After watching the Jaylen Brown-less Celtics fall to the Phoenix Suns this afternoon, I turned off the television. No big game for me this year just like the last three years. I’ve stopped watching the NFL .

It really hasn’t been that hard of a transition. Sunday afternoons in the fall at the supermarket were a revelation. Hikes in the woods felt better than watching the Patriots. It is just this Sunday every year that feels different. When you know that fans, casual fans, and many non-fans are watching this cultural moment across the country. I will follow the commentary on the advertisements on social media and observe whether Tom Brady can win a seventh Super Bowl but I will not watch the NFL.

Like many decisions, this one was influenced by several factors. When I made this decision in 2017, my home team was owned, coached and quarterbacked by men who seemed preternaturally inclined to suck up to Donald Trump. I don’t pretend to know who Kraft, Belichick and Brady voted for but given Trump’s racism and corruption, their unwillingness to distance themselves from him was repugnant.

During the 2016 and 2017 seasons, the NFL showed its true colors with its reaction to Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling protest for racial justice and reform of policing in the United States. One need to look no further than the NBA for a league that took a decidedly different stance in support of players commenting on matters of race and justice.

And finally, the brutal nature of the game got to me after all of these years. In 2015, the movie Concussion came out and made the issue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. hard to ignore any longer. Repeated blows to the head, similar to what occurs regularly on a NFL field, cause C.T.E. “It’s like smoking and cancer,” said Bruce Miller, a neurologist and Alzheimer’s expert at the University of California, San Francisco, . “It’s as clear as day.” As a fan, it increasingly bothered me that each team had to prepare for season-ending injuries to key positions every single year because it was impossible to get through a year without significant losses. Attending a game almost felt like being a Roman at the Colosseum. Now the evidence was in. C.T.E. is shortening lives and making the quality of those lives significantly worse.

So I won’t be watching. I have resisted disclosing this because most of the people I know – family, friends, colleagues – will be watching. Heck, much of the country will be watching. I’m not claiming any moral superiority here. It helps that my dad was not much of a NFL fan and I began truly following the Patriots only after graduating from college. No judgements here. Football at its best showcases incredible athletes doing amazing feats on the field. Malcolm Butler’s goal line interception is still seared into my brain as is David Tyree’s unbelievable balancing of a football on top of his helmet.

Football is part of the United States for both good and ill. NFL ratings remain fairly stable, rising and falling slightly over the last four years through all sorts of controversy. It is not lost on me that the largest group of people who report they have stopped watching in recent years includes white men who were turned off because of the players kneeling in protest. Black men peacefully protesting is evidently a bridge too far for some. I’ll root for an NFL that respects its players’ health and welfare and freedom of speech. And, in the meantime, I’ll follow Jaylen Brown on and off the court.