NFL’s response to brain trauma evidence is too little, too late


Take the time to read this excellent work from The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who put together a timeline on how the NFL has approached head trauma over just the last 20 years.

It should give you a good taste of why people like me don’t blame retired players for going to court in pursuit of damages.

Many times I have shared with you statements from the league about concussions and the damage they cause, or more accurately, the league’s statements that concussions cause minimal or no significant damage and that players have always known the risks.

Yet people act as if it is the players’ fault. Players, especially those who played in the 1960s, ‘70s and 80s, were all but tricked into torturing themselves for our entertainment.

The Atlantic’s timeline is only since 1992, so imagine what it was like before then. Before the league cared enough to study brain injury.

It is very simple. The league hired doctors who lied, misinformed or were just plain incompetent.

Commissioner Roger Goodell has pushed hard for a new approach and it has wrinkled feathers. Whether or not we like the new rules, the old approach was terrible.

Here is an excerpt from The Atlantic’s piece:

1994 – The NFL establishes the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee. Rheumatologist Elliot Pellman is installed as its chair. “Concussions are part of the profession, an occupational risk,” rheumatologist Pellman tells Sports Illustrated. He says that a football player is “like a steelworker who goes up 100 stories, or a soldier.”

Pellman continues–”Veterans clear more quickly than rookies…They can unscramble their brains a little faster, maybe because they’re not afraid after being dinged. A rookie won’t know what’s happened to him and will be a little panicky. The veterans almost expect the dings. You have to watch them, though, because vets will try to fool you. They memorize the answers. They’ll run off the field staring at the scoreboard.”

Does it sound like the league was overly concerned about the long-term problems that might be associated with traumatic brain injury?

The facts simply do not support the idea that players knew the risks of playing professional, thus putting the blame on them for playing a sport that is likely to cause long-term physical harm.

Of course, players know that football is a rough game and they expected to be banged up at the end of their careers, but the NFL systematically went about telling them that head trauma wasn’t part of the banged up process and that concussions wouldn’t hurt them.

I’m irritated to the highest of irritation when dimwits say players have no right to sue for what football has done to them.

If your employer tells you that whatever it is that you do for a living won’t hurt you, but you find out years later that it actually did harm you, irrevocably, what would you do?

Of course, most of them would have made the same choice, knowing the possible damage, but they made ill-informed choices because they didn’t have good information. Going forward, you can surely make that argument, but that position doesn’t hold up looking back.

How do we know which players would never have played the sport if given accurate information on what the game could do to one’s brain? How do we know whose parents would never have allowed their son to play had they known what we now know?

Categories: General
Jerome Solomon

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