League acknowledges football, CTE are linked

PHILADELPHIA — The NFL is standing behind a top executive’s acknowledgment that the brain disease CTE can be linked to football.

The comments by Jeff Miller, the senior vice president for health and safety, “accurately reflect the view of the NFL,” league spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tuesday. Miller spoke Monday at a congressional committee’s roundtable discussion about concussions.

League officials have long denied proof of a connection between playing in the NFL and the condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Miller told the congressional panel brain research on former NFL players “certainly” shows a link between football and CTE.

Critics of the NFL’s proposed $1 billion plan to settle concussion claims call Miller’s sudden acknowledgment of a football-CTE connection a game changer. The settlement is being appealed by players concerned it excludes future cases of CTE — what they consider “the signature disease of football.”

The deal announced by lead plaintiffs’ lawyers and the NFL in August 2013 would instead pay up to $4 million for prior deaths involving CTE.

“Given that, the settlement’s failure to compensate present and future CTE is inexcusable,” lawyer Steven Molo wrote Tuesday in a letter to the federal appeals court in Philadelphia that is hearing his appeal.

Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior VP for health and safety, said studies have shown braindisease link.