The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Helping the other side
Ex-NFL benefits plan official now assists players.
BALTIMORE — Retired NFL players struggling with debilitating injuries years after they leave the field have a not-so-facetious way of describing the league’s approach to doling out their health benefits: “Delay, deny and hope you die.”
Enter Paul Scott.
For 13 years, he worked for the NFL benefit plan as the point person telling players what paperwork they needed to apply for disability benefits. His signature was on the letter that said whether their applications were accepted or denied, which, depending on the outcome, made him either the savior or the enemy, even though representatives from the NFL and players’ union — not Scott — decided who received benefits.
Through those years, Scott said, he always wanted to help the players flummoxed by the arcane rules, which lawyers in the field of disability benefits call among the most byzantine of any employer. Yet he was allowed to tell the players only what they needed to submit, not how to submit it. Some rejections puzzled him.
“Sometimes, it just baffled me the decisions they arrived at,” Scott, 42, said over lunch in Baltimore, not far from the benefit plan’s office. Burned out, he quit in 2016 and soon realized he could do the thing he always wanted to do. He contacted retiree advocacy groups and NFL alumni chapters and spoke to players about the application process, the reaction from them so positive that he started a company, Benefits Huddle, to advise them.
Workers often jump from one side of the fence to the other: Journalists become publicists, prosecutors become defense attorneys, bank regulators become bankers. Rarely, though, has someone left the league’s secretive benefit plan and used that inside knowledge to help former players.
Scott appears to be getting results, though there is no way to independently verify his track record. Since he began Benefits Huddle, he said, he has helped more than 100 players secure settlements in two years, a figure he estimates is double, or even triple, the approval rate when he worked for the plan. About half of those players qualified for the neurocognitive disability benefit, which pays up to $54,000 a year. The others received total and permanent disability benefits ranging from $60,000 to $265,000 a year. For his services, he charged a fraction of the player’s first lump-sum benefit.
The NFL, the players’ union and representatives of the benefit plan declined to provide data on the plan’s acceptance or denial rate.
Scott said his track record was the result of his ability to make sense of the abstruse plan, not favors from inside connections. Last year, he helped Sam Gash, a fullback who played 12 years with the New England Patriots, the Buffalo Bills and the Baltimore Ravens, obtain benefits worth about $10,000 a month.
Over the years, Gash had broken his leg, popped ligaments in his wrists, injured his ankles, developed bone spurs and torn his anterior cruciate ligament. He figures he has had 20 operations and numerous concussions. His NFL medical report is about 80 pages long, he said.
Yet he was denied disability benefits in 2013 because the plan’s doctors said he was still employable. He worked for two more seasons as a coach with the Green Bay Packers. But struggling with memory loss, moodiness and a short temper, Gash reapplied for disability, this time with Scott’s help, and was accepted. Scott said he homed in on the specific injuries that were preventing Gash from working, including his neurocognitive problems — not all of his medical conditions.
“I told Paul a while ago, the knowledge he imparts is in a language you can understand,” Gash said.
As Gash discovered, Scott is a stickler for details. He speaks precisely but quickly. He drops acronyms into conversations, then quickly clarifies them.
Scott played football growing up in Virginia, then took up the hammer throw at Towson State in Maryland. In 2003 he joined the Bert Bell NFL Retirement Plan, which oversees the league’s disability process.
One critical thing he learned there was the importance of having pinpoint paperwork so complete that there would be few reasons for a rejection. Former players often hire lawyers to help them apply for benefits, but they can be confrontational and usually submit too much paperwork — some of which can be used against the players, Scott said.
“Paul is doing a good thing, but it’s unfortunate that it’s necessary because the plan is so complicated and the plan refuses to help the players navigate the system,” said Cy Smith, a lawyer in Baltimore who has sued the NFL benefit plan on behalf of former players. “It’s only gotten more complicated and restrictive in the past decade.”
The disability plan is one of the largest available to former players. But they can also apply for a wide range of other benefits, including for joint replacement surgery, long-term care, dementia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease.
However complex the rules, Scott seems to have mastered the intricacies. In Scott’s time with the NFL benefit plan, players had to get a diagnosis from a doctor chosen by the league and players’ union, and the league and union had to sign off on everything. The political tension between the two sides could sometimes interfere with approval. The injuries were also different. Unlike, say, a factory worker who breaks an arm, many football players had multiple injuries that degenerated over time.
And unlike Social Security, the universe of retired football players was small, and word traveled quickly. Some players could not understand why their applications were denied while others’ were approved. Other players were unaware that taking a pension early could affect their disability claims.
Scott is now free to answer these and other questions.
“Most retired players love football and appreciate their time in the NFL,” Scott said. “But they also deeply distrust the league because, they say, it makes it hard to obtain the benefits promised to them. I’d like to feel like I’m helping them out.”