The broken promises of the NFL concussion settlement

The NFL concussion settlement should be pried open, like the dented, expired can of goods that it is, and revised. Players are part of the “NFL family” when everyone is hugging at the draft and a guy has his career in front of him. But what happens at the end of the day when he’s no longer a functional commodity?


For a member of the league’s greatest generation that built the league, when his vagueness and slowing speech or delusions and tremors set in, he is treated as a financial liability to be systematically haggled over as a “claimant” by arbiters arguing his “concurrent conditions” and whether his depression and anxiety are “alternative causations” for the fact that he can’t tell you what month it is. Someday, that could be Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

No settlement is ever truly satisfying. A hideous legal fight ended with a complex agreement that, to give the lawyers due credit, has paid out nearly $1.3 billion, as opposed to the alternative, which was years more litigation. But the settlement also has terrible shortcomings, ones there is no excusing NFL team owners or the lawyers for. The 1,300 former players whose claims have been denied should demand a new legal review from Judge Anita Brody to force the NFL to adhere to contemporary medical standards, if not basic decency.

As anyone who has been through any kind of negotiation knows, here’s what happens in settlement talks: First the lawyers reach a “framework” agreement. But then they start typing up the exact language — and inserting all kinds of sophistry calculated to favor their side. That’s what seems to have happened here. As The Washington Post’s Will Hobson has documented in an investigative series, the settlement’s agreed-on method for how to evaluate players for cognitive impairment, brain damage or other neurological diseases was supposed to be “state of the art.”

But it turned out getting a claim paid required a finding of far more impairment for dementia than your neurologist or mine would use.
And the settlement’s “state of the art” dementia evaluation does not include MRI exams, considered by doctors a critical tool for detection and early treatment of neuro-related issues. Conveniently, this saves the NFL millions.

Under the provisions of this deal, it’s all too easy for dementia symptoms to be attributed instead to other health problems that commonly afflict former players, such as depression or sleep apnea. So instead of getting their claims paid, you know what some former players have received? Autopsies showing obvious evidence of brain disease.

The U.S. standard for diagnosing dementia is neurological assessment via tests of memory, language and executive function. Normally, one or two impaired results lead to a doctor’s diagnosis. But under the settlement, an ex-NFL player must show four impairments. To be defined as suffering from “early dementia,” he has to be judged as “unable to function independently” at social events and to “need prompting” in his hygiene. As anyone with a family member with Alzheimer’s knows, there is nothing “early” about those symptoms, or questionable............

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/08/21/nfl-concussion-settlement-brain-science-mri/