The NFL knowingly ignored the effects of head trauma on its players for decades, obfuscating data that showed the effects all too clearly, and hiring Dr. Elliott Pellman to oversee the league’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, formed in 1994. Pellman, a Guadalajara-educated rheumatologist with no expertise in head trauma who was also former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s personal physician.
Pellman, who became one of the worst shills imaginable, and his colleagues wrote in January 2005 that returning to play after a concussion “does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season.” The group also stated repeatedly that there was “no evidence of worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players.”
It is not an exaggeration to state that without Pellman in charge of the committee, and with a more qualified and more independent physician at the helm, NFL players would have known the full measure of their eventual fates years before they did. The NFL’s eventual settlement with more than 4,000 former players and their families was the result of a series of lawsuits seeking to stamp the NFL with its own liability in this regard. One of the conditions of the settlement was a gag order on years of malfeasance, a huge boon for a league that would rather forget Pellman ever existed in a public relations sense.
Unbelievably (or perhaps all too believably), the NFL is still moving the goalposts in a figurative sense. Per a report by MaryClaire Dale and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press, the ex-players who are supposed to receive benefits from the $1 billion settlement eventually reached with the NFL are not receiving those benefits as the rate they should be, and one of the primary reasons is a repugnant practice called “race norming.”
As the AP report points out, “Race norming is sometimes used in medicine as a rough proxy for socioeconomic factors that can affect someone’s health. Experts in neurology said the way it’s used in the NFL settlement is too simplistic and restrictive, and has the effect of systematically discriminating against Black players.”
The NFL, in this case, has insisted on using a scale that pre-supposed that Black people have lower cognitive skills. Thus it is more difficult for Black ex-players — the majority of the players who should receive settlement benefits — to prove cognitive decline as a result of head trauma.
Per the AP report:
Dr. Francis X. Conidi, a neurologist and former president of the Florida Neurologic Society, who has treated hundreds of former NFL players, wrote a critique of the settlement’s assessment program in 2018, saying it had developed a system where players would be classified with “fictional diagnostic categories” of level 1, level 1.5 and level 2 neurocognitive impairments. Only those classified as levels 1.5 or 2 would qualify for a settlement.
Conidi said these categories could leave the patient confused about the cause of his symptoms and recommended that they adopt a protocol that includes a standard workup for dementia, including neuroimaging and other testing that is not currently done under the assessments.
The NFL’s dementia testing evaluates a person’s function in two dozen skills that fall under five sections: complex attention/processing speed; executive functioning; language; learning and memory; and visual perception. A player must show a marked decline in at least two of them to get an award.
In an example shared with The Associated Press, one player’s raw score of 19 for “letter-number sequencing” in the processing section was adjusted using “race-norming” and became 42 for whites and 46 for Blacks.
The raw score of 15 for naming animals in the language section became a 35 for whites and 41 for Blacks. And the raw score of 51 for “block design” in the visual perception section became a 53 for whites but 60 for Blacks.
Taking the 24 scores together, either a white or Black player would have scored low enough to reach the settlement’s 1.5-level of early dementia in “processing speed.” However, in the language section, the scores would have qualified a white man for a 2.0-level, or moderate, dementia finding — but shown no impairment for Blacks.
Overall, the scores would result in a 1.5-level dementia award for whites — but nothing for Blacks. Those awards average more than $400,000 but can reach $1.5 million for men under 45, while 2.0-level dementia yields an average payout of more than $600,000 but can reach $3 million.
“Norming by race is not the stance that the NFL ought to take,” Dr. Art Caplan, a New York University medical ethicist, told the AP. “It continues to look as if it’s trying to exclude people rather than trying to do what’s right, which is to help people that, clinically, have obvious and severe disability.” He noted that the long history of racial bias in medicine includes the long-held myth that Black people feel less pain.
“There’s always been this race-norming in medicine. that has been problematic because it’s tied in too closely to racism.”
Former NFL running back Ken Jenkins, who played with the Detroit Lions in 1983 and 1984 and the then-Washington Redskins in 1985 and 1986, recently, along with his wife, Amy Lewis, delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the settlement, and who recently dismissed a civil rights lawsuit based on race-norming brought by former NFL players Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry.
“My reaction was, ‘Well, here we go again,’” said Jenkins to the AP, who said that he has experienced no cognitive decline and is now an insurance executive. “It’s the same old nonsense for Black folks, to have to deal with some insidious, convoluted deals that are being made.”
Most of the NFL’s approximately 20,000 retirees are Black, and to date, only about 25% of the more than 2,000 retired players who have sought awards for early to moderate dementia based on the testing program have qualified. Several lawyers representing Black ex-players have asked for details on how the $800 million in payouts have broken across racial lines, but are still waiting for answers.
“Race-norming may have had a benign origin, but it quickly morphed into a tool that can be used to help the folks in power save money,” Jenkins concluded.
Until and unless the NFL is able to come up with a compelling reason for using race norming in this fashion, Jenkins’ point is difficult, if not impossible, to argue.