As we enter the final stop of the NFL playoffs before the Super Bowl, a reminder from our friends at Dept8 of what the NFL shield really stands for: CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy).

(For those of you with poor eyesight like me, the text reads “This degenerative condition is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience.  Any other result of sustained brain trauma, or any pictures, descriptions, and accounts of symptomatic concussions as well as asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head without the NFL’s consent is expressly prohibited.”  Thanks, once again, to the First Amendment, which protects satire like this.)

For more on the issue, see this report about high school football deaths (a more scholarly treatment of both high school and college football deaths here), see how far we’ve come since 1905 (but also see this Deadspin article re-investigating the deaths of 1905), and consider whether we should do without helmets entirely.