The broken promises of the NFL concussion settlement

ELLENWOOD, Ga. — It took five years, three doctor’s visits, two federal lawsuits and countless emails with his lawyers, but Reggie Brown finally got word in February: He officially had dementia.

Which meant, he believed, it was time for the NFL to pay up.


Brown, 64, had been fighting for years to get paid by the landmark NFL concussion settlement, which promised to compensate every former player with dementia or a brain disease linked to head trauma.

Under the rules of the settlement, Brown’s lawyers told him, his diagnosis entitled him to about $200,000.


All that stood between him and a check was BrownGreer, the independent administrative firm that examines all claims.

He had heard stories about the firm taking months, even years, to review claims, but he hoped his would move quickly.

After all, his diagnosis had come from a board-certified settlement doctor who had been vetted by BrownGreer and lawyers for the NFL.


Then, in July, Brown received an email from the firm. It had reviewed his tax returns and scoured his social media activity, and it wanted to know:

If Brown had dementia, how had he managed to work part-time, earning about $30,000 annually the past five years?


Why did he claim online he worked as a motivational speaker?


And what about the Facebook posts that showed him attending his daughter’s graduate school graduation, traveling with his wife and going to the gym?


“It feels like these people are really trying to jam me up,” Brown, a former running back for the Atlanta Falcons and Philadelphia Eagles, said in a recent interview in his home outside Atlanta.

When lawyers for the NFL and thousands of former players struck the historic settlement a decade ago, they entrusted the crucial role of managing it to BrownGreer, one of the most experienced firms in the country focused on settlement administration.

And BrownGreer’s founding partner, Orran Brown Sr., publicly assured former players that his firm would work to make the process as efficient and fair as possible.
It was building a nationwide network of settlement-approved doctors whose diagnoses would quickly lead to payments, Brown said.

And while the firm would consult a panel of expert review doctors on some claims, he said, it would rarely — if ever — deny claims involving diagnoses made by those settlement doctors.

“We do not take orders from the NFL,” he said then. His firm, he added, wanted to “get this done correctly and get it done quickly.”


But seven years later, BrownGreer has denied hundreds of claims involving diagnoses made by settlement doctors, and the firm has spent months — and, in some cases, years — scouring players’ social media and scrutinizing medical records, sparking an outcry from former players and causing some doctors to quit the settlement’s languishing network, a Washington Post investigation found……….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/12/29/nfl-brain-injuries-players-compensation/