Concussion Inc. (27 page)

The New York Time
s busted Pellman for résumé hype years ago. Earlier this year, Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth updated the new-and-improved Pellman
20
— though Patrick held off on using the line I fed to him about Pellman via LBJ: “The NFL would rather have Pellman inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

One of the new facts in ESPN's excellent piece is that Pellman had a doctor-patient relationship with then–NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

Choose your favorite mallard on the NFL pond. With my pro wrestling pedigree, I'll always be partial to Dr. ImPACT Dr. Resveratrol Dr. Sports Brain Guard Supplements, Joe Maroon, and his fellow Anatidae at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (at least one of whom is a convicted growth hormone trafficker).

21 August 2013

The tyranny of football-think is evident everywhere: in the passive solutions of parents who should know enough to “just say no,” and now in the intellectual backlash of writers who ain't going to jump on no anti-football bandwagon.

Alexander Nazaryan of
Atlantic Wire
has an overview of the newest examples in “The Culture War Over Football.”
21

The antidote for this new round of counter-attacks on behalf of the savage wars of peace, domestic variety, at the expense of our sons' health, and the gross national mental product, is Matt Chaney, the Cassandra of football harm. Chaney, author of the overlooked book
Spiral of Denial
, is readying a new article for ChaneysBlog.com; he uncovers 35 cases of football fatalities in 2012 that didn't make the cut of the not-so-authoritative, though widely cited, list compiled by Dr. Fred Mueller at the University of North Carolina.

A dose of Chaney from his article-in-progress is the cure for the common football-is-good backlash.

A teen football player dies suddenly in America, for reasons unrelated to collisions on the field, and the postmortem investigation produces more questions than answers — particularly whether the sport contributed mortally.

And so it goes for too many fatal cases of active football players, mostly juveniles, with the game's possible link neither verified nor nullified because of two prime areas of limitation:

First, the reputedly “deficient” state of autopsy in America, especially for children, as part of the death-investigations system that a government report
22
characterizes as “fragmented” and “hodgepodge.”

And, secondly, the equally challenged research field of football fatalities, funded in present form by game organizations and led by two men lacking medical doctorates and certifications, Fred Mueller and Bob Colgate, a professor and a sports administrator, respectively, who largely troll news reports for gathering incomplete data.

Thus the mortality rate of American football remains incalculable, despite those long-standing Mueller-­Colgate statistics widely cited as epidemiology, including by the CDC.

Such holes in football-injury tracking are “known for years,” says Charles Yesalis, ScD, retired epidemiologist. “You have the problems articulated [regarding death investigations], but it goes beyond that. It's often based on whether an autopsy is done. And even if an autopsy is performed on the athlete, there are a lot of times that it's just not nailed down, particularly, regarding what's the cause of death and the like. So there's that issue.”

Meanwhile, the researchers aiming to quantify football's risk and casualty face their own obstacles.

Beyond the few cases of collision fatalities tied ­directly to the sport, injury researchers typically rely on minimal data for judging whether a case was “indi­rectly” game-related, such as a cardiac death.

Anecdotal information and subjectivity can influence the record-keeping process, like coaches' quotes and other bits from news items. In many cardiac cases that kill players, grieving parents declare football was not a factor; some families refuse to cooperate with ­researchers.

For player deaths involving autopsy, researchers Mueller and Colgate value official rulings, but ­local coroners or medical examiners, elected to the job in many jurisdictions, often do not go far in probing cause or link to football. Many coroners are incapable themselves and lack funds for contracting specialized follow-up that could shed light.

“You really have to start digging through the medical charts,” Yesalis suggests for strengthening a ­Mueller-Colgate study, although “the variability of [medical records] is scary when it comes to producing really solid research.”

“All this variability, of how the medical record [of a casualty] is written, how it is accessed or not by the researchers, and whether it's clear that this event was precipitated and related to some sport activity — football, track and field, whatever — anybody who thinks the process is precise is very naive and hasn't done a lot of work with medical records, examining them for research purposes.”

This review of 35 players who died during 2012 — see annotated cases below — demonstrates the problem. Determining death risk and casualty in vast American football remains a lofty goal, mere talk, despite the contemporary clamor for accurate injury reporting as part of establishing a “safer” game.

Indeed, Mueller and Colgate, funded by football and publishing from the University of North Carolina, qualify merely 15 of these fatalities as game-related for their 2012 report.

25 August 2013..........

We've finally found the writer who puts the “foot” in football stupidity. It is Max Boot. We recently brushed off his ill-researched
Wall Street Journal
essay, “In Defense of Football,” on the grounds that it would be a waste of bandwidth.

But as a Blog of Record, we are duty-bound to inform you that a plagiarism controversy has erupted inside the conservative community over the provenance of Boot's 2,000 poorly chosen words.
Politico
has the story
23
of the rejection by
WSJ
of freelance journalist Daniel Flynn's article “In Defense of Football” — quickly followed, as fourth down follows third, by the newspaper's soliciting of Boot to write a piece under the same (admittedly hackneyed) headline.

Boot is a think-tank expert whose special expertise is being wrong about America's benevolently imperial wars. The
Journal
editor who solicited Boot noted that he has a “football obsession.” Perhaps what he most loves about football is that it is such a faithful metaphor for America's benevolently imperial wars.

Anyway, let me hold the principals' coats while they duel amongst themselves over originality, credit, and filthy lucre (the newspaper paid Boot $4,000 after he accepted the assurance of sports editor Sam Walker that “This thing will write itself!”).

30 August 2013..........

Yesterday a mediator announced a $765 million settlement in a lawsuit against the National Football League by 4,000 retired players. It will come as no surprise to followers of this space that I think the NFL settlement is a dud. It settles nothing. Like Big Tobacco, the $10-­billion-a-year NFL has written a check to make the first round of claims go away for pennies on the dollar. There are many screwed-over retired players who have opted out or not yet filed.

But more important, the league's very omnipotent act has demonstrated more acutely than ever that public high school football is a dead man walking, a zombie, a cultural obsession with no sustainable model. Cash-strapped public school districts scrambling for the resources to pay a reading recovery instructor can't afford the tiniest fraction of the NFL's litigation load.

Further, this shows how the NFL, for a cool three-quarters-of-a-bil, continues to default on the subsidized public health costs of its profiteering. More adroitly than RG3 slipping a tackle, NFL lobbyists have simply shifted these costs to schools in the form of “concussion awareness” state-by-state legislative measures that don't work — or at least don't work nearly well enough for their outlay and leap of faith: sideline neurologists, local ambulance services on call, “ImPACT” neurocognitive tests to line the pockets of WWE medical director Joe Maroon and his fellow witch doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Let the maniac parents who feel otherwise continue to push their kids into this brain-busting extracurricular activity … in private clubs. Let's get our public institutions out of it.

2 September 2013..........

We've made the point that the National Football League's $765 million settlement with retired players will not calm the ferment in the football industry's feeder systems. On Monday's
Good Morning America
on ABC, the parents of Derek Sheely talked about their lawsuit over his 2011 death while playing football at Frostburg State University in Maryland.
24

The Sheely case also has drawn the interest of Maryland parent and advocate Tom Hearn, whose guest column we are pleased to publish below. In a nine-page fully footnoted letter,
25
Hearn asked Maryland's university regents to discuss Sheely's death and sports safety issues. By law, Governor O'Malley is invited to each regents' meeting, and Hearn urged the governor to attend the next one.

Hearn's piece raises questions every university governing board in the country should be asking about their athletic programs:

• Have you discussed sports concussions and other sports injuries at your meetings?
  
• Have you abdicated your responsibility on football head trauma by delegating decisions on limiting contacts to the NCAA rather than following the leads of the Ivy League and the Pac-12 Conference?
  
• For public universities, does limited sovereign immunity for coaches, administrators, and even regents create perverse ­incentives that make sports more dangerous for students?
  

by Tom Hearn

Last Friday, the Maryland Board of Regents, which oversees the state's university system, met by conference call. The day before, I emailed the regents a letter, asking them to add to their agenda a discussion of Derek Sheely, the Frostburg State University student who died two years ago of head trauma sustained in football practice with the school's team.

On August 22, Sheely's family filed a complaint in which they allege that his death stemmed from misconduct by Frostburg's football coaches and an athletic trainer.

The day after I sent my letter — the day of the regents' meeting — the university's chancellor explained that the regents' bylaws did not allow them to discuss Sheely's death at Friday's meeting. He committed that he and the regents would review my letter carefully and follow up with me.

The most pressing question is whether Frostburg football is currently safe. According to the Sheely lawsuit, the football coaches conducted dangerous ­helmet-to-helmet “Oklahoma-style” tackling drills over three days that caused Sheely to sustain a bleeding gash on his forehead and that the two football coaches and athletic trainers named in the suit ignored concussion signs that he displayed before collapsing unconscious on the field. Each of these staff currently serves in these positions at Frostburg.

It is not clear that the regents are aware of Sheely's death, of the suit his family has filed, or of the ­broader issues of concussions in college football and other sports. A review of the minutes of the regents' public meetings since August 2011 reflect no discussion of Sheely's death. The minutes also reflect no discussion of concussions in intercollegiate football.

There is no discussion in the regents' minutes of the long-term risk that repetitive head blows in football may lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) not only in retired NFL players but also in college football players, for example, Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania football player who committed suicide in April 2010.

There is also no discussion in the regents' minutes of the short-term risks that repetitive head blows in football can lead to altered brain function, even in players who are not diagnosed to have sustained a concussion, and that such altered brain function can take months to return to baseline.

Further, on September 28, 2012, 13 months after Sheely's death, the regents adopted Policy V 2.10, ­University System of Maryland Policy on Intercollegiate Athletics. The policy requires a university president to report to the regents' information about a school's intercollegiate athletics program such as student participants' academic performance and financial aspects of the program.

The regents' policy, however, requires no reporting on concussions or other injuries that students sustain from participating in intercollegiate athletics. The report filed by Frostburg State University for the 2010–2011 school year contains no information about concussions or other injuries. (No report by Frostburg State University is available at the Board of Regents website for the 2011–2012 school year, the year in which Sheely died.)

By law, the regents are required to invite Governor O'Malley, Treasurer Nancy Kopp, and Comptroller Peter Franchot to attend each of its meetings. If you will recall, in 2011 Pennsylvania's Governor Tom Corbett exercised a similar role to lead the Board of Trustees for Penn State University to address the child abuse scandal related to Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky.

I respectfully urge Governor O'Malley, Treasurer Kopp, and Comptroller Franchot to attend the regents' next meeting and play a similar leadership role on the issue of the safety of students when they participate in intercollegiate athletics within the University System of Maryland.

At their next meeting, the regents needs to get a report from staff of whether football at Frostburg is being conducted safely and whether football at other Maryland Schools is being conducted safely.

At their next meeting, the regents should also adopt limits on full contact football practices similar to those adopted by the Ivy League, the Pac-12 Conference, and the NFL. The NCAA has not adopted such limits and appears to be committed to studying the issue. The regents' deference to the NCAA amount to an abdication of their responsibility to keep Maryland students safe when they participate in interscholastic sports.