After creating memories, will NFL stars recall them?

Sunday's Super Bowl created some of the most indelible memories in the game's recent history. Years from now, fans will be recalling Santonio Holmes' balletic touchdown catch and James Harrison's roaring 100-yard interception return.

Whether the players will remember is a different story. Early last week, while the Super Bowl hype machine cranked out its usual merriment, the Sports Legacy Institute held a small press conference in a quieter corner of Tampa, Fla. The group, dedicated to studying head injuries in sports, unveiled new evidence that NFL players are at risk of developing serious brain damage from the effects of repeated head trauma.

In one sense, this hardly seems like news. With ever bigger, faster players crashing into each other Sunday after Sunday, with fans clamoring for tooth-rattling hits they can replay on YouTube, semi-regulated violence remains the cornerstone of football's allure. But as we learn more about the alarming toll the game takes on its players, the NFL has been slow to act -- leaving it to guys like Chris Nowinski to ferret out the truth.

"People are not taking this seriously enough by a long shot," said Nowinski, president of the Sports Legacy Institute. "Active players don't want to talk about it. They have a short window of time to make money in the game, and they don't want to think what happens to the brain when they run into a 300-pound man at 20 miles per hour. And the NFL's research is borderline pathetic.

"Our ultimate goal would be for nobody to develop [the brain disease] CTE, to figure out how to prevent and treat it. Our initial goal is just to give people a choice. Nobody knew that multiple concussions would lead to this."

CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It used to be called dementia pugilistica, because it was primarily seen in boxers who had taken too many blows to the head.

A progressive, degenerative brain disease, CTE occurs when repetitive head trauma causes toxic proteins to build up in the brain, killing cells and impairing function. It leads to memory loss, erratic behavior, depression and eventually, full-blown dementia.

Even more troubling, Nowinski's group announced in Tampa that researchers found evidence of the disease in an 18-year-old who suffered multiple concussions while playing high school football.

"Our efforts to educate athletes, coaches and parents on the need to identify and rest concussions have only been moderately successful, because people have been willing to look the other way when a child suffers a concussion," said Dr. Robert Cantu, who co-founded the Sports Legacy Institute with Nowinski and is chairman of its medical advisory board. "I hope the discovery of CTE in a child creates the urgency this issue needs."

Nowinski became an advocate for studying head trauma in sports after his WWE wrestling career was ended by a concussion in 2003. His Sports Legacy Institute teamed with the Boston University School of Medicine to create a CTE research center, which diagnosed the disease in former NFL players Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Terry Long, Justin Strzelczyk, John Grimsley and Tom McHale. A number of retired players -- including Joe DeLamielleure, Ted Johnson and former Viking Brent Boyd -- have agreed to donate brain tissue for research after their deaths.

The NFL has taken some steps to address the issue, including its own study of concussions and a recommendation that players knocked unconscious in a game or practice should sit out the rest of it. But its officials consistently dispute research that connects football with serious brain injury, and it has been slow to seek answers to a problem that plagues many of the men who built the game into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

In its desire to protect its own interests, the NFL is sacrificing its human capital. The men who make memories for millions deserve to fully understand the risks of the game, and to decide for themselves whether they can live with the prospect of forgetting.