NFFL Hoodwinked Players in Concussion Settlement

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Sports
The NFL Concussion

Settlement Is Pure Evi
Patrick Hruby
Oct 28 2014, 5:25am
The story goes that the

NFL concussion
settlement is a historic
victory for the players,
but the facts show that
the NFL is pulling off a
historic con.
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Ken McClain figured the National Football

League was preparing to screw his clients.
Question was, just how badly?
A Kansas City-based attorney, McClain

represents two dozen former professional
football players in their mid-30s to 60s whom he
says suffer from depression, impulsivity, and
other life-altering symptoms of brain damage
damage presumably accumulated during years
of on-the-job helmet-knocking. In theory, all of
them ought to be covered by the proposed NFL
concussion lawsuit settlement; a multimillion
dollar class action agreement that promises to
compensate ailing retirees and is moving toward
final approval in federal court.
In practice, McClain discovered, the deal works

a bit differently.
Over a two-month span and at a rough cost of

$10,000 per person, McClain says, he had his
clients screened using the specific
neurocognitive tests and diagnoses spelled out
in the settlement. He then had those same
former players evaluated by doctors at Boston
University who specialize in chronic traumatic
encephalopathy (CTE), football's industrial
diseasea neurodegenerative condition that
was found in the brain tissue of deceased
retirees Junior Seau and Mike Webster and sits
at the heart of both the suits against the league
and the damning investigative journalism of the
documentary League of Denial.
The results?
"Our worst fears were realized," McClain says.

"We found our players had significant emotional
and impulse control problems that according to
[Boston University] are tied to head injury. All of
our guys. And none of them qualify for awards
under the settlement.
"It's a bogus deal. A fraudulent deal on its face,

completely illusory, designed to pay very few
people except the lawyers and the players in the

most extreme [illness] category. All of these men
saddled with neurological problems throughout
their lifetimes are not the NFL's concern. The
NFL's concern is containing risk, just as if they
were [General Motors] and these players are
faulty ignitions."
Of course, the NFL doesn't put things that way.

Nor do the top lawyers representing the more
than 4,500 former players suing the league.
They call the settlement"extraordinary." A deal
that "reaffirms the [league's] commitment to
provide help to those retired players and their
families who are in need." When federal judge
Anita Brody gave the agreement preliminary
approval last July, both sides touted it as being
"uncapped," and with good reason: Brody had
previously rejected a settlement paying out a
maximum of $675 million over 65 years. Now,
the max has been removed. Every retiree who
qualifies for an award will receive cash,
regardless of the total cost to the NFL. Suffering
men and their families won'tcan'tbe left high
and dry.
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"If you get sick, period, you still get

paid," says Chris Seeger, co-lead counsel for
the players and one of a handful of attorneys
who negotiated the deal with the league.
Er, not exactly.
Seeger is lying. Or at least bullshitting. As

currently written, the settlement isn't designed to
help hurting former players. To the contrary, it's
designed to save the NFL as much money as
possible, to the tune of billions of dollars of
potential brain damage liability. If the deal goes
through, many sick retirees won't get paid. Most
of those who do will receive minuscule sums,
hardly commensurate with their injuries, far from

the hefty maximum awardsamyotrophic lateral
sclerosis sufferers get $5 million! Parkinson's
victims get $3.5 million! Everyone gets a car!
reported in the press and cited by the
settlement's supporters. Only don't take my
word for it. Or even McClain's.
Instead, ask the people who cut the deal in the

first place.
Then, check the math and the fine print.
Demaryius Thomas after suffering a football injury. Photo byMitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports
According to documents filed in federal court, an

actuary for the top plaintiff's lawyersnote: the
people who are supposed to be negotiating the
best possible deal for former playerspredicts
that while 5,900 of the approximately 21,000
retirees covered by the settlement will be sick
enough with specific neurodegenerative
ailments to receive compensation, only 3,600 of
them will actually receive cash awards. As for
the awards themselves, the same actuary

estimates that the average former player will be
77 years old at the time the settlement's
diagnostic tests qualify them for payment.
Why does that matter? Simple. The deal

reduces payouts on a progressive, age-based
scale: the older retirees are when they're
deemed worthy of awards, the smaller those
awards will be. For a 77-year-old former NFL
player with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS),
that means an 80 percent reduction from the
maximum payout, from $5 million to $1 million;
for the same player with Parkinson's,
Alzheimer's, or debilitating dementia, that
means reductions of 96 to 97 percent, from as
much as $3.5 million to as little as $40,000.
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Small wonder, then, that both the NFL's lawyers

and Seeger have told Brody that they remain
confident that total payments by the league over
the lifetime of the settlement will not exceed the
deal's original $675 million cap. Small wonder,
too, that Wisconsin-based brain injury attorney
and advocate Gordon Johnsonwho has
actually read the through entire 163-page
settlement and supplemental court filingssays
the league will probably end up paying out even
less, as little as $250 million, all thanks to a deal
he describes as a "hoodwinking."
"It looks like going into negotiations, the NFL

authorized its attorneys to pay a billion dollars,
or at least three quarters of a billion," says
Johnson. "And then it became a contest among
the lawyers for the league to see how they could
define the terms of the settlement so that they
didn't have to pay up."
It's a horrifying thought, but imagine you are the

NFL. How do you win said cost-cutting contest,
creating a settlement that only looks sufficient?

Follow along...
Step 1: Ignore Your Industrial Disease
Picture a pair of clear plastic jars. Each contains

the brain of an NFL retiree. Both brains have
been examined by neuropathologists and
diagnosed with CTE. Under a microscope, both
brains show the same telltale tangles of tau
protein that are the hallmark of the disease.
One retiree died between January 1, 2006 and

July 7, 2014. Under the settlement's qualifying
diagnoses of "Death with CTE," his family
qualifies for an award of as much as $4 million.
The other retiree died outside of those dates.
Under the same settlement, his family qualifies
for nothing.
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Sound fair?
CTE is largely why the settlement exists in the

first place. Pittsburgh-based lawyer Jason
Luckasevic, who filed the very first brain
damage lawsuit against the NFL, calls the
consolidated suits against the league "a CTE
case." The actual class action complaint
devotes nine paragraphs to the disease; by
contrast, ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's
merit two paragraphscombined.
A 2013 National Institute for Occupational

Safety and Health study of nearly 3,500 NFL
retirees who played at least five seasons
between 1959 and 1988 recorded just 17
combined cases of the aforementioned three
diseases among the former players surveyed.
Meanwhile, 76 of the 79 deceased league

retirees whose brains have been examined for
CTE have been diagnosed with the condition.
And yet, the proposed settlement pays out for

ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's disease
going forward. It limits "Death with CTE" awards
to the families of former players who died after
January 1, 2006 and before July 7, 2014.
Seeger argues that the cutoff is both appropriate
and necessary for two related reasons: 1) As of
now, CTE can only be definitively diagnosed via
autopsy, and the settlement is designed to put
cash in the hands of living, suffering retirees; 2)
said retirees with CTE will be able to qualify for
the settlement's generalized "neurocognitive
impairment" awards, which are as high as $3
million.
"I think people got really hung up on CTE, but,

you know, this is all about symptoms,"Seeger
said during a CBS Sports radio interview this
summer. "If you're sick, and your activities of
daily living are being interfered with, you can't
function, you're going to get paid whether or not
you have CTE."
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This makes sense. Unless, of course, you know

the first thing about the science of the disease.
To qualify for the aforementioned neurocognitive
impairment awards, retirees must undergo and
perform poorly on a battery of
neuropsychological tests that
measure cognitive decline, which is measured
using symptoms like memory lapses and
executive dysfunction. Problem is, CTE patients
often suffer from mood and behaviordisorders:
emotional explosiveness, impulsive behavior,
poor judgement, outbursts of
violence, depression, and hopelessness. Think
Seau's reported gambling, drinking, and
relationship woes before his suicide via

gunshot wound to the chest, or Dave
Duersonassaulting his wife, getting divorced,
and watching his business empire
implodebefore his own suicide via gunshot
wound to the chest.
Last year, Boston University CTE researcher

Robert Stern and other scientistspublished a
detailed study of 36 adult males who had CTE.
Thirty-three suffered symptoms while alive.
Twenty-nine played football. As I've written
before, the men fell into two distinct groups.
One group, 11 men, first suffered from cognitive
symptoms. They tended to live longer, and their
symptoms tended to show up later in life,
typically in their late 50s. By contrast, the 22
men in the second group first suffered from
mood and behavior issues. They generally died
younger, and their symptoms appeared earlier.
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Mood and behavior disorders are a sign of brain

damage. They absolutely interfere with your
daily life, with having a family, or holding down a
job. Only the settlement doesn't compensate
players suffering from those symptoms. It
doesn't even screen for them, something
McClain's clients learned the hard way. If the
deal goes through, the lone cold hope for them
and all CTE-afflicted retirees who fall into
Stern's second groupthe bigger groupis to
live and suffer long enough to develop cognitive
problems. Then, and only then, will they possibly
qualify for cash awards.
Of course, those same awards will be subject to

age-based reductions.
Jason Campbell after suffering a football injury. Photo byKirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
If the above sounds like it was purposefully

engineered by NFL lawyers to both save money
and perpetuate the ongoing lie that CTE
doesn't really exist, then you're starting to see
how the game is played. After all, the league
certainly is aware of Stern's study. Moreover, the
NFL has known about CTE's mood and
behavioral symptoms since at least 2009, when
neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKeean expert on
the diseasemet with league doctors and a
group of independent researchers at NFL
headquarters in New York City.
In a transcript of the meeting obtained by VICE

Sports, McKee says the following:
" personality and behavior changes are

usually prominent and are seen in about two-
thirds [of CTE patients]. Aggressive or violent
behaviors are most common, followed by
confusion. There's dysphoria, meaning
depression or mania. Most of them are
depressed but some of them have sort of a

bipolar look. They have alternating euphoria and
depression. Many of them are irritable. A lot of
them have poor insight or judgment, agitation,
and some of the things that are less frequently
seen are apathy and hypersexuality"
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Later, McKee discusses a CTE-afflicted boxer

who retired at age 22 and was misdiagnosed
with Alzheimer's disease in his 70s. Someone
else at the meeting asks: was the boxer okay
until then?
McKee responds:
"He was not okay. He would get disoriented

when he went traveling and his wife called him
punch drunk, but he stayed more or less stable
until his 70's, when he started deteriorating
more. It's a slowly progressive disease.
Sometimes it smolders for years."
As for only being able to diagnose CTE after

death? In September, researchers at Mount
Sinai Hospital in New York City announced
thatan experimental brain imaging technique
allowed them to identify the disease in the
brain in former New York Jets lineman Dave
Hermanwho played in the 1969 Super Bowl
and happens to still be alive. Stern believes a
verified, Food and Drug Administration-
approved test for the disease will be available
within the next decade, probably sooner. So
how does the settlement account for future
scientific advances?
By foreclosing on them. The deal specifically

prohibits the NFL and the players' top lawyers
from meeting more than once every decade to
discuss possible changes to the tests used to
determine brain damage, with each side holding
a veto. (If the league doesn't like the Mount

Sinai test, for instance, it simply can refuse to
incorporate it.) Moreover, the actual diagnoses
that qualify retirees for money can "in no event"
be modified, which means there will never be a
"Life with CTE" award, no matter what
researchers learn over the next 65 years about
identifying and treating the disease.
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Again, the NFL knows what it's doing.
How much is the league saving through a

settlement that eliminates and/or deeply
discounts future CTE cases? The answer
depends on how you crunch the numbers. Start
with how many former players can reasonably
be expected to develop the disease. No one
knows for sure. But we can make a
conservative, reasonably informed guess.
Between 2006 and the middle of last year, 1,128

former NFL players died. Fifty-two of the tested
retirees4.6 percentwere diagnosed with
CTE. Apply that rate to the 19,400 living retirees
covered by the settlement, and you end up with
approximately 892 future cases.
For an even more conservative number, assume

that the settlement had no Death with CTE
cutoff date, and instead paid for future cases.
Court documents filed by top player lawyers
identify 46 CTE cases among 1,700 deceased
retirees, which equals a disease rate of 2.7
percent. Apply that number to the same 19,400
living former player pool, and you get 524 future
cases.
In court documents, the NFL estimates that

Death with CTE cases will pay out $1.44 million
per player after accounting for age and other
built-in settlement discounts. Multiply that
number by our 524 still-to-come cases, and you

end up with roughly $755 million the league will
keep in its coffersa windfall larger than the
total sum it expects to pay out under the current
settlement.
If asbestos companies could write mesothelioma

out of their settlements, they'd save an awful lot
of money, too.
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Step 2: Define Away Other Types of Brain Damage
Last week, former NFL quarterback Kevin

Kolb wrote about retiring from the league at
age 29 because of concussions and about the
brain damage symptoms he continues to suffer:
"some symptoms are impossible to ignore.

The ringing is like someone shooting a shotgun
right next to my ear, every second of every day.
It doesn't go away.
The sensitivity to light also has a profound

impact. I'll be in a business meeting indoors and
have to politely ask to put on my sunglasses
before the headaches and double vision start"
Neither of those problems is covered by the

settlement. Nor are chronic headaches,
numbness, burning, tingling, attention disorders,
sleep disorders, loss of sense of smell and
taste, balance problems, and other life-altering
symptoms of brain damage. While people who
suffer a single traumatic brain injury have a 150
percent greater risk of developing epilepsy than
those who don't, seizures aren't part of the deal.
Similarly, pituitary dysfunction doesn't qualify
even though (a) brain injury increases the risk of
a problem that can result in fatigue, mood and

cognition problems, and hardening of the
arteries; (b) a recent study of 68 retired
playersfound significant hormonal
abnormalities in 25 percent (16) of them.
Kevin Kolb after suffering a football injury. Photo byMark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Randy Benson is a neurologist and clinician at

the Michigan-based nonprofit Center for
Neurological Studies. He once testified before
the House Judiciary Committee about brain
injuries in football, and has studied and treated
dozens of former NFL players, some sent to him
by lawyers suing the league over concussions.
"I get a checklist," Benson says. "Do they have
ALS? Do they have Alzheimer's? The answer is,
the bulk of the guys I see don't have that stuff.
But what they do have is neurological
impairmentwe can see it with imagingand
they're in a bad way psychologically because of
their brain injuries. These guys can't earn a
living any more. They don't have a lot of money
left. They end up alienating and isolating

themselves."
Based on experience, Benson suspects damage

to the pituitary glanda pea-sized gland that
sits at the base of the brain and secretes
hormones that regulate many bodily functions
is common among the group. "We know with
non-sports brain injuries the rate of pituitary
deficiency is about a third of population," he
says. "You can imagine people exposed to hits
day in and out are really at risk. And those
deficiencies can have pretty devastating
consequences to people from the standpoint of
psychological health."
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The good news? Some of the same deficiencies

are treatable. Working carefully with an
endocrinologist, Benson has prescribed
hormones to many brain injury patients,
including a retired NFL lineman who came to
Benson's clinic from a psychiatric ward,
depressed and wanting to take his own life. "He
is not suicidal anymore," Benson says. "He went
home and hasn't felt this good in years."
The retired lineman wouldn't be helped by the

settlement. Nor will Kolb. Again, how much is
the league saving by pretending that certain
types of brain damage don't matter, and that
only severe neurodegenerative diseases saddle
former players with pain, suffering, and medical
costs? Impossible to say, but consider this:
according to the Brain Injury Association of
America (BIAA), human growth hormone and
other drugs given to treat pituitary dysfunction
can cost $15,000-$20,000 a year. For one
person. For life. If a quarter of living retired
players (4,850) have pituitary damage and need
an average of, say, 30 years of treatment
costing $17,500 annually, that's another $2.5
billion. Of course the NFL would rather not fork it

over.
Step 3: Rig the Rules
Let's say you're a retired player who does

qualify for settlement compensation. As
mentioned earlier, your maximum possible
award is subject to reductions based on age and
the amount of time you played in NFL. The older
you are at the time of a qualifying diagnoses
and the fewer credited professional seasons you
have, the smaller your payout.
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On paper, this makes a kind of rough sense

players who had longer careers were exposed
to more head injury risk, and cognitive ailments
are more common among older people,
regardless of having played in the league. In a
memo filed with Brody, however, the BIAA
argues three key points:
1) A single concussion can result in permanent

brain damage.
2) Multiple concussions sustained over a single

season or a short period of time can be more
harmful than those sustained over a long career.
3) As a result, "the nature and extent of the

impairment - not the number of seasons played -
should be the determining factor in any
monetary award."
University of Maryland health policy professor

Eleanor Perfetto has a related concern with the
settlement, which she shared with me last
summer. Her husband, NFL veteran Ralph
Wenzel, died in 2012 at age 69 and was

posthumously diagnosed with Alzheimer's and
CTE. He originally was diagnosed with dementia
in 1999, and began experiencing memory loss
five years earlier.
"With many of the older [NFL retirees], the date

of their formal diagnoses is probably many years
after they became sick," Perfetto told me. "So,
like Ralph, maybe they had symptoms for five or
10 years before a formal diagnosis. And one of
the reasons they didn't realize they needed to
get checked out, or did get checked out but
doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with
them, was all of the efforts the NFL made to
smokescreen that this problem didn't exist."
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Perfetto says her attorney told her that her

husband is due a $1.4 million payout for his
postmortem diagnosis of CTE, based on his
official dementia diagnosis at age 56. Had
Wenzel instead been diagnosed in 1994, his
award would have been closer to $3 million.
"This is the one thing that bothers me a lot,"

Perfetto told me. "The NFL has actually
managed to reward themselves for their deceit."
Also saving the league money? A series of

settlement eligibility hoops that act as a kind of
bureaucratic poll tax for brain-damaged retirees.
If former players fail to register with a claims
administrator within 180 days of a class notice
being distributed following final settlement
approval, they'll be denied awards. The same
holds true for retirees over age 43 who fail to
undergo baseline neurological exams within two
years, and for younger former players who fail to
do the same by their 45th birthday or the 10th
year of the baseline program, whichever comes
first. Now, imagine that you're a homeless
retiree like Terry Tautolo, or living in a

dementia ward like Willie Wood. Are deadlines
and paperwork really your forte?
(Speaking of paperwork, the settlement also

requires all former players to produce "objective
evidence beyond [a] sworn statement" of NFL
employment and participation in more than one
eligible season or have their awards reduced by
80 percenteven though the league keeps
historical records of its own players. Do they
want retirees to produce old copies of Madden
NFL? Dog-eared football cards? As far as
obvious cost-cutting measures go, this would be
funny if it wasn't so transparent.)
Joseph Addai after suffering a football injury. Photo byMitch Stringer-USA TODAY Sports
To receive a qualifying diagnosesand with it,

cashformer players have to be examined by
doctors who have been approved by both the
top players' lawyers and the NFL. Those same
retirees have to pay for their travel and exams,
no matter how poor or sick they happen to be.
The league can appeal an unlimited number of

awards per year at no cost; by contrast, former
players have to pay a $1,000 fee to appeal
denied claims, and are limited to submitting just
five pages of supporting evidence. "You can't do
that in five pages," says Johnson, the brain
injury lawyer. "I'm in the middle of a relatively
straightforward mild brain injury case right now
I have to persuade a mediatorand those
documents could fit into a banker's box. I have
80 pages summarizing 500 pages."
Further, Johnson says that the

neuropsychological tests used by the settlement
to determine impairment are both flawed and
insufficient, and figure to disqualify deserving,
brain-damaged NFL retirees. Stern, the Boston
University CTE and neurodegenerative disease
researcher, agrees. For payout purposes, the
settlement places former players into three
neurocognitive impairment buckets: Level 1,
Level 1.5, and Level 2. Only the latter two
groups receive cash awards. In an affidavit filed
in support of an objection to the settlement,
Stern states that:
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"the algorithm used in the Settlement to

translate test performance into compensable
Neurocognitive Impairment categories is not one
that is used in any known or published set of
criteria for the determination of dementia, and
utilizes a threshold of impairment that would
exclude many [retired players] with dementia
the criteria used in the Settlement would require
that [retired players'] test performance be even
more impaired than what is often seen in well-
diagnosed cases of moderate stage
dementia"
To illustrate, Stern notes that under the

settlement's testing and diagnostic criteria, two
retirees of the same age and same number of

credited NFL seasons could score exactly the
same on a series of memory and intellectual
functioning tests with the exception of a single
word pronunciation examan exam stacked
against people with dysarthria, a speech
impediment that affects 10 to 12 percent of
people who have suffered brain injuriesand as
a result, one player would qualify for Level 1.5
impairment while the other would not. Never
mind that both retirees, Stern writes, would be
"so severely impaired in several areas of
cognitive functioning that they would require
assistance in many activities of daily living."
To weed out people who are attempting to fake

brain injuries, neuropsychological testers use a
concept called "malingering." Over a series of
exams, sometimes lasting as long as five hours,
patients are expected to give a consistent,
emotionally-neutral effortif they don't, there's a
good chance they'll be labeled as frauds.
Johnson says NFL retirees run a high risk of
earning the same designation, even if they're
truly sick. "This is a group of people who are
emotional wrecks," he says. "And they're in
pain. Pain makes you moody, makes you
irritable. Most of these guys are probably too
sore to sit in the same chair for five hours.
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"If I were a defense neuropsychiatrist, my goal

would be to piss off one of these guys during the
exam and then say he's malingering. Not that
the doctors will have to be that dishonest.
People getting to this level of senility won't test
well, anyway. Now add in the personality of
someone who has played pro football, who has
progressing CTE, who is in painit's all going to
work together to come out badly."
Step 4: Ding 'Em With Demographics

Retired NFL lineman Craig Heimburger is 37

years old. A fringe pro, he played for five league
teams over a four-season span, spent much of
his career on preseason or practice squads, and
appeared in 15 games for the Rhein Fire of NFL
Europe. Heimburger suffered at least three
concussions that he played through, including
one with the Fire that caused memory loss and
vomiting. In court papers, he claims that he now
suffers from "personality changes, cognitive
impairment," and pituitary damage, and that it's
"virtually certain" he has CTE.
Under the terms of the settlement, however, any

award Heimburger qualifies for will be reduced
by as much as 60 percent. The reason? Time
spent in NFL Europe doesn't count toward the
deal's "eligible seasons," even though players
across the Atlantic were still getting hit in the
head while working for the league, and even
though injured players were often flown back to
the United States for surgery and rehabilitation.
Given that approximately 3,500 retirees spent
some or all of their careers overseas, that's
likely millions more dollars that will remain in the
league's hands for no good reason.
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But wait. It gets worse.
All former players who suffer a single stroke or

non-football-related traumatic brain injuryfor
instance, a concussion during a car accident
are subject to 75 percent award reductions.
Does this make scientific sense? Not really.
There's no way to determine that a stroke or
slip-and-fall on an ice rink has caused three-
quarters of the brain damage suffered by
someone who has spent years bashing helmets

on a football field. Nevertheless, NFL actuaries
expect 4.5 percent of league retirees to suffer
strokes, which means it also expects at least
162 settlement award recipients to forfeit three-
quarters of their cash.
Oh, and about that 4.5 percent figure: it's likely

to be higher. After all, concussions increase the
risk of stroke. So does using Toradol, a painkiller
league doctors spent two decades administering
to players. Moreover, obesity and large body
size make strokes more likely, and black people
are 1.3 times more likely to suffer strokes than
other races.
In other words, the settlement isn't just

parsimonious. The case could be made that it's
structurally racist.
Step 5: Sweeten the Deal
A few weeks ago, lead player lawyer

Seegeradmitted to ESPN that he "couldn't get
the NFL to pay on every single set of injuries."
True enough. And perfectly fair. But left
undiscussed? Just how hard he and others
negotiating on behalf of league retirees tried to
get those same players paid at all.
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Fact: Seeger and the other top player lawyers

did not subject the NFL to discovery, nor did
they take a single deposition to test the strength
of their claims.
Fact: They reportedly engaged in only twelve

days of mediation with the league before
producing the initial settlement, a deal that is
almost identical to the one awaiting final judicial

approval.
Fact: The NFL has agreed to pay Seeger and a

handful of other lawyers a separate $112.5
million fee within 60 days of final approval, in
addition to their individual client fees and a
provision in the deal that allows them to petition
the court for five percent of every settlement
award going forward.
Did the league buy itself a favorable settlement

for less money than itcosts to buy 15 minutes
of television ad time during the Super Bowl?
Not necessarily. Were the top player lawyers
incentivized to fight tooth and nail for the best
deal possible? Not in the least.
"The way the class counsel's fees are

structured, they don't pay the price down the
road for this having turned out badly," Johnson
says. "Wouldn't it have been a lot fairer to make
their fee based on contingency, like one-third of
what gets paid out in the future? They could still
get to $112 million, but I bet the qualifying
diagnoses would be a lot different. They would
have wanted players to get paid as soon as
possible, not when they are 77 years old."
Trent Edwards after suffering a football injury. Photo byThe Star-Ledger-USA TODAY Sports
Earlier this month, Debra Pyka wrote a letter to

Brody, the federal judge overseeing the
settlement. Pyka's son, Joseph, committed
suicide at age 25. He played Pop Warner and
high school football. He never played in college
or the NFL. After his death, he was diagnosed
with CTE.
The settlement, Pyka wrote, isn't just unfair to

former players. It's unfair to mothers like herself:
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"to this date the NFL has not made the

research re: head trauma and concussions
public I am furious with the NFL for keeping
this research from the public. The NFL sponsors
these young kids in Pop Warner through high
school. I, and every parent along with the
players, have a right to know of the dangers of
playing football along with the brain diseases
and brain trauma our children could possibly
suffer in the future.
I do not know whether you are married or have

children, but I'm sure you can relate to my pain
and suffering. Try to imagine what life would be
like without your child or spouse. Imagine
watching them suffer from a brain disease or
head trauma due to the negligence of an
organization to fail to release information to
prevent the suffering and death of many. Had
the research been made public many years ago,
these tragedies could have been prevented. I
look forward to the day that those who knew of
the dangers and let people suffer and die will be
banned from the NFL and prosecuted"
The league is not settling out of the goodness of

its corporate heart, or because it truly cares
about its brain-damaged former employees. The
league is settling out of fear. Fear of liability.
Fear of accountability. Fear of Pkya's question,
the same one haunting McClain's clients, 24 of
whom have opted out of the deal to pursue their
case in state court: What did the NFL know, and
when did it know it?
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For a price that will likely be significantly lower

than the $1.17 billion value of the average
team, the league will never have to answer. So
maybe Seeger is right. Maybe the proposed
settlement truly is extraordinary. After all, the
NFL isn't just buying silence. It's buying it on the
cheap.
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THIS WEEKEND IN THE PREMIER LEAGUE
Return of the Moyes:

This Weekend in the
Premier League
With West Ham an absolute shitshow at thi
point and managerial change in the air, the
long shadow of David Moyes looms over
English football once more.
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Will Magee
Nov 6 2017, 8:37am
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
Football crazy! Chocolate mad! Please read the

VICE football round-up with the lads*!
(*all genders inclusive.)
UPDATE 6/11/17, 11:40AM: The below has

been confirmed Bilic is out and West Ham
are set to hire David Moyes on an initial six-
month contract.
Return of the Moyes
First up, to West Ham, a team with more losers

on it than a Men Going Their Own Way Reddit
thread. Having been battered 4-1 by Liverpool at
the weekend and finding themselves down in
the relegation zone, it looks to be the end of the
road for Slaven Bilic as Hammers boss.
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Amazingly, the most serious contender to

replace Bilic appears to be none other than
David Moyes, a man who has inspired more
spicy memes over the past few seasons than he
has actual football teams. This is a manager
whose greatest legacy at Manchester United is
the phrase "Give it Giggsy 'til the end of the
season," and whose last two jobsat Real
Sociedad and Sunderlandhave yielded 28.57
percent and 18.60 percent win ratios
respectively.
The West Ham hierarchy are reportedly

confident he's the man to keep them up, this
despite his bombing out of the league with
Sunderland last season being direct evidence to
the contrary. His time in charge at the London
Stadium is likely to be a parade of angry men in
Harrington jackets, extremely uncomfortable
Russell Brand vox-pops and disappointed
tweets signed "dg," and as such can only be a
very good thing.
Photo: John Walton/PA Wire/PA Images
Arsenal: The Withering
They say that after a long time a dog begins to

look like its owner, and the same must hold for
football teams and longstanding managers.
Arsene Wenger, once a curly haired Adonis with
a crisp dress sense and a Gauloise hanging
out of his mouth on a semi-permanent basis,
has now started to look a bit like your nan after
two weeks without any central heating.
Gaunt, grey, somehow shrunken and withered

with a pencil-like outline beneath his roomy old
cardigan, Wenger looks to the sepia photos on
his mantelpiece and sees the elegant, shapely
manager he once was. So too Arsenal have
been somehow diminished, their football
depressingly weak and anaemic. Forget the
offside goal which snatched away their shadow
of a fightback at the Etihad on Sunday: pitting
Manchester City against Arsenal these days is
like making a boxer fight someone who has just
spent six months in bed for the sake of medical
science and suffered massive muscle atrophy in
the meantime.
ADVERTISEMENT
To think, it wasn't too long ago that Arsenal were

aesthetic champions of the Premier League.
They weren't actual champions, mind, but even
when they lost 3-2 at home to West Bromwich
Albion or drew 4-4 with Newcastle they did so in
style. Now, even that title is lost to them, with
City making a mockery of the idea that Arsenal
are a watchable outfit. While Pep Guardiola and
co. are young, lithe and full of life, Arsene
Wenger and his team are so outmoded at this
point they're practically mummified.
Delicious Shirtenfreude
It may not be easy to look at, but please take a

moment to appreciate the shirt Sam Allardyce
wore on Match of the Day. Nothing shouts "Big
Sam sends Bill Kenwright provocative come-
and-get-me plea" like a man blouse with an
enormous open collar, cheque elbow patches
and a red-white-and-blue plaid trim. While
Sam's attire may have had yer da calling up
M&S and asking whether he could order in bulk,
the rest of us were too busy wondering whether
the colour scheme was a deliberate act of
patriotismor if Big Sam asks for the Union
Jack's colours to be woven into the fabric of all
his clothes, an act of respect towards our
Queen, Waterloo, our way of life and our
decision to sack off the European Union.
Having repeated his call for more opportunities

for British managers on the programme ("It's
always time for an English manager to be given
a chance, as far as I'm concerned, Gary," said
the man who once claimed he'd be a top-four
manager if his name was Sam Allardici), we
can only assume Big Sam was doubling down
on that sentiment with his sartorial choices.
Spirit of Cantona
The incident may have taken place in the

Europa League on Thursday, but the spirit of a
Premier League icon was awakened this
weekend. After former Manchester United right-
back Patrice Evra karate kicked a Marseille
supporter in the head in the midweek, it was
hard not to spend the latest round of fixtures
waiting for someone else to channel their inner
Cantona and launch themselves studs-up at an
abusive dickhead in the stands.
ADVERTISEMENT
If we're honest, as fans, we can all think of a

time we deserved to be kicked in the head by a
footballer. As such, if Evra really has opened the
floodgates of player-on-spectator violence in the
Premier League, maybe we'll all learn a lesson
or two about moderating our criticism and not
saying despicable things.
@W_F_Magee
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Welcome to the 16
Project
Theres no one way to be 16 years old.
Theres no one way to be a superstar at you
sport.
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VICE Sports Staff

Nov 6 2017, 8:00am
Over the next two months VICE Sports will be

profiling 16 athletes as they evolve into national
superstars. Keep checking back here to find
them all.
Sixteen is a transformative age for anybody. You

learn to drive. You see freedom and the real
world out there just beyond your grasp. But for
an athlete, sixteen can be something bigger. It
can be the time you separate yourselfthe time
you take the leap from high school hero to
international superstar in the making. How does
a sixteen-year-old juggle the pressure of
competition, failure, success, on top of the

everyday struggles of being a teenager?
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To find out, we went in depth with sixteen

athletesall elite in their sports, all sixteen
years old in 2017. Over the next two months,
we'll introduce you to them one by one. They
range from Kayvon Thibodeaux, the country's
most sought after football recruit in Los
Angeles, to Ellie Robinson, a world-record
setting para-swimmer in the United Kingdom;
from rising amateur golf superstar Yealimi Noh,
to MLS soccer player James Sands.
We also spoke to pro athletes around the world

about what their life was like when they were
sixteen. You'll hear from Damian Lillard,
Robinson Cano, Julia Marino, Michael Bisping,
George St. Pierre and more.
The teenagers we feature come from divergent

backgrounds, and live vastly different lives: from
hosting shows on Nickelodeon to boxing in
inner city gyms, to getting recruited by D1
colleges, to representing their countries on an
international stage. Each week we'll announce
more athletes, and tell more stories.
There's no one way to be 16 years old. There's

no one way to be a superstar at your sport.
16 athletes. 16 stories. Welcome to the 16

Project.
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NFFL Hoodwinked Players in Concussion Settlement

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Bryan Hooks <thecateringcourtier@gmail.com>

NFL Photo by Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY

The NFL Concussion

The story goes that the

Ken McClain figured the National Football

A Kansas City-based attorney, McClain

In practice, McClain discovered, the deal works

Over a two-month span and at a rough cost of

"Our worst fears were realized," McClain says.

"It's a bogus deal. A fraudulent deal on its face,

people except the lawyers and the players in the

Of course, the NFL doesn't put things that way.

"If you get sick, period, you still get

Er, not exactly.

Seeger is lying. Or at least bullshitting. As

hardly commensurate with their injuries, far from

Instead, ask the people who cut the deal in the

Then, check the math and the fine print.

According to documents filed in federal court, an

the awards themselves, the same actuary

Why does that matter? Simple. The deal

Small wonder, then, that both the NFL's lawyers

"It looks like going into negotiations, the NFL

It's a horrifying thought, but imagine you are the

creating a settlement that only looks sufficient?

Step 1: Ignore Your Industrial Disease

Picture a pair of clear plastic jars. Each contains

One retiree died between January 1, 2006 and

CTE is largely why the settlement exists in the

A 2013 National Institute for Occupational

Meanwhile, 76 of the 79 deceased league

And yet, the proposed settlement pays out for

"I think people got really hung up on CTE, but,

This makes sense. Unless, of course, you know

relationship woes before his suicide via

Last year, Boston University CTE researcher

Mood and behavior disorders are a sign of brain

Of course, those same awards will be subject to

If the above sounds like it was purposefully

In a transcript of the meeting obtained by VICE

" personality and behavior changes are

depressed but some of them have sort of a

Later, McKee discusses a CTE-afflicted boxer

"He was not okay. He would get disoriented

As for only being able to diagnose CTE after

By foreclosing on them. The deal specifically

a veto. (If the league doesn't like the Mount

Again, the NFL knows what it's doing.

How much is the league saving through a

Between 2006 and the middle of last year, 1,128

For an even more conservative number, assume

In court documents, the NFL estimates that

number by our 524 still-to-come cases, and you

If asbestos companies could write mesothelioma

Step 2: Define Away Other Types of Brain Damage

Last week, former NFL quarterback Kevin

"some symptoms are impossible to ignore.

The sensitivity to light also has a profound

Neither of those problems is covered by the

a problem that can result in fatigue, mood and

Randy Benson is a neurologist and clinician at

left. They end up alienating and isolating