His death, at age 36, helped spark a debate in the NFL about the link between playing football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

His father Connie "Big Bird" Strzelczyk was a 6-foot-4 basketball standout player at Montana State University, from 1958 to 1960.

As a 6 ft 5 in (1.96 m) forward, Strzelczyk averaged 21 points a game as a junior and 22 as a senior, earning all-Western New York honors.

However Strzelczyk's dad, who had played college basketball only to end up teaching, convinced him that he had a better future in football.

[3][5] He made the Pittsburgh Steelers roster after the team's 1990 training camp and moved to Plum, and then Ross Township.

However, when right tackle Tunch Ilkin was injured and missed four games in 1992, Strzelczyk leaped into starting duty.

During games, he would pick up the red phone on the Steelers' sideline and scream at the team's offensive coordinator, from Ron Erhardt to Chan Gailey to Ray Sherman: "Run the damn ball!"

Five months later, during a Monday Night Football game, against the Kansas City Chiefs, Strzelczyk had a quadriceps tear that required season-ending surgery two days later.

There, Strzelczyk plays himself as he steals the kicker's "snow shoe" and taunts him throughout the video along with fellow Steeler teammates Jerome Bettis, Greg Lloyd, and Kordell Stewart.

He also invested in several businesses that failed, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, although the monetary losses did not cripple his finances.

It was initially thought that Strzelczyk was under the influence of alcohol or other drugs due to his irrational behavior, but that was disproved by toxicity tests.

[9] This incident sparked a debate about the seriousness of concussions at the National Football League Summit in June 2007 when neuropathologist Bennet Omalu linked the deaths of Strzelczyk to chronic traumatic encephalopathy like three other retired NFL players—Mike Webster, Andre Waters and Terry Long.

The film depicted the efforts of Omalu, who fought against the efforts by the NFL to suppress his research on the brain damage suffered by professional football players called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease that football players get from taking constant hits to the head and causing damage to the brain.