New York Times reveals former Alabama player, coach Ray Perkins suffered from severe CTE

Former Alabama player and coach Ray Perkins passed away December 9, 2020 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but a recent New York Times article revealed today that he did suffer from CTE, a progressive brain condition that’s thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head and repeated concussions.

“In my heart, I knew he had it,” said Lisa Perkins, Perkins’s widow, to The New York Times.

As a player, Perkins won two national championships at Alabama under Bear Bryant, then went on to win a Super Bowl in his five year NFL career with the Baltimore Colts. As a head coach, Perkins had stints with the New York Giants and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, as well as a four year run at Alabama as Bryant’s successor where he went 32-15-1.

Perkins even coached at a junior college and volunteered at a high school less than a decade ago, as he asked for his whistle once, announced he had a meeting as he held his briefcase on two occasions, and would read through old playbooks when his coaching career was over and his brain unfortunately deteriorating. And as Perkins symptoms like flashes of fury and defiance, struggles speaking, memory loss, and repetitiveness began to increase, his family edged toward letting scientists study his brain once his time had come. Perkins apologized to his daughter Shelby for his failing memory weeks before his death, which later revealed Stage 3 CTE.

“I went outside, and I started crying,” his other daughter, Rachael Perkins, recalled of the minutes after the exchange. “In that moment, I thought, ‘On my wedding day, he’s not going to know who I am.’”

Doctors and specialists saw evidence of Perkins suffering from Alzheimer’s disease as well, saying that his brain had been much bigger before and believe that CTE played a significant role in his diminished quality of life towards the end of it.

The New York Times also revealed that Perkins had teammates from 1965 Alabama’s National Championship team that also suffered from CTE, including two additional teammates that died with confirmed CTE and two whose families suspect that they have developed the disease.

One of those is Alabama legend Dennis Homan, whose wife Charlotte is currently watching her husband’s condition decline and his memory loss worsen. She said that every now and then Homan will wise crack and say, ‘I think I’ve been hit one too many times’, but he’s agreed to let his brain be studied after college teammate Kenny Stabler did the same, it was confirmed that he, too, had CTE after his 2015 death.

“We don’t blame this on Alabama,” she said. “We blame it on something that no one could have known.”

As the Perkins family and others continue to lobby for players to pledge their brains for research, it will be intriguing to see how the continuing research of CTE, as it relates to head injuries in football, impacts the current and future product of the game of football as we know it.