Former Raiders receiver Tim Brown met Junior Seau on the field many times and developed a friendship with him off the field, and Brown is urging everyone to hold off on making any conclusions about what led Seau to commit suicide.
Brown said in an interview on 95.7 The Game that chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a real problem facing former players, but he doesn’t believe there’s enough information available to make the leap that CTE led Seau to kill himself.
“What I say about this, and this is what I’ve been saying to everybody when it comes to the whole CTE thing: I know that that’s real because you have guys who play this game, and they get concussions and keep playing. So I’m not doubting the fact that CTE is real,” Brown said. “But when you look at the guys who do this, you don’t see Roger Staubach committing suicide. You don’t see some of the more successful players doing this. It’s all guys who are having a few problems. You can say what you want — does the CTE cause the depression? Does the CTE cause these guys not to be able to adapt? That’s another whole story. But all I’m saying is it seems like all these guys who are having this issue, going back to the center, Mike Webster, for the Steelers, it’s all guys who are having issues adjusting to life after football.”
Brown said he suspects that football had dominated Seau’s life to such an extent that he had a hard time adjusting to life without football — and a hard time finding a reason to get up in the morning.
“There’s a whole lot of studies that need to be done before we can just say it’s CTE,” Brown said. “I just think it has a lot more to do with the issues that these guys are dealing with.”