Chris Johnson's ALS Forces an Uncomfortable Titans Conversation

The reaction to a question about Chris Johnson, ALS and football's risks says something important about how fans have learned to process the game's consequences.

By PAUL KUHARSKY

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Chris Johnson is the second prominent Titan to be diagnosed with ALS, joining Tim Shaw. 

After he died in 2023, Frank Wycheck was diagnosed posthumously with Stage 3 CTE.

Each development left me pondering my role in endorsing a game built on extraordinary physical punishment, with potentially brutal consequences.

NFL players have 42x the risk of dying from ALS before age 50, according to a new study from @ConcussionCTEfn, Mass General Brigham, Harvard, and the Boston University CTE Center that I coauthored and was published last week in eClinicalMedicine, an open-access journal from The… pic.twitter.com/I0I52kNMuf

— Chris Nowinski, Ph.D. (@ChrisNowinski1) July 14, 2026

Johnson himself has raised the issue. While acknowledging that he doesn't know exactly how his ALS started, he wrote on Instagram that there is growing research connecting repetitive head trauma and ALS and said, “I hope the NFL steps up, invests in research, and continues working to protect players.”

Not long after Johnson’s news came out, I wrote a column about how we can’t become complicit by looking away from things like his ALS or Marshawn Kneeland’s suicide, after which we learned he had CTE. I make my living covering the NFL, a league I love that also has a lot of warts. Two things can be true: Football is great fun to watch and it includes awful dangers that many guys willingly take on.

My way of reconciling it is to keep talking about Johnson and Kneeland and whoever comes next, and not to let the conversation dwindle as we get more used to more bad news. Part of that is asking people inside the sport how they reconcile it themselves.

Chris Johnson Made the Question Relevant Again

So when Robert Saleh and Mike Borgonzi sat down Tuesday on the eve of training camp, I asked how, or whether, they reconcile their roles in a sport they love with what can happen to the men who play it.

It’s not a new subject. But Johnson's diagnosis made it newly relevant here; Saleh and Borgonzi hadn't been asked about it and both had just participated in an Ice Bucket Challenge to honor Johnson.

The Reaction Was the Revealing Part

I was stunned to see how many Titans fans were not only put off by the question, but apparently horrified by it.

We’ll use this tweet from Braden Gall as the sample.

Has stan culture ruined football discourse?@PaulKuharskyNFL asked #Titans GM and Robert Saleh about how they felt about the risks inherent in the game re: Chris Johnson’s recent ALS diagnosis.

Was the LAST question of the presser. The fans took it perfectly. 🤦🏼‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/oaGSfBuhxC

— Braden Gall (@BradenGall) July 29, 2026

Really, the reaction further makes my point.

The NFL Has Won an Extraordinary Cultural Argument

The NFL has won an extraordinary cultural argument.

“They knew what they signed up for” becomes the end of the discussion instead of the beginning of one. The violence is acknowledged, the consequences are accepted and anyone who asks people inside the game to reckon with those consequences risks being accused of attacking the game.

Don’t mess with football, man. What are they supposed to say or do? Violent sport. Not the time or the place. Why are you grandstanding?

The success isn't that the NFL convinced people football is safe. Nobody believes that. The success is that it convinced people the danger is already priced into the transaction.