BOSTON (AP) — Former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez suffered severe damage to parts of the brain that play an important role in memory, impulse control and behavior, a researcher who studied his brain said Thursday. 
 
 Dr. Ann McKee, director of the CTE Center at Boston University, said she could not "connect the dots" between Hernandez's severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is linked to repeated blows to the head, and his behavior. The 27-year-old hanged himself in April, while serving life in prison for murder. 
 
 But McKee said she says Hernandez experienced substantial damage to key parts of the brain, including the hippocampus — which is important to memory — and the frontal lobe, which is involved in problem solving, judgment and behavior. 
 
 "In any individual we can't take the pathology and explain the behavior," said McKee, who has studied hundreds of brains from football players, college athletes and even younger players, donated after their deaths. "But we can say collectively, in our collective experience, individuals with CTE — and CTE of this severity — have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses or aggression, often emotional volatility and rage behaviors," she said. 
 
 Hernandez hanged himself in prison days after he was acquitted in the 2012 drive-by shootings of two men in Boston and just hours before his former teammates visited the White House to celebrate their latest Super Bowl victory. 
 
 Prosecutors claimed he gunned the two men down after one accidentally spilled a drink on him in a nightclub — and then got a tattoo of a handgun and the words "God Forgives" to commemorate the crime. 
 
 He had been serving a life sentence without parole in the 2013 killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd when he killed himself in April. 
 
 Hernandez, who said he was innocent, did not raise CTE in his defense at either trial. 
 
 But after his death and September CTE diagnosis, his attorneys filed a lawsuit against the NFL and football helmet maker Riddell, accusing them of failing to warn Hernandez about the dangers of football. The lawsuit, which seeks damages for Hernandez's young daughter, said he experienced a "chaotic and horrendous existence" because of his disease. 
 
 Hernandez inherited a genetic profile that may have made him more susceptible to developing the disease, McKee said. She said Hernandez had the most severe case of CTE they've seen in someone his age. Hernandez was diagnosed with Stage 3, out of 4, of the disease. 
 
 While the outside of Hernandez's brain appeared normal, the inside showed evidence of previous small hemorrhages, which experts associate with head impacts. Other parts of his brain had begun to shrink and show large holes in the membrane, McKee said. 
 
 "Individuals with similar gross findings at autopsy were at least 46 years old at the time of death," McKee said. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Alanna Durkin Richer @aedurkinricher . Read more of her work here . ||||| The dots are awfully close to each other, daring you to connect them. Aaron Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE when he committed suicide, after years of inexplicable violent behavior, including at least one murder. It would be simple and easy to blame football for what happened to him. 
 
 Dot: The hits to the head gave him brain damage. Dot: The brain damage made him paranoid. Dot: The paranoia made him violent. Dot: The brain damage eventually made him suicidal. 
 
 Maybe all the dots really do connect in this case. Maybe just some of them do. But the truth is that we don’t know, and we may never know. 
 
 There is so much—so much—we still don’t know about concussions. We know repeated head trauma can ruin a life, but not every brain reacts in the same way. We know there is a direct correlation between football and CTE. And we know that the NFL’s response to this issue, for many years, was to sweep it under the rug—and when that didn’t work, to buy bigger rugs. 
 
 The CTE problem in football is real, and it is enormous. But it has also led to facts-based hysteria. We take what we know about football and CTE, which is obviously significant, and we apply it to every single player, every case of dementia, every football life gone awry. And it’s just not that simple. 
 
 On the surface, the Hernandez case may seem like the clearest case of football-related head trauma causing a player to literally and figuratively lose his mind. After all, nobody went crazier than Aaron Hernandez, right? 
 
 I would argue the opposite: the extreme nature of Hernandez’s transformation, and the early age when it began, makes his story even foggier than most. 
 
 Hernandez’s widow is suing the NFL on behalf of his daughter. The suit claims that the NFL in general and the Patriots specifically were “fully aware of the damage that could be inflicted from repetitive impact injuries and failed to disclose, treat or protect him from the dangers of such damage.” 
 
 Maybe Shayanna Jenkins and her daughter Avielle will triumph in court. I’m not going to speculate on that; my colleague Michael McCann is far more qualified and capable of examining the lawsuit than I am. 
 
 I will say this, though: Pinning his suicide on the NFL makes for a good headline. It may be a winning legal strategy. But it’s a hard theory for me to buy in this case. 
 
 Aaron Hernandez played 40 games in the NFL. He also played 40 games at the University of Florida, and he played a lot of football before he arrived at Florida. Even if you do pin his suicide on football, can you really isolate his NFL career as the cause? 
 
 Hernandez’s behavior started to change radically when he was in high school, almost immediately after his father died. He showed signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, though it was never diagnosed. He hung out with a different crowd. At times he was distant, at others charming, and he seemed to go back and forth with frightening ease. We still don’t know the full extent of his drug use. He was investigated for a double shooting in Florida in 2007—when he was a college freshman. Character concerns caused him to fall in the NFL draft. 
 
 Nothing in that last paragraph can be pinned on the NFL. Nothing. 
 
 Of course, the thrust of the lawsuit is that the CTE made Hernandez suicidal, not that it made him a violent criminal. But can you really separate the two that easily? Hernandez took his own life while serving a life sentence for murder. He did it just after being acquitted in another murder trial. 
 
 You can come up with a bunch of theories for Hernandez’s suicide that seem sensible on their own. He couldn’t stand to live the life ahead of him. He was filled with regret, though he didn’t show it publicly. Once he was acquitted, there were no battles left to win. He knew that dying while he was appealing his conviction would technically vacate his conviction, possibly shielding his wife and daughter from any civil suits. He had CTE. 
 
 Or: We don’t know. Maybe someday we will. 
 
 The link between football-related head trauma and CTE is a serious issue. The NFL deserves heavy scrutiny for its actions, both past and present. We should absolutely continue that conversation, but maybe it’s best, for now, to leave Aaron Hernandez out of it. ||||| The CTE made him do it. 
 
 That’s the charge leveled Thursday in a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Aaron Hernandez. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is what turned him into a homicidal maniac. 
 
 I’m no doctor, but you don’t have to be a doctor to know CTE is a devastating mental condition. 
 
 You also don’t have to be a doctor to smell a money grab. 
 
 The amount here is $20 million, and the defendants are the Patriots and the NFL. The lawsuit’s filing coincided nicely with the news release from Boston University’s CTE. Center. 
 
 It said Hernandez had an advanced form of CTE, which can only be diagnosed in an autopsy. It was “the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron’s age,” said attorney Jose Baez. 
 
 Hernandez was 27. 
 
 This is terrible news for the NFL, which was already getting scorned for not doing enough to prevent concussion-related damage. But at least most of its CTE victims were players who had long careers. 
 
 Hernandez played 38 games for the Patriots. If young NFL players weren’t panicky about life-altering concussions before, they should be now. 
 
 It’s a reach, however, to say Hernandez wouldn’t have broken bad if only the Patriots had been more caring. 
 
 Then again, it was a reach to say Caylee Anthony drowned in the family pool and her grandfather George disposed of the body. 
 
 But hey, that defense worked for Baez when he defended Casey Anthony. 
 
 Sentinel file photo Casey Anthony Casey Anthony (Sentinel file photo) 
 
 That tabloid-crazed trial might be upstaged by the mere sight of a court registrar telling Bill Belichick to raise his right hand and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 
 
 One question I’d like asked is of all the people who were posthumously diagnosed with CTE, why did only one start acting like a mob hitman? 
 
 Maybe CTE aggravates a pre-existing condition. There is no doubt, however, that the condition existed long before Hernandez put on a Patriots helmet. 
 
 His troubles date back to at least 2006, when his father died from complications following hernia surgery. By the time Hernandez got to Florida a year later, he was ready to detonate. 
 
 “It was a rough process, and I didn't know what to do for him,” his mother, Terri, told USA Today. “He would rebel. It was very, very hard, and he was very, very angry. 
 
 “He wasn't the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.” 
 
 A 17-year-old Hernandez got in a bar fight and ended up busting a bouncer’s eardrum. He was also identified as the person who fired five shots into a car one night following a dispute over a gold chain necklace. 
 
 The case quietly took a number of twists and turns, and the witness later recanted his testimony. 
 
 Technically, the only blot on Hernandez’s record was a one-game suspension for a failed drug test. The USA Today story even referred to him as a “good kid (who) was headed down the wrong path.” 
 
 Most people familiar with the routine criminality and covering up during Urban Meyer’s tenure might have a different description for Hernandez. 
 
 Gary W. Green / Orlando Sentinel Florida tight end Aaron Hernandez (81) runs for a 28 yard pass completion during the second quarter of the Gators game against Charleston Southern at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, FL Saturday, September 5, 2009. (Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel) ORG XMIT: 00124324A Florida tight end Aaron Hernandez (81) runs for a 28 yard pass completion during the second quarter of the Gators game against Charleston Southern at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, FL Saturday, September 5, 2009. (Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel) ORG XMIT: 00124324A (Gary W. Green / Orlando Sentinel) 
 
 The Boston Globe reported Hernandez failed as many as six drug tests at Florida. He left after three seasons, but NFL teams were so leery that a first-round talent wasn’t picked until the fourth round. 
 
 “We stayed away,” one scout told CBSSports.com, “because we hated the people he hung out with and how trouble always seemed to find this guy.” 
 
 Don’t be surprised if Baez adds Florida and the NCAA to the complaint. Heck, why not throw in Bristol Central High? 
 
 The cynical answer is because there’s no money to make suing a high school. If CTE turned Hernandez into a murderer, however, who’s to say which blow to the head started the spiral? 
 
 Baez will surely find an expert witness who will blame it on the Patriots and/or the Gators. But Hernandez would have been a thug if he’d never played a down after high school. 
 
 Even the Casey Anthony jury could see that. 
 
 David Whitley can be reached at dwhitley@orlandosentinel.com ||||| The National Football League and New England Patriots will fight hard to get the Aaron Hernandez estate’s concussion lawsuit dismissed, but they could have an incentive to settle if that strategy fails, according to legal experts. 
 
 “The NFL will fight tooth and nail to get this case thrown out of court,” said Daniel Wallach, a prominent sports law attorney based in Florida, said Friday by phone. 
 
 His comments came one day after lawyers for Hernandez’s estate filed a $20 million lawsuit against the league and the Patriots, on the grounds that both parties failed to protect Hernandez from the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain condition linked to concussions and repeated blows to the head. 
 
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 Wallach, who has advised top athletes and pro franchises, said the league probably will cite a number of factors in its bid to get the suit tossed, including the exclusion of any players who retired on or after July 2014 from signing onto a prior class-action concussion settlement expected to top $1 billion. 
 
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 Hernandez was in jail awaiting his first murder trial in July 2014, and the league could argue he fell into the retired player category because he had “no reasonable expectation” of resuming his playing career, Wallach said. 
 
 In addition, he said, the league will cite the full scope of Hernandez’s football career going back to his youth Pop Warner days, as well as his violent tendencies that predated his selection by the Patriots in the 2010 draft. 
 
 The team released the once-promising tight end immediately after his June 2013 arrest for murder. 
 
 Michael McCann, an attorney and founding director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, agreed that Hernandez’s estate faces challenges. 
 
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 “These are difficult cases to bring, that a finding of CTE proves liability against the NFL,” he said. 
 
 At the same time, McCann added, the league might be tempted to settle if it can’t get the case dismissed, to avoid turning over documents in a protracted legal battle. 
 
 “It’s still a potentially threatening lawsuit to the Patriots and the NFL,” said McCann, who is also a leading expert on the Deflategate saga. “We know the Patriots are known to be private about various issues.” 
 
 So is the league, Wallach said. 
 
 “Five years into this overall concussion litigation, one thing the league has been very successful at is keeping its executives off the witness stand, avoiding testimony under oath, and not having any of its so-called treasure trove of documents in the public eye,” Wallach said. 
 
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 But a third expert, Andrew Brandt, said he doesn’t see a settlement on the horizon. 
 
 “My sense is they would not settle, as they would have a lot of defenses around Hernandez’s lifestyle and his short career in the NFL compared to other levels of football,” said Brandt, who heads the Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova University. 
 
 Hernandez was acquitted in April on charges of killing Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu in a drive-by shooting in Boston in 2012. Five days after the acquittal, the 27-year-old Hernandez hanged himself in his prison cell at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. 
 
 He was serving a life sentence for the June 2013 killing of Odin L. Lloyd. A judge later vacated Hernandez’s first-degree murder conviction in the Lloyd case because Hernandez had not exhausted his appeals at the time of his suicide. Bristol County prosecutors are challenging that decision. 
 
 The league, citing Hernandez’s criminal history, vowed Friday to vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit. 
 
 Material from The New York Times was included in this report. Ben Volin and Milton J. Valencia of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. ||||| Aaron Hernandez suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age, damage that would have significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition, researchers at Boston University revealed at a medical conference Thursday. 
 
 Ann McKee, the head of BU's CTE Center, which has studied the disease caused by repetitive brain trauma for more than a decade, called Hernandez's brain "one of the most significant contributions to our work" because of the brain's pristine condition and the rare opportunity to study the disease in a 27-year-old. 
 
 Hernandez, a former New England Patriots tight end, hanged himself with a bedsheet in April in a Massachusetts prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013. 
 
 In a diagnosis that linked one of football's most notorious figures with the sport's most significant health risk, doctors found Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE, which researchers had never seen in a brain younger than 46 years old, McKee said. The extent of that damage represents another signpost in football's ongoing concussion crisis, which has seen professional players weigh early retirements and parents grapple with whether to allow their young sons to take up the sport. The findings released Thursday only will heighten those concerns. 
 
 Because the center has received few brains from people Hernandez's age, McKee could not say whether his brain was representative of a 27-year-old who had played as much football. But she found the advanced stage of CTE alarming. 
 
 [The NFL studied every concussion over two seasons. What happens next may be up to manufacturers.] 
 
 "In this age group, he's clearly at the severe end of the spectrum," McKee said. "There is a concern that we're seeing accelerated disease in young athletes. Whether or not that's because they're playing more aggressively or if they're starting at younger ages, we don't know. But we are seeing ravages of this disease, in this specific example, of a young person." 
 
 At Thursday's conference, McKee flipped through slides comparing sections of Hernandez's brain with a sample without CTE. Hernandez's brain had dark spots associated with tau protein and shrunken, withered areas, compared with immaculate white of the sample. His brain had significant damage to the frontal lobe, which impacts a person's ability to make decisions and moderate behavior. As some new slides appeared on the projectors, some physicians and conference attendees gasped. 
 
 "We can't take the pathology and explain the behavior," McKee said. "But we can say collectively, in our collective experience, that individuals with CTE — and CTE of this severity — have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses for aggression, emotional volatility, rage behaviors. We know that collectively." 
 
 McKee said Hernandez had a genetic marker that makes people vulnerable to certain brain diseases and could have contributed to how aggressively he developed CTE. 
 
 "We know that that's a risk factor for neurogenerative disease," McKee said. "Whether or not that contributed in this case is speculative. It may explain some of his susceptibility to this disease." 
 
 
 
 Normal 27-year-old's brain and Aaron Hernandez's brain. (Boston University School of Medicine/Boston University School of Medicine) 
 
 The condition of Hernandez's brain, pristine because of his age and the adept handling of medical examiners, could lead to future breakthroughs and better understanding of CTE. For example, researchers could better study the interaction of inflammation and tau pathology through the use of fluorescent stains. It gave researchers their best view yet of a marker associated with CTE. 
 
 "We are able to understand this disease at the scientific level in a way that's very rarely presented," McKee said. "We're very grateful to the family for making this donation. We're hoping this will advance medical science in a very significant way. . . . This will really accelerate and advance our research going forward." 
 
 BU researchers say they have discovered CTE in more than 100 former NFL players, a handful of whom have committed suicide. Medical examiners delivered Hernandez's brain, weighing 1,573 grams, to BU's labs in April. From the outside, it looked like a typical brain — no lesions, no bruises, no abnormalities. When researches sliced the brain into sections, they discovered startling damage. 
 
 Ventricles were dilated, in response to the brain shrinking. Researchers determined Hernandez had lost brain tissue. Membranes that were supposed to be firm had grown "thin and gelatinous," McKee said. There were abnormal, large holes in parts of Hernandez's brain. 
 
 The hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory, had shrunk. 
 
 The fornix, which also contributes to memory function, had atrophied. 
 
 The frontal lobe, which is responsible for problem-solving, judgment, impulse control and social behavior, had been pockmarked with tau protein. 
 
 The amygdala, which produces emotional regulation, emotional behavior, fear and anxiety, had been severely affected. 
 
 The temporal lobes, which process sights and sounds, showed significant damage. 
 
 Together, they were "very unusual findings in an individual of this age," McKee said. "We've never seen this in our 468 brains, except in individuals some 20 years older." 
 
 The physical damage inside Hernandez's brain provides another layer to the catastrophic and tragic downfall of Hernandez, a gifted player who caught a touchdown pass from Tom Brady in the 2012 Super Bowl. 
 
 Hernandez grew up a football star in Connecticut and fell in with a rough crowd at age 15, after his father died unexpectedly during a routine operation. He starred at the University of Florida even as off-field trouble, in the form of drugs and violence, dogged him. The problems caused some teams to remove him from consideration in the NFL draft, and he lasted until the Patriots plucked him in the fourth round. 
 
 Hernandez formed a dominating tandem with fellow 2010 draftee Rob Gronkowski and convinced the Patriots he had straightened out his life. The Patriots signed him to a seven-year, $40 million contract after the 2012 season. Months later, in the summer of 2013, Lloyd was murdered, his body found in a gravelly field a mile away from Hernandez's mansion in North Attleboro. 
 
 Hernandez's estate filed a federal lawsuit against the Patriots in September, alleging the Patriots knew hits to the head could lead to brain damage and failed to protect him. 
 
 A jury convicted Hernandez of the killing in 2015. Hernandez hanged himself in his cell just four days after a jury had acquitted him of the murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, two strangers whom the state argued Hernandez killed in 2012 after an altercation at a Boston club. 
 
 Thursday's news conference coincided with the release of an NFL study consisting of video reviews of the 459 known concussions that occurred over the 2015 and 2016 seasons, from preseason games through the playoffs. 
 
 The NFL has attempted to make the sport safer for its players through rule changes, policies designed to remove concussed players and technological advances. But brain trauma occurs when a football player's brain accelerates or decelerates after it hits another player or the turf, bashing the sides of the head, an action no helmet can prevent. 
 
 "It happens inside the skull," McKee said. "It's an intrinsic component of football." ||||| CLOSE SportsPulse: USA TODAY Sports' Peter Barzilai discusses the ramifications of the findings that Aaron Hernandez had severe CTE. USA TODAY Sports 
 
 Aaron Hernandez was found to have CTE. (Photo: Mark L. Baer, USA TODAY Sports) 
 
 Aaron Hernandez just became the most dangerous man in football. 
 
 It’s a strange statement, given the former New England Patriots tight end is dead and had spent the last four years of his life not on the field but behind bars for murder. But the revelation Thursday that Hernandez had chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he killed himself will shake the NFL to its core. 
 
 As it should. 
 
 Hernandez was just 27 when he died, yet an autopsy of his brain showed he had Stage 3 CTE, the second-worst stage of the disease. His brain had also begun to shrink, and there were large holes in a central membrane. 
 
 To be clear, this is not normal, as was noted in a lawsuit filed Thursday against the NFL and the Patriots by Hernandez’s fiancée and their young daughter. 
 
 “The Boston University neuropathy report also notes that Aaron’s CTE pathology was unusually severe considering his age,” according to the lawsuit. 
 
 And that’s a problem the NFL can’t spin or double-talk away. 
 
 Lawsuit: Aaron Hernandez's family sues NFL, Patriots amid CTE revelation 
 
 More: Ex-Patriots star Aaron Hernandez had severe CTE, examiners conclude 
 
 It was easy to absolve football when it is players in their 60s and 70s whose memories and personalities had disappeared, turning them into people their loved ones barely recognized when they died. There’s no definitive link, the NFL would say, alluding to a host of other environmental and lifestyle factors that might have played a role. 
 
 Even when it was Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, taking their lives in their 40s and 50s because their addled brains were already making their lives hell and they knew there was more to come, the NFL managed to tap dance around football’s responsibility. Tragic, but there are still so many unanswered questions, we’ve heard time and time and time again. More research is needed on genetics and mental illness and, well, anything else that might gum up the debate. 
 
 The number of former players with those telltale dark spots on their autopsied brains has piled up – 20, then 50, now more than 100 – and still the league insisted on playing dumb. 
 
 “There are still many unanswered questions relating to the cause, incidence and prevalence of long-term effects of head trauma such as CTE,” the NFL said in July, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that found CTE in the brains of 110 out of 111 former NFL players. 
 
 But a 27 year old? The NFL is going to own that whether it wants to or not. 
 
 The NFL spends considerable time and resources every year to reassure worried parents that it’s OK to let their kids play football at the youth level. But the news about Hernandez will only ratchet up the fear, making parents wonder if they’re consigning their kids to a jail cell or the morgue by allowing them to play. 
 
 If Hernandez had severe CTE before he was 30, how can you promise me that my kid won’t, too? 
 
 “According to the CTE Society, individuals suffering from CTE in Stage III, like Aaron, typically experience symptoms such as memory loss, executive dysfunction, aggression, explosive behavior, loss of concentration, mood swings, depression, apathy and cognitive impairment,” the lawsuit alleged. 
 
 NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said the league hadn’t seen the lawsuit filed by Hernandez’s family and could not comment. 
 
 While the NFL has always known this day was coming, it’s done everything it can to put it off. Casting doubt on the science and stalling the research. 
 
 But the league has had it wrong all along. Knowledge is power, and finding answers to what causes CTE – how many hits are too many, when do they do the most damage, why are some people more susceptible than others – is the only thing that can save football in the long run. 
 
 Hernandez’s death at such a young age is going to be a tipping point for CTE and repetitive head trauma. If the NFL doesn’t recognize that, it’s not just deceitful. It’s delusional. 
 
 Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour. ||||| On Thursday it was revealed a 27-year-old with 44 career NFL games had the brain of a 67-year-old man. Will the league do anything about it? 
 
 We probably didn’t need Aaron Hernandez’s attorney to declare Thursday that his dead client had the brain of a near-70-year-old with severe dementia. Too many decisions the one-time New England Patriots star made before killing himself earlier this year at 27 made no sense. Experience has told us that when young, wealthy football players start making erratic life choices, there is probably a physical reason lurking inside their skulls. 
 
 The question is: what will anyone do about it? 
 
 The time for hand-wringing about the role football plays in the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy is over. Science is only beginning to understand CTE. It’s going to take decades to assess how much the pounding of football helmets affects players’ brains. But enough is known now to say that dire measures need to be taken. 
 
 Aaron Hernandez lawyer says ex-NFL star had 'severe' case of CTE Read more 
 
 For more than 10 years, neurologists have been drawing a connection between the blows players take to their heads and the growth of tau deposits that signal CTE. They have measured the power of enough hits to the head and looked at enough slides of brain tissue to say football has some culpability in the sudden aging of otherwise healthy men’s brains. 
 
 Even the NFL has conceded this fact. 
 
 And yet for all the talk about better helmets or smarter tackling or trying to get players to not turn themselves into human torpedoes when going for the hit, no one wants to deal with the bomb ticking inside their helmets – the one that makes sane, smart men go crazy. We get lots of chatter. We get promises about brain study initiatives, but we don’t get the kind of action needed to maybe save players’ lives. 
 
 A few days ago the Canadian Football League and the league’s players union together announced that the league is eliminating full-contact practices during the season. 
 
 “It was clear we had an opportunity to get this out and do something proactive for player safety,” CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie told the CBC while unveiling the new policy. 
 
 The move isn’t as significant as it sounds. CFL teams only have 17 full-contact practices during the season which amounts to slightly less than one a week - NFL teams are allowed roughly the same number. But it’s a message that the CFL and their players’ union is committed to at least addressing the root of the problem – a message the NFL has said it doesn’t expect to match. 
 
 An impression is stuck in people’s minds that the biggest cause of CTE is the big, booming hits players take in games, those where they are smashed to the ground or knocked out completely. It’s an impression built in the earliest days of the discovery of CTE in dead football players and further fed by the movie Concussion, which tells the story of how a link between CTE and football was first made. But most research now is focused less on those crashing blows but on the seemingly benign day-to-day cracking of helmets in practices and games. 
 
 It might not seem like much to watch a football practice and watch players bump heads over and over and half speed – or even to see them do the same with more power in games. And yet each crack of hard plastic against hard plastic triggers some kind of trauma. The wounds might be small at first but they build up over time. At some point the damage can reach dangerous levels. This, scientists suspect, may be where the real trouble lies. An invisible killer. 
 
 The NFL has been slow to embrace CTE discussion, perhaps for obvious reasons. Litigation from former players has cost the league close to $1bn in settlements. Hernandez’s attorney Jose Baez said Thursday he is suing the Patriots and NFL on behalf of the player’s young daughter. The league seems to operate with litigation in mind, employing fleets of lawyers to counter potential lawsuits related to many of their decisions. 
 
 In some ways the NFL is right in raising questions about how much CTE affects their players. It will take years for scientists to properly study the disease that can only be detected posthumously. The brains doctors have been given to study have come from players like Hernandez, whose behavior troubled relatives enough to allow researchers to take chunks of their dead loved one’s brain. Brains of the thousands of ex-players who have lived normal lives have not been examined, meaning CTE studies are self-selective and perhaps misleading. 
 
 CTE can’t be the reason for everything that goes wrong in a player’s life. Sometimes bad behavior is just bad behavior. We can’t say CTE led Hernandez to kill Odin Lloyd in 2013, the crime for which he was sentenced to life in prison. But CTE is something and that something is serious. 
 
 It will take more than cutting full-contact practices during the season to reduce the risk of CTE, Maybe teams at all levels have to eliminate nearly all their contact practices. Maybe football has to reinvent itself completely. But at least the CFL has taken a positive action to deal with the menace that has destroyed lives. 
 
 A small step, perhaps, but a step nonetheless. 
 
 The time has come to stop listening to the lawyers and take many steps more. ||||| News broke Thursday that Boston University researchers found former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez to have a severe case of CTE, the degenerative trauma-based brain disease that has been found in numerous former football players and other athletes. 
 
 Hernandez’s brain, which was donated after his death, was examined by Dr. Ann McKee at BU. Dr. McKee diagnosed Herandez with Stage III CTE (out of four) and released images of his brain which show early brain atrophy and “severe deposition” of the protein associated with CTE. The disease is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, which is why it often affects football players, hockey players and boxers. 
 
 The below video shows what the research team found. Stage III CTE is frequently associated with dementia. Hernandez hung himself in prison in April while serving a life sentence without parole for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013. 
 
 Hernandez is the latest in a long list of NFL players who have committed suicide and later been found to have CTE, including Junior Seau and Dave Duerson. CTE is also associated with a propensity for violence, as with former Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide in the parking lot of the team’s facility.
– More than 100 former NFL players have been found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with repeated knocks to the head. One might think, then, that Aaron Hernandez's case of CTE is just another one. Not so. Hernandez's diagnosis "will shake the NFL to its core. As it should," writes columnist Nancy Armour at USA Today. He was just 27, yet had an advanced stage of the disease. The NFL can brush off cases in older men, citing other possible factors, but not here. "If Hernandez had severe CTE before he was 30, how can you promise me that my kid won’t, too?" writes Armour. The the only way the league can save itself is to honestly assess the question and find answers. Related coverage: 'Severe case': Doctors said Hernandez had "the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron's age," similar to what a former player in his 60s might have, says a lawyer representing Hernandez's family. The New York Times notes that it raises a big, perhaps unanswerable, question: Did CTE play a role in Hernandez's violent behavior off the field? (He committed suicide in prison.) What they saw: Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE out of 4, and Sports Illustrated has images and a video showing what doctors saw when they looked at his brain. Long odds: Hernandez's family sued the NFL and the New England Patriots for $20 million on Thursday, saying they did not protect Hernandez from the dangers of the game. The case would be difficult to win, a legal expert tells the Boston Globe. But he adds that the league and team may want to settle in order to avoid turning over related documents. NFL response: "It's a complicated puzzle," league spokesman Joe Lockhart said Friday in regard to football and CTE, per NBC News. "There are a lot of dots here, and science just hasn’t been able to connect them.” He also said the league plans to "vigorously contest" the lawsuit, adding that the CTE finding shouldn't cause people to view Hernandez as a victim, because the real victims are the friends and relatives of those he killed. Skeptical: Boston Herald columnist Michael Rosenberg writes that it is oh-so-tempting to connect the dots from CTE to Hernandez's criminal life and ultimately to his suicide. But too much is unknown about concussions to do that. "Pinning his suicide on the NFL makes for a good headline," he writes. "It may be a winning legal strategy. But it’s a hard theory for me to buy in this case." More skeptical: The lawsuit is a "money grab," writes David Whitley at the Orlando Sentinel. "One question I'd like asked is of all the people who were posthumously diagnosed with CTE, why did only one start acting like a mob hitman?" He also won't be surprised if attorney Jose Baez, who defended Casey Anthony, adds Hernandez's college team, the Florida Gators, to the lawsuit. Time to act, NFL: Yes, much is unknown about CTE, but enough is known for the NFL to be more aggressive in preventing it, writes Les Carpenter at the Guardian. A small first step could be following the Canadian Football League's lead and banning full-contact practices during the season.