Giants' Cam Skattebo says CTE isn't real: 'I think it's an excuse'

Cam Skattebo isn’t shy about being himself but the Giants running back’s recent comments about CTE brought along some controversy.

On a March 12 episode of "Bring The Juice" podcast, Skattebo told host Frank Dalena that he though CTE, a brain disease caused by repeated head trauma, wasn’t real and just an excuse. Videos of the exchange went viral this weekend.

“Do you think CTE is a real thing?” Dalena asked.

“No,” Skattebo replied.

“I don’t think so either,” Dalena responded.

To which Skattebo said, “I think it’s an excuse.”

The issue came up after Skattebo mentioned he couldn’t remember a story of his mother telling people he used to run into telephone poles as a child with his older brother’s football pads.

CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, has been linked to boxers, soccer players and other athletes postmortem when studying their brain tissue. But it’s been prominently linked to football players since 2002 when Dr. Bennet Omalu diagnosed it during an autopsy of Steelers’ Hall of Fame center Mike Webster.

In 2023, the Boston University CTE Center announced that 345 of 376 players’ brains they studied were found to have had CTE.

After those comments, Dalena also told Skattebo that he believed asthma is an excuse as well. Skattebo agreed and added that it’s fake.

“Is there anything worse than when you're in fourth grade [and] someone’s huffing and puffing, ‘I have asthma’.”, Dalena said. “You're just soft.”

“Yeah,” Skattebo said. “Just literally, Breathe the air.”

Skattebo has not commented publicly since the episode.

By Evan Barnes

evan.barnes@newsday.comevan_b

Evan Barnes covers the Giants for Newsday. He previously covered the Brooklyn Nets, Memphis football and the Memphis Grizzlies and also covered prep sports in Los Angeles.