by Brian Ettkin
Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
We can handle the truth. It's the NFL's good fortune that we're just not interested in it.
We don't want to know how the NFL suppresses information about the effects of multiple concussions on its players.
We're not outraged that the enormously profitable NFL and its players' union "provides" a meager pension and no health insurance benefits for former players whose careers began before 1977.
We don't care about the loopholes in the league's drug-testing policy. We don't even care when a superstar such as Shawne Merriman tests positive for steroids and is suspended for four games.
We are outraged by every revelation about steroid use in baseball.
Because we're smitten with the NFL, we'd prefer not to look at its dark recesses. We want to observe Super Bowl Sunday as a holiday, and ignore our favorite league's unsavory practices, which we could never celebrate.
It's not that news stories casting the NFL in shadowy light are softened. They're just not widely reported.
When an October 2006 story in ESPN The Magazine reported the NFL-commissioned Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee's dubious findings on head trauma, findings that contradict the research of other doctors who study players with concussions, it was a nonstory in the popular press.
Among the revelations: The MTBIC concluded that returning to play after a concussion "does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the game or during the season." Which is funny, because a 2003 NCAA study of 2,905 college football players found exactly the opposite: a player who suffers a concussion becomes more susceptible to further head trauma for seven to 10 days after the injury.
The MTBIC claimed there's "no evidence of worsening or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players," even though a 2003 report by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina concluded -- wouldn't you know it? -- just the opposite. And most sports doctors agree.
Yet, according to the MTBIC, 51.7 percent of players who sustain concussions return in the same game.
The story also found that MTBIC chairman Elliot Pellman, the Jets' team doctor, didn't include in his study all relevant available data on players with concussions.
It's worth noting that Pellman is a rheumatologist, not a neurologist, so he's not trained to study brain trauma. He didn't earn a medical degree from Stony Brook, as he once claimed. He attended medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico.
And we don't find this disturbing.
Then there's the pension and benefit plan for pre-1977 players, which Hall of Famer Howie Long once called, the "dark secret nobody wants to talk about."
Even players covered by the NFL disability plan rarely collect. NFL veterans who play long enough become physically broken men and their minds are sometimes permanently jumbled too. Yet, The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2005 that only 90 of the more than 7,000 former players covered by the NFL plan were receiving the benefits.
This has prompted Pro Football Hall of Fame members including Deacon Jones and Mike Ditka to boycott the annual induction ceremonies in Canton to protest the NFL's and players union's treatment of its former players.
Not that we want to know about it.
Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
We can handle the truth. It's the NFL's good fortune that we're just not interested in it.
We don't want to know how the NFL suppresses information about the effects of multiple concussions on its players.
We're not outraged that the enormously profitable NFL and its players' union "provides" a meager pension and no health insurance benefits for former players whose careers began before 1977.
We don't care about the loopholes in the league's drug-testing policy. We don't even care when a superstar such as Shawne Merriman tests positive for steroids and is suspended for four games.
We are outraged by every revelation about steroid use in baseball.
Because we're smitten with the NFL, we'd prefer not to look at its dark recesses. We want to observe Super Bowl Sunday as a holiday, and ignore our favorite league's unsavory practices, which we could never celebrate.
It's not that news stories casting the NFL in shadowy light are softened. They're just not widely reported.
When an October 2006 story in ESPN The Magazine reported the NFL-commissioned Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee's dubious findings on head trauma, findings that contradict the research of other doctors who study players with concussions, it was a nonstory in the popular press.
Among the revelations: The MTBIC concluded that returning to play after a concussion "does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the game or during the season." Which is funny, because a 2003 NCAA study of 2,905 college football players found exactly the opposite: a player who suffers a concussion becomes more susceptible to further head trauma for seven to 10 days after the injury.
The MTBIC claimed there's "no evidence of worsening or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players," even though a 2003 report by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina concluded -- wouldn't you know it? -- just the opposite. And most sports doctors agree.
Yet, according to the MTBIC, 51.7 percent of players who sustain concussions return in the same game.
The story also found that MTBIC chairman Elliot Pellman, the Jets' team doctor, didn't include in his study all relevant available data on players with concussions.
It's worth noting that Pellman is a rheumatologist, not a neurologist, so he's not trained to study brain trauma. He didn't earn a medical degree from Stony Brook, as he once claimed. He attended medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico.
And we don't find this disturbing.
Then there's the pension and benefit plan for pre-1977 players, which Hall of Famer Howie Long once called, the "dark secret nobody wants to talk about."
Even players covered by the NFL disability plan rarely collect. NFL veterans who play long enough become physically broken men and their minds are sometimes permanently jumbled too. Yet, The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2005 that only 90 of the more than 7,000 former players covered by the NFL plan were receiving the benefits.
This has prompted Pro Football Hall of Fame members including Deacon Jones and Mike Ditka to boycott the annual induction ceremonies in Canton to protest the NFL's and players union's treatment of its former players.
Not that we want to know about it.
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