The debate around town now is whether the coaches and administrators are guilty of incompetence, indifference, or some combination. The new university president has issued an apology, reaffirmed the school’s commitment to player safety, and vowed to review team procedures. Alumni, fans, and a sports columnist for the Michigan Daily have called for ousting either Brandon or Hoke, and the whole thing has become one giant mess.

Jonathan Chait—a Michigan graduate and devoted, if demoralized, fan—has a summary of the whole thing if you want to read more. Or you can just turn on the television, because the incident has now become national news. In the last few days, I’ve seen feature segments on ABC News, CNN, and MSNBC. Partly that’s because there are a lot of Michigan alumni in the media. (Sanjay Gupta, who did the CNN story, got both his undergraduate and medical degrees here.) Partly that’s because Michigan prides itself on taking the “student” part of the “student-athlete” phrase seriously.

But there’s one other reason, I think: The video of Morris being hit and then staggering is unusually vivid. This is obviously not the first time a football player has suffered a concussion or a coaching staff has allowed him to keep playing. Camera footage has simply made the problem harder to ignore.

It happened that way with the Ray Rice-domestic violence story. It’d be nice if this controversy, too, sparked a broader conversation—in this case, about concussions and what to do about them.

As it happens, PBS Frontline just released a new report about the concussions in football—and the impact they have on players. The basis is a series of exams that Boston-area researchers have conducted on the brains of former, deceased football players. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Veterans’ Affairs brain repository in Bedford and the Boston University CTE Center. CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease. So far, of the 79 brains that researchers have examined, 76 were found to have it.