CFL blind to CTE evidence

EDITORIAL: WHAT OTHERS THINK League’s focus should be on protecting players, compensating former players

If the Canadian Football League proved one thing at its annual State of the League address in advance of the Grey Cup last weekend, it’s this: It’s got its head in the sand.

What else but willful blindness — or a desire to defend itself from two lawsuits — can explain commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s insistence that the science connecting concussions and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is “inconclusive?”

Contrast the CFL’s position on the scientific evidence to that of the National Football League. Jeff Miller, the NFL’s top health and safety officer, openly acknowledged the link between concussions and CTE during a discussion on concussions convened by the U.S. Congress last year. Indeed, the American league agreed to settle a class-action suit with its former players in 2013, eventually paying out $1 billion.

Still, last week Ambrosie, a former CFL player himself, was citing a 2016 study from the fifth International Consensus Conference on Concussions in Sport, which concluded that science has not established an unimpeachable and conclusive link between head trauma and CTE.

It was reminiscent of a tobacco manufacturer holding up studies denying the link between smoking and cancer. Anything is possible. But Ambrosie did not cite a more recent 2017 report from researchers in Boston who studied the brains of 202 deceased football players. They found evidence of CTE in 177 of the brains studied, including in seven of eight CFL players.

Nor did he reference the disturbing findings of a McMaster University study on former CFL players released in September. It found some of the players in their 40s had the brains of 80- or even 90-year-olds.

The research also found alarming thinning in the former players’ cerebral cortexes, decreased activity in the part of their brains associated with decision-making, and average scores on a test for depression that were nearly four times higher than the average for control subjects.

Despite the more recent research, Ambrosie has not moved the marker one foot down the field since his predecessor, Jeffrey Orridge, said essentially the same thing in his State of the League address a year ago. “The league’s position is that there is no conclusive evidence at this point.”

To be fair, Ambrosie has announced an end to in-season, full-contact practices, and an extra week next year in every team’s schedule to give players more time to recover from the sport’s punishing on-field action. That should help.

But the CFL should not ignore the vast scientific evidence connecting concussions with CTE or wait for the courts to force it to act on either a $200-million classaction suit or one before the Supreme Court from former Argo Arland Bruce III.

Instead, it should up the ante on protecting current players and move quickly to ensure that those it failed to shield in the past are compensated for their suffering. Anything less than that is blowing smoke.

An editorial from the Toronto Star (distributed by The Canadian Press)