The New York Times The NFL ran ads in the New York Times adjacent to the story it wished to dispute. But confidential data obtained by The Times shows that more than 100 diagnosed concussions were omitted from the studies-including some severe injuries to stars like quarterbacks Steve Young and Troy Aikman. The Times’ Twitter account also said one of the documents it reviewed indicated that all teams were mandated to participate in the concussion study, while the league said participation wasn’t mandated.
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NFL’s follow-up statement: “The studies themselves expressly noted the limitations in their work and never claimed to be based on every concussion that was reported or that occurred”. Specifically, there were more than 100 concussions missing from the data and more than 10 percent of the total diagnosed cases.
The vast majority of omitted concussions identified by The Times were included in the NFL’s public injury reports, meaning that medical staffs had made the diagnoses and reported them to the league.
He added, “If somebody made a human error or somebody assumed the data was absolutely correct and didn’t question it, well, we screwed up. Inaccurate. They put out a 50-page reply to it. But we’re here to celebrate Team IMPACT tonight, and I’ll let you deal with those issues”.
“One of the rules of science is that you need to have impeccable data collection procedures”, said Bill Barr, a neuropsychologist who once worked for the Jets and who has in the past criticized the committee’s work.
The NFL settled the suit with its former players for $765 million in 2013.
Some ex-football players have compared the NFL’s tactics to the tobacco industry, which obscured the harmful effects of smoking for decades. In 1992, Tisch asked the cigarette company’s general counsel, Arthur Stevens, to contact then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue about certain legal issues, the Times reported.
The NFL issued a lengthy statement in response to the Times story, challenging the premise of the article and suggesting the newspaper “intentionally ignored the facts”.
The NFL’s flawed data wasn’t the only revelation in the New York Times piece. The league tweeted out the links and, likely, felt quite satisfied with its zinger of a final line: “The Times had the facts – now you do”.
Roger Goodell and the NFL have been making headlines in recent days for saying that an admission by Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president of health and safety policy, that there was “certainly” a link between football-related head trauma and C.T.E. was consistent with the league’s position over the years.
Besides, we know the National Football League had previously lied about the data. But the Times has a suggestion for how that happened: The NFL was getting tips from its truth-twisting friends in the tobacco industry. Its political action committee, according to the San Jose Mercury News, has given almost $300,000 in campaign contributions to 41 of 54 members of the congressional committee reviewing concussion research. “You gotta get people who don’t owe us anything”.
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Here’s the catch: Beginning in 1994, after a season in which a number of its marquee players-quarterbacks in particular-began dropping like flies, the NFL formed the oddly named Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee to study concussions and football.
