Amid coverage of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, brain damage got buried at the bottom of the pile.
It was such a bad week for the NFL – arguably the richest professional sports brand in the world, if only because few American sports fans even know what UEFA stands for – that the biggest, game-changing news of the week was essentially buried in the mix of coverage about Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson.
The news? That nearly a third of the league’s former players will likely develop debilitating brain conditions from years of helmet-smashing concussions that start in adolescence and culminate in their professional careers; that they’ll develop those conditions earlier in their lives than the rest of us; and that they’ll suffer this brain trauma at a rate that is about twice as often as the general population.
The NFL’s front office – which was busy generating statements of support from the league’s owners in the wake of the Rice elevator video controversy, and fending off questions about Peterson’s child abuse charges – didn’t announce the news.
It was part of a disclosure in court documents Friday first reported on by The Associated Press and a handful of news organizations. It wasn’t a medical science study in a peer-reviewed journal. It was actuarial data that the league and lawyers for NFL retirees released as part of a proposed $765 million settlement of thousands of concussion lawsuits.
The data, developed by a New York firm, was used as the rationale for setting the payout in the settlement. The league and lead lawyers for the players involved in the settlement talks said they expect about 6,000 of the 19,400 retired players (28 percent) to develop Alzheimer’s disease or at least moderate dementia. A much smaller subset can be expected to develop Lou Gehrig’s or Parkinson’s disease, they said.
This is stark, sobering data.
And, I would argue, it is considerably more important than the cases of individual marquee players that dominated the NFL’s coverage this past weekend, as troubling as those cases are.
Rice will hire very good, expensive lawyers, and get himself reinstated to play in the NFL in 2015. There is ample precedent for this. Peterson’s very good, expensive lawyers will almost certainly plead out his case, with the net result being probation and community service. There is ample precedent for this as well.
The Rice and Peterson cases will dominate coverage for weeks and perhaps months because social and mainstream media are now driven by celebrity coverage. The Rice controversy could, in fact, cost NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell his job. There is ample precedent for such a conclusion to dramas of this sort as well.
What there is no precedent for, however, is what the league will do – and the players will demand – in the case of dementia and brain trauma in the sport. It is a much, much bigger problem for the league than the Rice and Peterson controversies.
It will, in fact, be the defining issue for the NFL in the next few years.
The ripple effects for the league are already starting to appear. In the wake of stories about retired NFL players filing lawsuits and efforts to deal with concussions on the playing field, registrations in amateur football sports leagues have fallen by as much as 10 percent, according to recent reports.
The proposed $765 million settlement needs to be ratified by the various parties involved in the class-action lawsuit against the NFL – which had accused the league of hiding information linking concussions from practices and games to brain injuries – by Oct. 14. Lawyers for players not involved in the settlement talks will have their day in court in November to challenge the fairness of the settlement.
Former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson committed suicide on Feb. 17, 2011.
Critics of the proposed settlement have already begun to talk publicly about whether it’s enough to cover claims from all of the NFL’s retired players; whether the wealthy professional sports league can afford more money for the settlement; and whether enough money was allocated for ongoing brain trauma and dementia research linked to concussions.
"We still lack ‘an informed understanding of the dynamics of the settlement discussions and negotiations.' Indeed, we have zippo understanding," Thomas A. Demetrio, who represents the family of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, wrote in a motion the day before the settlement data was released in court, according to the AP.
But the biggest problem for the league – which is a substantive and legal problem as well as a gigantic marketing and public relations headache – is that it does nothing for current and future players.
Are they at risk? Is the NFL doing enough to protect them? Are children and adolescents playing football in leagues and high schools at risk over time – or is this just a problem for the most serious players who continue into college and then to professional football?
Right now, we don’t really know. The jury is out on that, and there is simply no precedent for this urgent problem facing the NFL.
There is, however, precedent in other areas. I was closely involved with a somewhat related question once – the issue of whether extensive cellphone use might cause brain cancer. As a former senior public affairs official with the regulatory agency with jurisdiction over the cellphone manufacturing industry, I spent five years involved with a series of medical studies that were systematically and deliberately built to study this precise question. The industry funded the studies without prejudice, and the results were made public as rapidly as possible. There was transparency in the funding, the studies and the results.
I would encourage the NFL’s front office to do something much like this with the concussion and brain trauma question. Fund the studies that can answer the questions raised by this issue – not just a handful that are minimally helpful, but the ones that can truly answer key questions. Players, parents and even fans need answers – not obfuscation or opaqueness.
The league’s future may well rest on its ability to answer the questions raised by this one issue alone. If the NFL fails here, either in its efforts to address the looming questions publicly or in its willingness to confront the issue directly, then it may lose not just fans or credibility – it could lose its very existence as the biggest sports brand in the world.