NFL’s long history of racism could work in Brian…

(AP Photo/Richard Drew)

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 pointed 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.

From 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.

From Flores’ complaint:

Perhaps worst of all, in connection with its distribution of settlement monies to retirees who suffer from traumatic brain injury, the NFL insisted on applying so-called “racenorms.” Put simply, the NFL took the position that white people simply have better baseline cognitive function than Black people. This is the very definition of racism—the assumption that someone is not as smart as another person because of the color of his or her skin. It also perhaps explains why the NFL and its Teams are so loath to hire Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers (“GMs”), just as for years the League discriminated against Black quarterbacks.