If you didn’t think the NFL had something to hide when it came to the ongoing investigation into CTE and other degenerative brain issues inflicting the League’s current and former players then you may want to take this in.
According to Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada of ESPN’s Outside the Lines, the National Football League is being accused by the United States Government of ‘improperly’ influencing a federal study into brain injuries associated with football because basically the NFL didn’t get their own ‘yes man’ to lead the investigation.
The 91-page report describes how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league’s committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million “unrestricted gift” the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.
After the NIH rebuffed the NFL’s campaign to remove Robert Stern, an expert in neurodegenerative disease who has criticized the league, the NFL backed out of a signed agreement to pay for the study, the report shows. Taxpayers ended up bearing the cost instead. The NFL’s actions violated policies that prohibit private donors from interfering in the NIH peer-review process, the report concludes, and were part of a “long-standing pattern of attempts” by the league to shape concussion research for its own purposes.
So instead of getting a leading expert in neurodegenerative diseases, like Robert Stern the NFL instead opted for one of their own advisors in Dr. Richard Ellenbogen who is the co-chairman of the League’s committee on brain injuries. Now that’s fine and everything, until you divulge yourself into the huge conflict of interest that comes with having your own guy lead a study that will try to basically disprove the dangers of being a small car crash every Sunday for 17 weeks straight.
“Dr. Ellenbogen is a primary example of the conflicts of interest between his role as a researcher and his role as an NFL adviser,” the report states. “He had been part of a group that applied for the $16 million grant. After his group was not selected, Dr. Ellenbogen became one of the NFL’s primary advocates in expressing concerns surrounding the process with the BU grant selection. … This series of events raises significant questions about Dr. Ellenbogen’s own bias.”
This goes without saying that this is another black eye for the NFL who continues to look the part of not only an entity with something to hide but totally guilty in the process.
Also just to make mention, I’m usually not a fan of Government led studies when it comes to professional sports in the United States. Generally there’s other things the United States should be concerning themselves with other than football.
This is something different though. Sure players should be aware that in general playing football probably isn’t good for your long-term health. But the extent of that needs to be investigated by the leading body of professional football in the World which is the NFL. The players who make that League billions of dollars a year also deserve to have the best possible investigators leading that study in an honest and straight forward manner. Unfortunately that continues to be lost on Roger Goodall and the rest of the NFL.