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Congressional report says NFL waged improper campaign to influence government study


At least a half-dozen top NFL health officials waged an improper, behind-the-scenes campaign last year to influence a major U.S. government research study on football and brain disease, congressional investigators have concluded in a new report.

The 91-page report describes how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league's committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million "unrestricted gift" the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.

After the NIH rebuffed the NFL's campaign to remove Robert Stern, an expert in neurodegenerative disease who has criticized the league, the NFL backed out of a signed agreement to pay for the study, the report shows. Taxpayers ended up bearing the cost instead.

The NFL's actions violated policies that prohibit private donors from interfering in the NIH peer-review process, the report concludes, and were part of a "long-standing pattern of attempts" by the league to shape concussion research for its own purposes.

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_...ened-brain-research-cost-taxpayers-16-million
 
Bubba Smith, the All-Pro defensive end in the N.F.L. who went on to a second career as a movie actor, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma, when he died in 2011.

The findings were confirmed by researchers affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University and the Concussion Legacy Foundation, and released on Tuesday morning with the permission of the executor of Smith’s estate.

Smith is the 90th former N.F.L. player found to have had C.T.E. by the researchers at the Boston University brain bank; they have examined 94 former pro players.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/sports/football/bubba-smith-cte-nfl-concussion.html?_r=0
 
“This is the game of football,” Buffalo Bills GM Doug Whaley told WGR 550 radio. “Injuries are part of it. It’s a violent game that I personally don’t think humans are supposed to play.”
 
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