Yes. People who throw this out as evidence are ignorant imbeciles.
There may be, and is indeed likely a link. If they did the analysis on a thousand NFL players and and a thousand randomly selected physically active men who played a variety of sports and engaged in other physical activities, I will bet there is a higher incidence in NFL players. And in Hockey players. And in Soccer players. And in Baseball Players. And so on.
Gee. Doesn’t raise a flag to some people that, there might be some bias inherent in this when 99% of the brains display CTE? Doesn’t even occur to the dummies that there is a reason they were doing pathology on these brains, that their families or the individual made them available for a specific “reason”?
Which is why it would be very helpful to be able to read the dang study for ourselves.