The league issued a statement supporting the official and his statement.
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Cowboys owner Jerry Jones isn’t buying that football is linked to head trauma and brain disease like CTE.
If Jones is trying to say there hasn’t been a double-blind study comparing the brains of a randomly selected group of football players and a randomly selected group of non-football players, he’s right: So far, CTE has been found in the brains of a self-selected group of football players, and most of those players or their families asked for their brains to be studied because they suspected CTE. I’ve covered the man on a regular basis since 2003 and most of us in the local media have sort of a “that’s just Jerry” approach.
Speaking at the conclusion of the league’s annual owners meetings, Goodell supported the recent assertion of NFL senior vice president Jeff Miller, who said at a congressional roundtable that there is “certainly” a connection between the brain disease and football.
“The overwhelming response and the overwhelming mentality is for him, if we’re involved in any way, to help and encourage him to get it together, to get his issue improved because those issues, in my mind, not talent, are why he is free today”, Jones said, via ESPN’s Todd Archer.
“There’s no data that in any way creates a knowledge”, Jones said, according to the Washington Post. “He has been very productive, particularly productive against us, as somebody pointed out. We’ve been looking at ways to improve the safety, looking for ways to assist in research and acting on it. So from that standpoint, I think the question was, ‘Have you changed your direction in the NFL?’ And the answer to that is no”.
Jones, to his credit, says he’s supportive of more research to make the game safer. “In no way should we be basically making assumptions with no more data than we’ve got about the consequences of a head injury”. None at all. So that’s where we are. We’re doing a lot more. Since then, researchers at Boston University found CTE in 96 percent of NFL players that they examined, and 79 percent of all football players.
That was the same position taken by National Football League attorney Paul Clement, who wrote a letter last week to the appeals court considering objections to the potential $1 billion concussion settlement in which he said that Miller’s admission “is consistent with National Football League positions in court and otherwise”.
Goodell said owners approved funding this week for “additional research”, but he did not provide details.
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“We are seeing changes in brain activity even without a diagnosed concussion, even without any sign or symptoms showing up and that that occurs in a large population of our subjects.”
