QUESTIONS ARISE OVER CONCUSSIONS
Skepticism ensues over when NFL and NHL started taking the issue seriously
Jay Glazer, the gravelly voiced NFL reporter for Fox Sports, was asked about concussions last week during a discussion on a podcast hosted by Bill Simmons, the former ESPN personality.
Glazer’s response went to a strange place. He said he had spoken with a retired pro who discovered that he had dozens more concussions than previously thought. This player, he said, was now worried about the possible impacts. Glazer said this player hadn’t learned anything helpful.
“Don’t frigging tell me how many concussions I’ve had and the effects I’m going to have if you are not going to give me a solution,” Glazer said. “Ignorance is bliss.”
It wasn’t the only odd claim in the interview, but that part stood out: you’re better off not knowing how much abuse your brain has taken if you play in this league.
Glazer doesn’t work for the NFL, but he’s an insider, one of the most connected reporters in the industry. He trains players at a California gym, is friends with many of them, as well as coaches and executives. And so if that’s his take-away today after the years of revelations about the long-lasting effects of concussions and the risks they pose, it’s not hard to imagine how dismissive NFL culture was about this stuff 10 or 15 years ago.
Cue the story from Thursday’s New York Times, which documents how the concussion data that the NFL compiled more than a decade ago — and which formed the basis for the league’s longheld stance that football did not pose a significant risk for brain injury — was missing a considerable number of cases. “More than 100 diagnosed concussions” were not included in the studies, which were based on injury data provided by NFL teams.
The unreported cases, which included concussions suffered by players like Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys and Wayne Chrebet of the New York Jets — both of whom were escorted wobbly kneed from the field after taking shots to the head — mean the concussion totals were understated by 10 per cent during the period studied (1996-2001), the Times said.
In response, the NFL has said it never claimed the studies to be exhaustive since the data handover was voluntary, not mandatory. The league also said the missing cases were not part of an attempt to artificially lower the concussion rate.
None of this is particularly surprising in the NFL, where a strain of concussion skepticism remains, whether with Glazer’s comments or the actions on the field, such as the incident last November when St. Louis quarterback Case Keenum stayed in a game despite having clearly had his helmet bounce violently off the turf.
The NFL has already accepted the opinion of outside researchers who said its concussion studies were flawed; this is in part why the league settled lawsuits with thousands of retired players in 2013. The Times story essentially says the studies happened to be more flawed than thought.
There’s a parallel here, though, for the NHL and its own unresolved lawsuit brought by more than 100 retired players in a Minnesota court.
Like the NFL, the NHL quantified the incidence of concussions in its sport by reviewing the medical data provided by teams covering the years 1997-2004. In 2011, the league instituted a much stricter concussion protocol as a response to the report’s conclusions.
But aside from vague suggestions the NHL dodged “the implications of its own soft-pedalled and long-delayed report,” nowhere in the 126-page master complaint does the lawsuit allege the league peddled flawed science for years, as was the case with football.
(NHL executives have repeatedly insisted the league gave appropriate attention to player safety at all times and they reject the lawsuit’s allegations. I asked deputy commissioner Bill Daly on Thursday if, in light of the NFL story, the NHL was still confident in the conclusions of its report, but have not yet received a response.)
Instead, the lawsuit charges repeatedly that the NHL should have known about the risks associated with head injuries given advancements in medical science and it should have acted much sooner than it did.
Lawsuits tend to allege all manner of things in the hope some of it sticks and so the NHL is charged with glorifying violence, with failing to sufficiently curb fighting and with going soft on perpetrators, all as evidence that safety was not paramount. In one passage, it notes the history of Gary Suter, who blindsided Paul Kariya in 1998. “The NHL inducted Suter into its Hall of Fame’in 2011,” the lawsuit states.
But none of that gets to the central question: did the NHL know, sooner than it admitted, concussions were happening at a rate that demanded the major changes brought about in 2011? Or did it act responsibly, adjusting its policies as it gained a better understanding of the medical risks?
It’s a question that is ever more likely to be settled in court.