom, let it rip. You love that on that seam bender right down the middle of cover two. That's how you attack cover two. Now, all of a sudden you line up in this defense. It looks the exact same. It's a 4-3, two-deep zone coverage. Oh, no, no, no. This isn't cover two, this is cover four. Now that free safety, he's now looking at number two. If number two releases vertical, he's got to lock on man-to-man. Now all of a sudden, we don't like that four cut because that free safety is going to blow him up on that deep dig route. All of a sudden, we want to run a 48 combination and hit that guy over the post, right? S2 03:32 Football guys are dumb. They don't know what the heck they are doing out there. They have CTE, all this stuff, man. And so this is what is going through my mind the first preseason game. Texas kid taking the Cowboy's stadium. Now I'm pumped up and here comes , offensive coordinator, in my helmet and he says, "McGee, we're going to keep it real simple on you today, all right? Easy play calls. You got all the new guys, the free agents. No one knows what the heck is going on. Real 1

easy. Just have fun and let it rip, right?" Well, great. So I'm jogging out to the huddle. The other 10 guys are already there and here comes Coach Garrett with the play call. He goes, "Explode the strong right slot. Zap at four shift, deep four, 78 F flat sit. Kill 32 power. Don't forget, if they line up in a bear front you got to go Pittsburgh Seattle. And go on yellow count to allow the guys to see what's going on." Now, I know that's what he called. I'm not sure what I told the other 10 guys in the huddle [laughter]. So we break, acting like we know what we're doing. Half the team lines up in bunch formation, the other half shifts to strong right, while I'm going, "Kill, kill," because it's single-high defense. We want to throw the ball, and all of the sudden I say, "Hut." Half the team runs 32 power, and I'm dropping back running act four, shift four, 78 F flat sit. And then I'm about to hit that four cut behind that Will linebacker 17 yards, man. That thing comes out spinning. It was the best four cut I have ever thrown in my life, and I hit number 27 for the right [laughter] between the numbers. This is me telling the guys, "No, no, no, no. The other play. No, no, no." And so I got my first ever sideline greeting from Coach Garrett [laughter]. "What's going on out here? You got CTE too, don't you [laughter]?" S2 05:22 No, but recently, I guess you guys have probably followed what's going on in the NFL. About seven and a half percent down so far year-to-date on their ratings in TV. And NFL is big business, right? It's big-time money. The market cap of the NFL, all teams aggregated together a couple years ago, 63 billion. All right? They're generating 13 billion in revenues a year. Okay, it's not near the scope of Apple, right? It's not a $900 billion market cap company. Great. But it's a huge business and the NFL wants to protect the message to the public, and there's a very big concern going on right now between football types because they're concerned that these headlines that you've read about, that you've seen about-- in fact, here's the New York Times. New York Times, 110 brains on this screen behind me if my Aggie math serves me correct, and you're probably wondering which one's mine, and it's this one on the far left in the middle. There's nothing there. It's empty. According to my wife, anyway. But 110 of 111 of the guys studied had some form or type of CTE. 110 of 111. Over 99% of these guys. Well, that was alarming. That was alarming even to me. And then, in 2016, the NFL says, "We're going to publicly acknowledge the fact that CTE and the connection to football, there's something going on here." We wanted to try to dismiss it because of the money, right? So here come the lawsuits. $5 million for this guy, $5 million for this guy, and all the sudden, the backlash and the concern in the broader world of fans and viewership. Man, they're concerned, right? So that's my point of today. S2 07:18 What's the future of a game that has meant so much to me? What is the future of football when mom won't let her son go play this game? People come up to me all the time, "Hey, are you going to let your son play football one day? You going to let him be exposed to concussions and the concern of brain damage?" And here's another stat. And here, I know you can't read these slides. This is against all PowerPoint slide rules, but it's really more for me if anything. But in this study, they were showing the concerns of guys being exposed to brain damage and brain trauma early on from, specifically, the ages of 10- to 12-year-olds, and the effect of the cognitive growth, that they would be having a greater chance of being exposed to CTE later in life. Clearly a connection, right? And so mom is, for a good reason, concerned. And Dr.-- I'm going to butcher his name here. I'm trying to read this. Omalu, of course, chronicled in the movie. Maybe you saw the movie in 2015 titled Concussion, right? He went as far to say that allowing a kid under the age of 18 to play football, it was child abuse. Child abuse. What mom in her right mind would allow her kid to be a part of it? S2 08:44 And so here's another stat right below that. Chicago Youth Football League. A decade ago, over 10,000 kids participated in youth football, a decade later, 7,500. Only 7,500. 2

Numbers across the US have diminished of participation in football. Part of that has to do with the fact that kids are engaged on social media, and phones, and whatever. There's a lot of different correlations here, but clearly the number one connection has been the concern of CTE. But here's my question. Is that really the truth? Is that really an accurate story being portrayed to us, the public? One of my coaches used to tell me, he said, "McGee, don't ever let the truth get in the way of a good story." And here we are. Here's a great story. It grabbed national headlines with every major news media source, Internet, TV, radio. Everybody grabbed onto this. And in fact, the lady that did that study that we saw earlier, she came out and even admitted that it was a convenient sample. All of which the people that they surveyed had some sort of a background with brain disease in their past. Well, that obviously affects the findings, right? And then another pathologist in Toronto, Canada, she came out and further went against-- and showed some concerns of the study as well. She said she was disgruntled over the findings, basically, lumping guys that had stage one and two levels of CTE in with people that had stage three and four, and the disparity in the amount of differences in those findings. Additionally, she's done her own studies and she has found that through , and hockey, and boxing, and all the athletes that she studied, less than 30% of those people had any signs of CTE, and 30% had no forms of CTE at all. Well, that's quite a different picture than what was painted in the minds of all of us. S1 10:53 And so what's my point today, in closing? I got four minutes. I sold three of my minutes. So I really got one minute. That was a joke from last night. It was really for Dr. Thornton. But in closing, football is a great game. And in answering that question earlier, will I ever allow my kids to play football? You dang right I will. Football has given me so much. That game has taught me so much about teamwork, discipline, how to handle adversity. Dr. Lightfoot was telling us about how we won a game. He didn't tell us about the other 10 games that we lost, right? I got booed out of that stadium more times than anybody in the history of Kyle Field. But let me tell you something, I love those memories and I cherish that every day, and no matter what becomes of a youth football player, one day he will remember those times with his buddies in that huddle. He'll remember all those great moments scoring . He'll remember the hot days when there was no fans in the stands, and they struggled together, but they played for a common goal. They played for each other. That's important, that our kids today are out and engaged in playing sports, and having fun, and enjoying life, man. Is it a concern? Is CTE a concern? Absolutely it's a concern. That's why we're spending millions of dollars investing in helmets, and how to tackle fundamental, and the penalties now for targeting, man. It's an extreme and it needs to be that way. But that's no reason yet, there's no confirmation that we have to conclude that our kids don't need to be playing football. That's a great game, man. Don't keep your kids from it. Engage them and allow them to play. Thank you guys so much, gig 'em, Aggies, God bless you. [applause] S2 12:40 Oh, I got questions. I forgot. You don't ask me any of those protein isotope questions because I don't know. I'm just going to tell you [laughter]. S1 12:48 That's next. That's next year. S2 12:50 Okay, okay. S1 12:50 Okay. So Matt sent us a question that I am going to ask, and we'll say something else. And we're not going to tell what university he's from, and you'll, I think, find out why. "I played linebacker in high school and I have gaps in my memory of the games I played. Did you ever experience memory loss after games?" S2 13:11 For good reason, right? I wanted to forget the games [laughter]. There was a moment 3

when we played Texas Tech, we were in the optioning college, and I'd about optioned myself to death and I really-- I remember I got off to the sideline. This was really before the concussion protocol and the attention that football players now have towards concussions. But anyway, definitely had some memory loss in those moments and I-- it was audible. There were six plays within one call, and I did not pick one of the available six, and the whole team looked at me, and of course we didn't score. We turned the ball over and my offensive lineman had some choice words for me on the sideline. But moral of the story is yes, and unfortunately, there's many moments of cloudy-- saw the stars. S1 13:58 And I think what it would-- it'd be safe to say, Matt, if you're watching, you should make sure you go check that out to make sure you're good. Right? S2 14:05 Absolutely. S1 14:06 Absolutely, yeah. S2 14:06 Or you can use it as an excuse with your wife [laughter]. S1 14:09 So Bethany from College Station says, "Do you foresee more changes in the rules to maintain the safety of players?" S2 14:15 I do, and I think we've already seen the game change drastically. Protecting in the pocket, that's been a big concern, them taking lower body injuries. Targeting and hitting a quarterback in the pocket, that's another area, but targeting specifically defensive backs. It's frustrating as a fan when it goes against you, but you understand that the extreme measures and penalties have to be there for guys to really focus on it and practice it. So I like what they have done to levy the penalties of not playing sound football and tackling the right way. S1 14:48 Okay. This is one of our former speakers, who has a question for you. It's not about protein isotopes either. S2 14:53 Oh, thank you. S1 14:54 This is Stella from Drexel University. "Do you think that starting kids at an older age is still better?" Playing football. S2 15:02 Definitely starting kids later in tackling football. I mean, if you ever watched little league football, it's like-- as my coach would say, it's like mice pissing on cotton. I mean, it's really soft football [laughter]. There are not a lot of big hits out there, all right? So-- S1 15:15 I think you started a new phrase now that none of us were aware of. S2 15:17 Y'all can have it, all right? Y'all can have it [laughter]. But if that's a concern, I think you can play seven on seven, it's such a big deal now. You're talking about skill development. I think that's a great way to get your kids involved if you're concerned about the contact of the game. S1 15:31 So we have to end with this question before we go to intermission, and this is from some of our friends over at University of Texas in Austin. This is from Kaylin. "Why do you think football is getting so much more attention than other contact sports in this arena?" S2 15:44 Well, it's the most popular sport in America, and that's why, and I think that people tune in. Nothing against hockey, but this isn't Canada [laughter], and so we don't have much ice here in College Station. So there's a good reason. I mean, we're passionate about it. We get behind our schools and we see our wallets blowing up people, and that comes to the forefront of our minds. And so I think just because it's a game that 4

we love so much and have for really the-- our American past time, so I think it will continue to be a discussion and for good reason. But again, we can't replace football, right? We've got to have this [laughter]. Come on, guys. S1 16:23 So please join me in thanking Mr. McGee for his talk today. [applause] S2 16:26 Thanks, guys. Thank you. S1 16:27 Fabulous job. [music]

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