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"I'm not sure when it happened because I kept playing on it. Then about three-quarters of the way through practice, I couldn't do anything right. They pulled me out and started checking me," he says. (The player's name is omitted to protect the integrity of an ongoing scientific study.)

After further examination, the team trainers confirmed that the lineman had sustained a concussion. Then they did a strange thing: They gave him a battery of neurological tests. The tests were simple but mentally taxing drills -- listening to a series of numbers and repeating them back in opposite order, listening to a group of words and trying to recall them several minutes later. Each drill is designed to utilize a different brain function and, by inference, to test the well-being of different parts of the brain.

Actually, this was the second time our dazed lineman endured these drills. Designed by psychologists Michael Collins and Mark Lovell of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, the battery of eight tests was part of an ongoing study that sought to gauge the long-term effects of concussions on college athletes. Since it began, 393 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division IA football players have taken the tests in order to track how quickly those who have sustained concussions recover their mental faculties.

The results of the first data, which tracked 16 cases of concussions, were troubling. The data -- published in the September issue of the Journal of the American Medical Society -- indicated that players who endured multiple concussions may suffer long-term declines in brain functions. Even worse, players who had preexisting learning disabilities who sustained multiple concussions seem even more likely to suffer permanent impairments.

But most convincing of all is the data from those who reported two or more past concussions: Their initial baseline mental functionality tested markedly lower than that of their less-shook-up counterparts, who had reported sustaining only one or no past concussions.

"We found that athletes who had experienced two or more prior concussions in the past ... performed significantly worse in tests in our battery relative to those who reported having one concussion or zero concussions. The two-or-more concussion group had deficits related to speed of information processing. They were not processing information as quickly as those people who had one or zero concussions," says Collins. "It's kind of like your Pentium III computer becomes a Pentium II computer or your 486 becomes a 386."

Should college football players stop playing ball after one, two or three concussions? To be fair, the same question applies to any collegiate sport where concussions occur often. In addition to football players, soccer players and wrestlers sustain the injuries somewhat regularly. Still, football, with its nasty hits and unmatched explosive physical contact, is the king of concussion sports and thus a natural for concussion studies. According to Collins, about one in three college football players has experienced a concussion at some point during his pre-college or college career.

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