Ex-players sue NCAA, schools
Six concussion suits seek class-action status
Lawyers representing former college football players who say they are suffering from the effects of concussions filed six separate lawsuits in federal courts around the country Tuesday against the NCAA and various schools and conferences.
The suits, which seek to become class actions, involve a halfdozen law firms but are led by a Chicago-based practice also representing objectors to the proposed $75 million settlement of a national class-action concussions case against the NCAA.
After an initial settlement proposal in the national case was rejected by a federal judge, it was expanded to cover athletes in contact and non-contact sports. But a new version of the settlement proposal involved the plaintiffs agreeing to waive their right to pursue personal-injury claims on a class-action basis.
In January, U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee gave preliminary approval to the new version of the settlement, provided it included a series of modifications, the first of which was allowing plaintiffs to pursue personal-injury claims on a class-action basis as long as those suits didn’t seek a nationwide class or a class consisting of athletes from more than one NCAA school.
The six cases filed Tuesday are styled on the ongoing NFL concussion litigation and each targets a different school. The NCAA and a conference are named as defendants in all the cases. Penn State and Vanderbilt are named as a defendant in two of the suits. The other suits were filed on behalf of former players at Auburn, Georgia, Oregon and Utah, but those four schools are not named as a defendant because of issues involving sovereign immunity, lead plaintiffs attorney Jay Edelson said.
The conferences named in the suits are the Southeastern (cases involving players from Auburn, Georgia and Vanderbilt), the Big Ten (Penn State), the Pac-12 (Oregon) and the Western Athletic (Utah played in that league through the 1998 season, when it joined the Mountain West; the school joined the Pac-12 in 2011).
In the filings involving all the schools but Oregon, the cases seek to cover athletes who played football at the schools between 1952 and 2010; the Oregon case seeks to cover athletes who played football at the school between 1964 and 2010. The 1952 date ties to the year in which, according to the suits, the New England Journal of Medicine first recommended that athletes stop playing football after suffering a third concussion. Oregon joined the conference now known as the Pac-12 in 1964. In 2010, the suit states, the NCAA made changes to its concussion-treatment protocols, requiring schools to have a concussion management plan in place for all sports.
Edelson said Lee’s order in January provided a road map for the new cases “and we are following that road map — which we are happy to do.”
A spokesman for the NCAA could not be reached for immediate comment.
The cases allege that “knowing for decades of a vast body of scientific research describing the danger of ” traumatic brain injuries, the various defendants “failed to implement procedures to protect Plaintiffs and other … football players from the longterm dangers associated with them. They did so knowingly and for profit.”