Concussions and the future of the NFL will be front and center this week as litigation moves to oral arguments before the Third Circuit on why the NFL Concussion Settlement should be reversed. Further, Will Smith’s new movie Concussion premiered just days ago in LA, to a huge audience.
Concussions and the future of the NFL will be front and center this week as litigation moves to oral arguments before the Third Circuit on why the NFL Concussion Settlement should be reversed. Further, Will Smith’s new movie Concussion premiered just days ago in LA, to a huge audience.
To address the issues head on, Sunday night the Commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell did a limited interview with CBS – who has the rights to the 2016 Super Bowl – on 60 Minutes, saying that he is not fearful of concussion data. This is a huge advancement from where the league was less than two years ago when PBS called it the “League of Denial.”
According to Goodell, the NFL, correctly, believes that facts will lead to better solutions. However, the amount of information currently known about concussions, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and mild TBI is nowhere near good enough. And reformulation of helmets will not be a “silver bullet,” as Jeff Miller, NFL senior vice president of health and safety policy, contends. This is because helmets prevent skull fractures, not concussions, in which the brain rattles around in the skull like an egg yolk.