The broken promises of the NFL concussion settlement
I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.
But I am even more disappointed that they cant even give one of their own HoFers (Maynard) the benefit of the doubt. Seems as though they learned nothing from Mike Webster.
Players like Mike Webster, Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, Andre Waters well-publicized struggles with premature dementia and accelerated Alzheimer's disease in conjunction with memory loss, cognitive decline sort of forced a long-hidden, yet well known secret within the NFL ranks out into the open to the extent the NFL (and Roger Goodell) were forced to do damage control and find an unwilling, convenient scapegoat to blame all of the NFL's decades worth of sins, crimes onto one team because we are historically, an NFL franchise many in the sports MSM and wider public views as lovable losers, so who cares if we ruin their momentum and possible chance at being a Dynasty. No one outside New Orleans or the central Gulf Coast cares about the Saints, their expendable.
Once Goodell and NFL.executives were finished giving the appearance of doing something while actually not accomplishing or dealing with the root core problem, the initial controversy had passed on from the 24/7 news cycle and NFL could go back to widdling down and screwing over hundreds of former ex-NFL players from the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000's from receiving desperately needed compensation money by having NFL-approved neurologists invent, derive alternative explanations for why ex-players have dementia so as to make it seem credible that they don't have to pay them for brain damage and save hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
BTW, I agree and understand with the Don Maynard analogy in comparing how flamboyant, flashy, and glitzy he was in the mid-late 60's NYC to Travis Kelce except the fact that in Maynard's day, a NFL player making $60-70k was rare (Maynard's teammate, Joe Namath was the team's highest-paid player at over 100k/year). Kelce makes more money in 6-7 games in any regular season then players in Maynard's era throughout most of their careers. Free agency, salaries exploding and player movement. The veteran minimum salary is over $250-300,000, thats almost as much as Namath's record-breaking 1965 $400,000 contract with the Jets when he signed with them over the St. Louis Cardinals.
Many more NFL players today and over the past 2-3 decades are actually retiring with more money saved up then their predecessors did from the 60's-late 80's. 50-55 years ago, many NFL star players worked second jobs to support themselves, I'm not saying their aren't some NFL players who aren't careless, frivolous, and irresponsible fiscally with their money but typically, most star NFL players over the past 25-30 years are doing better financially across the board then HOF WR's like Fred Belitinikoff who after retiring from the Raiders in 1978, was living in a one-story condo making $200/month in San Diego and actually played one season with the Montreal Alouettes in the CFL in 1979 to make little extra money and had to get into being a long-term WR's coach for his old team just to support himself after retirement.
Kenny Stabler sort of intimidated in his first autobiography, Snake, that one reason he signed with the Saints in 1982 and played a few more years longer then he should've was because his Saints contract ($250,000/annually) was the most money he ever made with any other team including Oakland and Houston. Archie Manning was actually earning 3-4x more money with his salary and endorsements on a 8-8 Saints team in 1979 than Terry Bradshaw was with Pittsburgh and winning Super Bowls most of the 1970's. According to Manning, Bradshaw needled him about that financial discrepancy every single time the two ever met back then.