Comedian and social media personality Druski is facing criticism from a former NFL player over a viral sketch mocking football's head injury crisis. The backlash arrived the same week a new study quantified how common chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease found in individuals exposed to repetitive brain trauma, actually is among former players. The video, titled "Athletes Get Concussions & Lose Their Minds," follows a fictional running back named Ray Price.
He is knocked to the ground during a play early in the clip, then shown leading police on a car chase, harassing a woman on camera, and banging his head against a locker. A mock social reads that a teammate's brain resembled a doorknob. Price tells reporters at a mock press conference that he cannot remember his favorite play from his career.
A reporter asks about his history of concussions, and the skit cuts away before he answers. Druski, ranked by Rolling Stone as the No. 1 creator in America in 2026, captioned the post, "Athletes get concussions and lose their minds." Newsweek reached out to Druski's representatives for comment on Thursday. The controversy comes just a week after the medical journal BMJ, one of the oldest and most widely cited publications in the world, published a study offering the most comprehensive estimate yet of how many former NFL players develop CTE.
Daniel Daneshvar of Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham led the research with Dr. Jesse Mez of Boston University. They examined every former NFL player who died between 2008 and 2021, with a core analysis covering 878 deaths recorded from 2016 to 2021, a period when brain donations became more common.
Families donated 235 of those 878 brains for examination. Researchers found evidence of CTE in 215, or roughly 92 percent. Because donated brains are more likely to come from families who already suspected their relatives had symptoms, researchers used a conservative assumption: every player whose brain went unexamined had been entirely healthy.
Even under that scenario, the minimum prevalence was 24.5 percent, or about one in four players. The NFL currently has 1,696 players across 32 active rosters. Applying that 24.5 percent rate means at least 400 of them could eventually develop CTE.
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