Anyway, let me hold the principals’ coats while they duel amongst themselves over originality, credit, and filthy lucre (the newspaper paid Boot $4,000 after he accepted the assurance of sports editor Sam Walker that “This thing will write itself!”).
30 August 2013..........
Yesterday a mediator announced a $765 million settlement in a lawsuit against the National Football League by 4,000 retired players. It will come as no surprise to followers of this space that I think the NFL settlement is a dud. It settles nothing. Like Big Tobacco, the $10-billion-a-year NFL has written a check to make the first round of claims go away for pennies on the dollar. There are many screwed-over retired players who have opted out or not yet filed.
But more important, the league’s very omnipotent act has demonstrated more acutely than ever that public high school football is a dead man walking, a zombie, a cultural obsession with no sustainable model. Cash-strapped public school districts scrambling for the resources to pay a reading recovery instructor can’t afford the tiniest fraction of the NFL’s litigation load.
Further, this shows how the NFL, for a cool three-quarters-of-a-bil, continues to default on the subsidized public health costs of its profiteering. More adroitly than RG3 slipping a tackle, NFL lobbyists have simply shifted these costs to schools in the form of “concussion awareness” state-by-state legislative measures that don’t work — or at least don’t work nearly well enough for their outlay and leap of faith: sideline neurologists, local ambulance services on call, “ImPACT” neurocognitive tests to line the pockets of WWE medical director Joe Maroon and his fellow witch doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Let the maniac parents who feel otherwise continue to push their kids into this brain-busting extracurricular activity … in private clubs. Let’s get our public institutions out of it.
2 September 2013..........
We’ve made the point that the National Football League’s $765 million settlement with retired players will not calm the ferment in the football industry’s feeder systems. On Monday’s Good Morning America on ABC, the parents of Derek Sheely talked about their lawsuit over his 2011 death while playing football at Frostburg State University in Maryland.24
The Sheely case also has drawn the interest of Maryland parent and advocate Tom Hearn, whose guest column we are pleased to publish below. In a nine-page fully footnoted letter,25 Hearn asked Maryland’s university regents to discuss Sheely’s death and sports safety issues. By law, Governor O’Malley is invited to each regents’ meeting, and Hearn urged the governor to attend the next one.
Hearn’s piece raises questions every university governing board in the country should be asking about their athletic programs:
Have you discussed sports concussions and other sports injuries at your meetings?
Have you abdicated your responsibility on football head trauma by delegating decisions on limiting contacts to the NCAA rather than following the leads of the Ivy League and the Pac-12 Conference?
For public universities, does limited sovereign immunity for coaches, administrators, and even regents create perverse incentives that make sports more dangerous for students?
by Tom Hearn
Last Friday, the Maryland Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s university system, met by conference call. The day before, I emailed the regents a letter, asking them to add to their agenda a discussion of Derek Sheely, the Frostburg State University student who died two years ago of head trauma sustained in football practice with the school’s team.
On August 22, Sheely’s family filed a complaint in which they allege that his death stemmed from misconduct by Frostburg’s football coaches and an athletic trainer.
The day after I sent my letter — the day of the regents’ meeting — the university’s chancellor explained that the regents’ bylaws did not allow them to discuss Sheely’s death at Friday’s meeting. He committed that he and the regents would review my letter carefully and follow up with me.
The most pressing question is whether Frostburg football is currently safe. According to the Sheely lawsuit, the football coaches conducted dangerous helmet-to-helmet “Oklahoma-style” tackling drills over three days that caused Sheely to sustain a bleeding gash on his forehead and that the two football coaches and athletic trainers named in the suit ignored concussion signs that he displayed before collapsing unconscious on the field. Each of these staff currently serves in these positions at Frostburg.
It is not clear that the regents are aware of Sheely’s death, of the suit his family has filed, or of the broader issues of concussions in college football and other sports. A review of the minutes of the regents’ public meetings since August 2011 reflect no discussion of Sheely’s death. The minutes also reflect no discussion of concussions in intercollegiate football.
There is no discussion in the regents’ minutes of the long-term risk that repetitive head blows in football may lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) not only in retired NFL players but also in college football players, for example, Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania football player who committed suicide in April 2010.
There is also no discussion in the regents’ minutes of the short-term risks that repetitive head blows in football can lead to altered brain function, even in players who are not diagnosed to have sustained a concussion, and that such altered brain function can take months to return to baseline.
Further, on September 28, 2012, 13 months after Sheely’s death, the regents adopted Policy V 2.10, University System of Maryland Policy on Intercollegiate Athletics. The policy requires a university president to report to the regents’ information about a school’s intercollegiate athletics program such as student participants’ academic performance and financial aspects of the program.
The regents’ policy, however, requires no reporting on concussions or other injuries that students sustain from participating in intercollegiate athletics. The report filed by Frostburg State University for the 2010–2011 school year contains no information about concussions or other injuries. (No report by Frostburg State University is available at the Board of Regents website for the 2011–2012 school year, the year in which Sheely died.)
By law, the regents are required to invite Governor O’Malley, Treasurer Nancy Kopp, and Comptroller Peter Franchot to attend each of its meetings. If you will recall, in 2011 Pennsylvania’s Governor Tom Corbett exercised a similar role to lead the Board of Trustees for Penn State University to address the child abuse scandal related to Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky.
I respectfully urge Governor O’Malley, Treasurer Kopp, and Comptroller Franchot to attend the regents’ next meeting and play a similar leadership role on the issue of the safety of students when they participate in intercollegiate athletics within the University System of Maryland.
At their next meeting, the regents needs to get a report from staff of whether football at Frostburg is being conducted safely and whether football at other Maryland Schools is being conducted safely.
At their next meeting, the regents should also adopt limits on full contact football practices similar to those adopted by the Ivy League, the Pac-12 Conference, and the NFL. The NCAA has not adopted such limits and appears to be committed to studying the issue. The regents’ deference to the NCAA amount to an abdication of their responsibility to keep Maryland students safe when they participate in interscholastic sports.
Finally, regents need to evaluate whether it is appropriate for football and other sports programs to be covered by the limited immunity from tort liability that Maryland law provides to state institutions and their personnel. Under Maryland law, the liability of a state agency such as the Board of Regents for tort damages is up to $200,000.
School personnel, that is, coaches, athletic directors, university presidents, the chancellor, and even regents are only liable for torts — like
a student dying in a school-organized football practice — if their conduct is malicious or grossly negligent. For negligence, these school personnel get a free pass.
The regents need to ask whether the limited immunity has created perverse financial incentives for the universities it supervises. Football and other sports programs represent significant revenue source and an opportunity to market a school’s “brand.” If liability for a tragedy like Derek Sheely’s death is capped at $200,000, in a perverse Ford Pinto–like cost benefit analysis, does this represent a small operating cost with no financial incentive for a university to correct dangerous conditions?
One private sector discipline that gets lost by intercollegiate athletics being conducted by state employees is the discipline of liability insurance. If the University System of Maryland had to obtain insurance on the private market for the football program at Frostburg, would an insurer be willing to provide coverage? If so, would the premiums be affordable?
Would a private insurer condition coverage on the regents banning dangerous football tackling drills, like the Oklahoma drills that the Sheely family allege caused their son’s death?
These serious issues may be beyond the regents’ willingness to address. That is why Governor O’Malley needs to step in.
Tom Hearn is a parent from Montgomery. Last year, after his son sustained a concussion playing JV football, he advocated to the Maryland State Board of Education that they take steps to address concussions in high school sports. Hearn is @ConcussionMCPS on Twitter.
10 September 2013..........
“The family of a Montclair High School football player who died two days after collapsing in a 2008 junior varsity game agreed Monday to settle its lawsuit against the school and the township’s Board of Education for $2.8 million, the family’s lawyer said.”26
Though the National Football League’s recent $765 million settlement with thousands of retired players hogs the headlines, the resolution of the Ryne Dougherty case is a much more telling harbinger of football’s future.
Not mentioned in the news account cited above is that this case involved more than the liability of a public school system for wrongful death. It also exposed the expensive futility of newfangled “concussion awareness” measures, such as the quack ImPACT “concussion management system.”
21 September 2013..........
We’re happy to report that yesterday the regents of the Maryland state university system invited Tom Hearn to address them at their board meeting. An adaptation of Hearn’s article here on September 2, also has run in online versions of both the Baltimore Sun and its sister Chicago Tribune.
Way to go, Tom. Again — these kinds of places are where the debate over the future of football is headed.
2 October 2013..........
Appropriately, corrupt doctors are front and center in separate excerpts of the book League of Denial, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, which are published today by Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine.
Other than Joe Maroon and the Pittsburgh neurology quack pond, what jumps out at me most in the ESPN excerpt by the Fainarus is the role of Kevin Guskiewicz, the MacArthur fellow I now mockingly call “Dr. No Junior” — after the original “Dr. No” Ira Casson, whose repeated nyet negativity at a Congressional hearing grilling him about traumatic brain injury is lampooned on YouTube as the ultimate in tobacconist defensiveness.
In the Fainarus’ account, Guskiewicz, who attended a 2006 NFL doctors’ concussion summit organized by new commissioner Roger Goodell, felt the event “had the makings of a Saturday Night Live skit, with Casson as the parody of a man in denial”:
Oh, my gosh, as long as I live I’ll never forget that day. I use that as a teaching point with my students. I’m like, ‘The day that you have to stand up in front of a group and tell them that you’re a man or woman of science, your credibility is shot, especially when you have nothing to put in front of people to convince them.’ That was a bad, ugly, ugly day for the NFL.
But ugliness is as ugliness does. Today Guskiewicz himself shills for the football establishment as a promoter of “safe football” — a position with all the public health conscientiousness of a marketer of filtered cigarettes.
The story, as told by me, isn’t about all these great men, who it turns out aren’t so great but simply stiffs like you and me, but with advanced degrees allowing them to peddle selective expertise to the highest bidder.
No, the story is about the power of a brand and the money behind it. The shill docs come and go, through the revolving door of PR hard denial to the revolving door of PR soft denial. Ending the systematic braining of young American males for mass entertainment isn’t in their hands. It’s in the hands of parents and the public.
13 November 2013..........
The most revealing quote in League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth — Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru’s page-turning game-changer of a book — comes early on from Dr. Ann McKee, the central casting blonde-bombshell laboratory coat face of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. She replaced Dr. Bennet Omalu, the original sprightly African lab coat face of CTE.
Musing aloud to the Fainarus a year ago, McKee says, “[H]ow come I just don’t say, ‘Let’s ban football immediately’?” She answers her own question: “I think I would lose my audience.”
Yes, League of Denial is a book about science in the sense that, along the way, CTE earns classification as a discrete pathology. This is because, under a microscope, a dead brain that was impaired by the disease exhibits the strangling tau protein accumulations also found in Alzheimer’s, but in different parts of the brain and without the beta-amyloid residue also attendant to Alzheimer’s. The Fainarus explain it all concisely, brilliantly, for a general readership.
It’s important to bear in mind, however, that League of Denial is not only, or even primarily, about science. For whenever public health collides with ingrained, commercially successful social customs, hard science gets you only so far. Moreover, what the world recognizes as pure science is often only slightly less elusive than art.
And that problem is the tangled web the Fainarus weave: a chaotic, improvisational dance of academic egotists, corporate butt-coverers, bad timing, and juicy intrigue, all with an unmistakable overlay of inevitability. Anyone who hasn’t been playing football without a Riddell Revolution helmet knows how this story will end … at some indeterminate point in the future, with a whimper, after all the books have been written and read. What remains to be known are just a couple of details — how long it will take to get there and precisely what will constitute the tipping point.
With its bickering ensemble, mixing crude politicos and earnest pointy-heads, and its long, truth-bending narrative arc, League of Denial is in the tradition of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s 1972 opus on how Team McNamara came — if I may be permitted to exploit a gridiron term — to “put the ball on the ground” in Southeast Asia. From my perspective, the Fainarus’ final product has foibles, and I’ll get to some of them. But don’t let those cloud what, in the round, is a huge achievement in sports journalism. In journalism journalism.
In coming years, literature will further concentrate the American mind on the gross national cognitive product–decimating insanity that our billion-upon-billion-dollar football industry has become. These forays have to combine good writing, good reporting, good analysis, and, finally, “bona fides”; like Ann McKee said, you mustn’t lose your audience! The authors of League of Denial, who work at ESPN, have delivered on their end. They found Goldilocks’ sweet spot: their verbal porridge is not too hot, not too cold, just right.
In a few places, the book tips its cap to ConcussionInc.net, for which I am grateful. League of Denial goes deep with the tragedy of Dave Duerson, a retired defensive back and fallen business tycoon who joined in stonewalling old colleagues’ brain injury claims on t
he Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan board — virtually up to the moment Duerson shot himself to death while admitting that he, too, was a victim of the syndrome. In the wake of that 2011 episode, Rick Telander and Paul Solotaroff wrote a fine article for Men’s Journal chronicling Duerson’s tormented last days, and Alan Schwarz of the New York Times raised the question of whether the deluded Duerson’s presence on the disability review board tainted its body of work. But so far as I know, only Alex Marvez of FoxSports.com and I have persisted in digging into the Duerson case files with an eye toward correcting injustices.
League of Denial also quotes my friend, Missouri-based writer Matt Chaney, calling Kevin Guskiewicz “Gus Genius” (a jab at that worthy’s MacArthur Fellowship), plus me tagging him “Dr. No Junior” (a reference to the senior “Dr. No,” Ira Casson, who once chaired the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee). These sallies appear in the epilogue, where the Fainarus ably bring their story home.
Heretofore, Guskiewicz had been part of a group of researchers the authors refer to as “The Dissenters,” since they pecked away at stubborn denial in the higher councils of the league and even in the scientific research the league’s well-connected consultants manufactured for publication in the most prestigious “peer-reviewed journals.” But like just about everyone in League of Denial at one time or another, Guskie shows his own ass once he becomes an ultimate insider, apologizing for the health toll of the football system and nitpicking at others’ more aggressive extrapolations of concussion-related findings.
In contrast, other figures in the book come off better at the end than in the middle. One is Dr. Robert Cantu, who had signed off on corrupt NFL research and bizarrely lax editorial standards when he was sports section editor of the journal Neurosurgery (whose jocksniffing editor-in-chief, Dr. Michael Apuzzo, was also a team physician for the New York Giants). At least Cantu came around to clearly opining that no one under age 14 should play tackle football, period.
Concussion Inc. Page 22