USA TODAY International Edition
NFL still can’t be trusted
Congress members chastise league for efforts to subvert concussion research
It didn’t take long for members of Congress to figure out what NFL players learned long ago.
On matters of health and safety, particularly when it comes to the head trauma that has marginalized the lives of so many players, the NFL cannot be trusted. Not to tell the truth, and certainly not to do the right thing.
The $ 12 billion- and- counting league can’t even be trusted to pay $ 16 million for research it had promised to fund, research federal officials deemed so important in unlocking the secrets of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ( CTE) that they used taxpayer money to ensure it went forward after the NFL refused to pay up.
“This investigation confirms the NFL inappropriately attempted to use its unrestricted gift as leverage to steer funding away from one of its critics,” Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Frank Pallone, D- N. J., said in statement, referring to a report Monday by the committee’s Democratic members that found the NFL tried to subvert a concussion research grant. When the National Institutes of Health refused to budge, investigators said, the NFL backed away from its funding pledge.
“Since its research agreement with NIH was clear that it could not weigh in on the grant selection process, the NFL should never have tried to influence that process,” Pallone said.
That’s what the NFL does. Dodges and denies while hundreds of its former players deteriorate and current ones fear what their future holds.
The NFL continues to pay lip service to the idea it cares about its players, past and present, and is committed to finding answers that will help limit the damage football causes. But what Mon-
day’s report shows is that protecting its image and interests trumps the NFL’s concern and commitment to the truth.
Always has. Probably always will.
“This is why the NFLPA refused to be a part of any study with the NFL. They cannot be trusted to do the right thing when it involves players,” Eric Winston, Cincinnati Bengals offensive tackle and president of the NFL Players Association, said on Twitter.
Predictably, the NFL vehemently rejected the investigation’s findings. Richard Ellenbogen, a neurologist and member of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee who was singled out in the report for trying to exert undue influence on the NIH, said he wasn’t even acting on the league’s behalf.
“I never talked to Congress. No one ever asked me my opinion,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “I had two private conversations with ( Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke), and this is a lesson, I guess: Big Government can crush you if you disagree with them.”
The same could be said for the NFL, a group that responded to the discovery of CTE and emerging evidence of its link to football by putting a rheumatologist in charge of its Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee. For those not familiar with fancy medical terms, a rheumatologist deals with autoimmune diseases and arthritis, not the brain.
This is also the same group that, as of Super Bowl week this year, was still denying there was a link between football- related head trauma and CTE. Never mind what scientists found when they examined the brains of Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, Mike Webster, Ken Stabler and dozens of other former players.
Two months later, Jeff Miller, the league’s senior vice president for health and safety, acknowledged the link, but it took a pointblank question from a member of Congress to do it. And even then the league said Miller’s answer was no different from what it had said all along.
It’s not in the NFL’s best interests to acknowledge that football can lead to a diminished quality of life, maybe even death. So it won’t. It will continue trying to distort the science, just as the congressional investigators allege. But, eventually, the science will win. It’s just a question of at what cost? And how many will have paid?