Billy Ray Smith Jr's death reopens football's CTE reckoning

Billy Ray Smith Jr. spent 10 seasons in the middle of the Chargers defense, the guy San Diego took 5th overall out of Arkansas back in 1983. He racked up 15 career interceptions, 14 fumble recoveries and 13 forced fumbles, made the Chargers' 50th anniversary team, and never really left the building even after he retired, spending years as a sports director at a San Diego ABC affiliate and covering football on national TV. Now his family says he's gone at 64, and the cause is the one that keeps swallowing up players from that era.

Adam Schefter broke the news Wednesday, relaying that Smith's family confirmed he'd been dealing with CTE-caused dementia. The family's own statement, released alongside the news, said Smith "faced his long journey with dementia caused by CTE with unmatched bravery, dignity, and strength" and that he passed "peacefully surrounded by family." CTE can only be diagnosed after death, which means every public account of a guy fighting dementia in his 50s and 60s is really the sport quietly confirming what it did to him.

Smith wasn't a bit player. He was a 2-time All-American at Arkansas before the Chargers grabbed him, and he made it to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2000. His dad, Billy Ray Smith Sr., played in the NFL too, so this was a football family through and through — 2 generations who gave their bodies to the same game that's now being sued, studied and second-guessed over exactly what it did to guys like him.

That's the part that lands heaviest here. Smith wasn't some anonymous practice-squad guy who took hits nobody saw. He was a starter on a playoff-caliber Chargers defense, a name fans in San Diego knew from the field and then knew again from the broadcast booth. Every time one of these names comes attached to a CTE diagnosis, it drags the conversation about player safety back to the front page, and it's a reminder that the guys who built these franchises in the '80s and '90s are still paying the bill decades later.

The NFL has poured money into concussion protocols, tackling technique reform and brain injury research over the last decade-plus, but none of that retroactively helps the generation that played before any of it existed. Smith's family choosing to publicly attribute his dementia to CTE is its own kind of statement — it's advocacy, whether they framed it that way or not, adding one more name to a list that keeps growing with guys who mattered to their teams and their cities.