N.F.L. Tried to Influence New Concussion Research, Congressional Study Finds | Hacker News Reader

N.F.L. Tried to Influence New Concussion Research, Congressional Study Finds

nytimes.com

190 pointsjstreebin65 comments

The problem that I see with the NFL is that they are essentially a monopoly on American Football.

As a fan, I don't really have any choices. I detest many things that the NFL does, can't believe some of the players are allowed to play the game after what they do outside of work, etc. yet I have no option if I want to watch football. Combine this with the fact that NFL football is culturally ingrained in many peoples lives and you end up with a behemoth that can't be stopped. Even if I wanted to boycott the NFL (more than I do as-is), the game will be on at literally every food/drink establishment I enter, people will be talking about it (and playing fantasy) at work, and on Thanksgiving, my family is going to watch football, that's just how it is.

I really wish there was some alternative. I would gladly support a league of slightly worse players if it wasn't as scummy as the NFL has proven itself to be.

The real question is: if this information about the link between health and playing football becomes more widespread, will people stop playing? People certainly wouldn't stop watching due to the culture that you describe, but I assume that young would-be players may second-guess their decisions.

The smaller the talent pool of a sport, the less competitive and skillful it becomes. I'm not convinced that the NFL as an organization would completely suffer though.

I don't think an up-and-comer aiming for a career in the NFL is someone who really cares about the odds or the downsides of that choice. The most likely outcome of that career path is failure even if you don't get injured.

There have been a few recent cases of NFL players retiring early due to the long-term health concerns of concussions, but it's certainly not common.

The minute there is a successful lawsuit at the high school or collegiate level where the school must pay 1 million plus you will start to see a change. I would guess high schools will drop the sport, and colleges will need to do something to either compensate players or also drop the sport. No one wants that much financial liability on their ledger.

The biggest risk to the NFL isn't young players finding the game dangerous, but their concerned moms. If the middle school and high school programs die off from parental concern then the NFL is doomed.

There is high school football, college football, the Arena league, soccer. The NFL is by no means "a monopoly on football". It is a monopoly on televised football on Sundays, I suppose. Which isn't really a monopoly at all.

It's a monopoly on professional football. The players association has even filed lawsuits with respect to collusion and anti-trust.

> I would gladly support a league of slightly worse players if it wasn't as scummy as the NFL has proven itself to be.

Isn't this what the USFL and XFL were intended to be? Even if the other league were to focus on niches (like indoor football).

I don't see how this changes without some anti-trust kind of oversight by a higher authority than the already profit-focused (with the consequential ethically blinders) NFL.

College football, although it feeds the NFL, still has some rules in place that reduce some of the bad behavior. Of course, there's plenty of problems there, too, but these days I feel much less guilty cheering for a university team than for a pro team.

I disagree. At least in the NFL, players are making (incredibly good) money.

In the NCAA, so many "student"-athletes are taken advantage of much more than NFL players.

I absolutely agree. The situation would be different if the coaches/college administrators didn't make so much money.

I still wonder: would it break any laws for a university system to institute a pay cap across the board?

Let's not forget the college itself is making an unhealthy amount of money. It's not just the personnel, it's the universities.

I attended Vanderbilt and was incredibly proud to see then-Chancellor Gee actually eliminated teh athletic department. He believed the department had too much power because of it's revenue generating capabilities, and the only way around that was elimination.

College football is much worse than the NFL. Players get paid nothing and still burden the same risks mostly. The idea that players are "getting an education" simply just isn't true when you consider some of the majors these guys are enrolled in.

We need a minor league where players can make money. College football is insanely profitable.

Decouple the football teams from the colleges. Make 'em fully pro, with the scholarships and all intact but the team only licenses the team from the university and pays for its use of facilities, plus "holy cow those are high" licensing fees. The university still acts as alumni funding agent.

I guess you call a 5 or 6 figure per-year free education, room and board, use of multimillion dollar facilites and training expertise, getting "paid nothing."

Minor league players don't make a lot of money. Sometimes they have to pay to play. They get chewed up and spit out broke for the most part.

Please name a minor league with an $11B TV contract

USFL was fine as a spring league and would have probably continued to this day if it was left as a spring league.

There is a pretty good documentary[1] on Netflix about the USFL and how attempting to make it a fall league competing directly with the NFL essentially handed it a death sentence.

I don't want to spoil anything, of course, so you'll have to watch it yourself to see who's bright idea that was.

It's really a shame, IMO. An alternate spring league would have been great.

[1]: http://espn.go.com/30for30/film?page=small-potatoes-who-kill...

So essentially you're saying that trying to compete with the NFL was the ticket to demise? Doesn't that sound like the NFL is a monopoly?

Oh, absolutely. I'm not disputing that even in the slightest.

USFL would have died once players got huge salaries. The only reason it was doing alright was because players were underpaid. They had star QBS. The XFL was a summer league and failed because they had no talent.

The XFL failed because NBC pulled out of the deal. Without a broadcast partner, a sports league is basically stuck operating off gate revenue, and at the scale the XFL attempted to run at, doomed.

I imagine there were some very progressively-minded patricians in ancient Rome saying much the same thing about gladiators in the coliseum.

I wonder, but I doubt it. Gladiator stuff originated as funerary ritual. So being religious, there's pretty much already a monopoly.

At the same time, there are a lot of really GREAT NFL players who do great things for their communities. Surely if a few shitheads spoil the NFL for you, the many more that are perennial nominees for the Walter Payton Player Award should make it easier to support.

The "as a fan" part makes my solution difficult. Me, I just don't pay attention at all partly out of the issues you mention (to me, it's ethically along the lines of watching gladiators in ancient Rome; YMMV), and also because I just don't find it interesting. It does make me a little out of touch, for instance a coworker on Slack compared the gait of someone in the office to "Marshawn". I thought they misspelled "marshmallow". Oooooh, that explains those "beast mode" stickers that never made any sense until now.

I did, however, kind of go through the same thing with pro cycling (and cycling in general) once it turned out that, by my assessment, the whole sport was full of PEDs top-to-bottom. I just quit watching, and watch other sports like MotoGP. And you know what? I don't need to watch paid professionals spin their legs in circles. Maybe you don't need to watch 300 lb. men run into each other as hard as they can. Oh, you used to play football, hence your interest? I used to be a next-stop-is-a-pro-contract bike racer. Regional-level race official once the legs got old and the dreams of a pro contract had long since died. That's a sunk cost, and the whole thing disgusted me enough to just quit paying attention.

You won't right any wrongs by not watching football, make no mistake. But at some point one needs to weigh whether "being a fan" is more important than not participating in a part of popular culture that has aspects that you "detest".

College football is a great alternative, as is the NHL. The NHL doesn't seem to have the same kind of conduct or injury problems that the NFL does. NCAA football isn't as tight or disciplined as the NFL, but the variance in skill level leads to some really exciting moments, and the passion and excitement really comes through most broadcasts. Way more teams means way more football.

College aged adults aren't immune to the long term effects of repeated head trauma. Unreported injuries among younger players may even be worse because of lying to stay in the game or trying to go all out to get noticed and win that lottery so many poor, talented kids buy into. But you don't see what happens after the years of them hurting themselves; no one follows and reports on the has beens who never made it, the ones who failed on the road the stardom.

Football is dangerous to long term brain health as long as people are impacting at any force with their heads and spines. There's more to the game than brute collisions and take downs, but it needs a rules update for it to be on the right side of modern medical science in the 21st century.

The only reasons not to are to protect the feelings of everyone who's been rooting on the pain and to shield the heads (how funny) from liability and litigation against their investments. If they admit the way it's being played hurts people and damages their brains, it'll be a shitstorm of guilt and blame. Parents, coaches, and fans all over are going to blame themselves for pushing their and other people's kids into getting late life brain damage for some local fame and and viewing pleasure.

Right now, someone is running damage control in the news saying reported concussions are higher for every sport compared to football-- emphasis on reported. No one is writing it down because it's just a "part of the game" unless they get knocked out or seize and EMS is called. If you're still on your feet and a smelling salt[1] gets your eyes focused, you're not concussed, you just need to toughen up. I wish I were exaggerating.

  [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6_QhPICfavwJ:escholarship.org/uc/item/7qq7b12k.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

In 200 years, when we look back on how science was funded, it will seem backwards and poorly designed.

Big money has infiltrated politics, media & journalism, and of course science, but for some reason the public regards scientific research as still somewhat authentic and immune to corruption. This is far from the truth, especially in the U.S., there is hardly any authentic science left. Even those well intentioned researchers play into the system of perverse incentives; publish or perish.

Climate science, tobacco research, energy (see fracking), sugar, pharma (see IP), the field of macroeconomics, etc there need to be changes if not at least different avenues for how research is funded. Otherwise it will lead to what I like to think of as intellectual inequality.

The vast majority of science research doesn't affect public policy. It's toward some goal, like making a process work better. Those scientists still need to be honest, but nobody is throwing big money at them to sway their agenda. Then sometimes, suddenly, huge money depends on a question of science.

I assume concussion research was like this for a long time: they were just trying to find the best way to heal brains after damage, and it was fine to take money from whomever would fund it. Then suddenly there's a question relevant to policy: do football players suffer a lot of permanent brain damage?

In fact it's crazy that such research would be funded by an organization that would be destroyed if the answer turned out a certain way. One should expect no better than with cigarette companies funding lung cancer research.

When an organization "funds" research that comes to a conclusion said organization knows to be false, that is fraud, outright. We should not accept fraud as "par for the course" or "we should expect no better." Actively attempting to defraud customers, employees, or government should be a crime.

How could they know something to be false, when their own scientists said it was true?

They should have known it was bullshit (in Frankfurt's technical sense [0]), though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit: "As such, bullshit can be neither true nor false; hence, the bullshitter is someone whose principal aim—when uttering or publishing bullshit—is to impress the listener and the reader with words that communicate an impression that something is being or has been done, words that are neither true nor false, and so obscure the facts of the matter being discussed"

Maybe when the stakes go up, it's harder to call something out as bullshit. One $10M study saying the NFL is safe for mental health will outweigh 100 $10k studies too scared to state the opposite.

tbh, the NFL was smart to lump so much money as a promise to the NIH, pitting all of the institutes against one lab at BU.

That doesn't seem like a very well thought out way of defending a logical endeavor like scientific research. I don't know how you plan to learn what an "organization knows", but lets pretend that is economically feasible - what do you think the logical move is for these bad actors? Well there would be a pretty strong incentive to never "know" anything, so that wouldn't be very good. As it is now, if the funded research is bad then it won't survive for long, and neither will those with their names on the papers. Also, fraud is already a crime - but again I don't know how you plan on demonstrating the "attempting" part.

"if the funded research is bad then it won't survive for long" that is not necessarily true.

Ok, I can be more explicit:

If the funded research is bad -- and it is an area of interest (political, social, industrial, etc) -- then it won't survive for long. So you are correct, if Philip Morris funded bad research relating to the mating habits of fruit flies in a zero gravity environment - it is unlikely to be challenged in a timely manner... but as nobody cares, it doesn't matter.

I'd also argue that it is possible for cultural bias and injected money to suppress truth over longer time scales - generations.

>there is hardly any authentic science left

I'm sorry, but what? You list a half dozen of the hottest-button research areas, but those represent (with the exception of pharma) probably less than 2-3% of non-proprietary research. The rest of the iceberg is just normal scientists working on hard problems that aren't going to make anyone rich, and scraping by on whatever money they can find. And keeping the 'science=corrupt' idea out there doesn't make it any easier.

In their defense, they did note "publish or perish" as a "system of perverse incentives", which presumably affects a far broader swath of science than the few politicized topics they mentioned.

Would you like me to list more? The point isn't hot button topics, like gun control research, GMOs, transportation, etc, the point is that it's a feedback loop. The system is set up so that the rich get richer. The top 20 research institutions by NIH grant funding (representing 0.7% of receiving inst.) haven't changed in decades, combined receiving 20%+ of total grants [1], meanwhile the bottom is dropping out.

The reason why the NFL (or gun lobby, or energy lobby, or whatever button topic you want) go to those particular universities or researchers is because of their publishing clout, making it more likely for their findings to be accepted, making it more likely that they'll receive more grants.

[1] http://www.genengnews.com/insight-and-intelligence/the-top-5...

[2] http://grantome.com/blog/rich-getting-richer

Hot button issues, like toxicity, health care, education, evolution, weight loss, endangered species, sleep, habitat, oral hygiene, etc. Just about anything related to either people, land, products, processes, faith, or stuff has someone who would like to influence the results.

Even if it's simply do the experiment 100 times until you get the result you want. Or just quietly pull the plug when it's not going the way you hope. There are many ways to manipulate even honest research done in good faith.

If you do the experiment until you get the result you want you are never doing it in good faith.

This assumes only one group gets funded. Bad actor A vs 100 grad students or whatever.

Alternatively, same experiment with slightly different formula.

Senior scientists spend a lot of their day chasing grant funding and you better believe they tailor their proposals and research to the goals of the organization that is funding the grant.

Macroecnomics is a public policy discipline. It's inherently political. And I'd say there's plenty of macro critical of the present ... regime, but that's not the sort of people who become, say, Fed governors.

If anything has been political, it's been the anti tobacco lobby. Seen these "truth.com" or "truth.org" ads? Full-metal propaganda. Quite creepy, really. All the tobacco companies did was curry doubt.

I'm curious when the golden age of authentic science ever was. Phrenology, Darwin, Galileo, Lysenkoism, Astrology, etc.

Research is always biased by whoever pays for it. Even self-funded research is biased.

> intellectual inequality

I have no idea what that is or how it applies here.

If you can think of a better way to fund science, let's hear it. There's no funding pathway that is clear of humans, and it is humans who exercise their preferences in funding paths.

BTW we just detected gravity waves, which opens up the first new way of perceiving the universe since Galileo. And we can't really explain about 95% of the known mass-energy of the universe. Oh, and we just figured out a way to custom-edit genomes.

Science is doing just fine right now.

With 80% of basic cable bills going to pay for ESPN, NFL as a non-profit organization, and all of tax breaks and stadiums paid for with taxes, it is absolutely disgusting the level of subsidizes going into football. They'll cancel band class and shop class, but the high school football team will still get new uniforms. There are so many better things the money and energy could be used for, things that actually improve society. Instead we have a method of crowd control that goes back to the Romans.

Espn costs about 6.61. Not 80% of the cable bill. http://www.whatyoupayforsports.com/numbers/

When this issue of safety comes up I wonder why the NFL is being assigned responsibility for protecting the players when the players have the ability to define rules to protect their own safety through their union. The union should fund studies, provide their own doctors and trainers, and fight for the rights to ensure the rules of the game align to their findings and keep their members as safe as they want to be.

It's not that they're being assigned responsibility so much as actively campaigning against it - which puts them squarely in the middle of the issue. If the union was fighting for safety while the NFL was remaining quiet it'd be one thing. But when the organization is actually working to make the game more dangerous, they've squared off against the players.

It's a good question, and I suspect that it's because the players who could influence that decision (the leaders and highly paid super star athletes), are not incentivized to sour their relationship with the NFL and the team owners over the health and well being of all players.

That is, their individual goal is to maximize the money they make while they play, and fighting for better working conditions may run orthogonal to that.

The NFLPA has a lot of good intentions, but without the support of the league stars, it's difficult to make any reason progress.

I think you're probably right and wonder then if it's not the players themselves who are to blame (at least when the fans/public gets "outraged" about this issue). It's awkward to assign (some) blame to the same class that contains the victims, but it seems in their own pursuit of wealth they might be forfeiting their own safety. Owners would care about the short-term safety of players so that they can realize their investments, but really don't have any long term incentive to care care about player health.

When you factor in that many of these athletes are young it makes sense why they aren't necessarily looking out for the long term self interest. It doesn't take too much searching to find once highly paid athletes having to work menial jobs post career, as they didn't take care of their finances.

And, I'd say there is blame all around:

Team owners (and by extension the League) wanting to maximize profits.

Players want to maximize salaries.

And the fans willing to continue to support the NFL as is.

The NFL is trying it's damned hardest to become as corrupt as FIFA

The Frontline on this issue was good. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/league-of-denial/

This sport will be dead in a generation or two. Parents don't want their kids doing something that demonstrably causes brain damage. Without a full cohort of kids involved the level of competition will starve off interest in the sport.

There will still be plenty of broke parents who will want to give their children that one shot at stardom. Take a look at backgrounds of fighters in boxing and MMA. These sports are explicitly about hurting the other person and people still volunteer to participate.

FWIW, MMA is likely much less brutal than boxing or football. Lighter gloves provide less hand protection, and many fights end in a submission instead of a knockout. And assuming you tap out appropriately, there's no serious injury from a knee bar, or a heel hook, or even a rear naked choke.

"“A series of misunderstandings and disputes might have been avoided had F.N.I.H. reminded the N.F.L. of its obligation to fund the study” under the original agreement years before, the study concluded."

Yeah, i mean, i can't count the number of times basically threatening someone who wants to pull out of funding has avoided "misunderstandings" and "disputes".

Oh wait, no, it's done the exact opposite.

NFL is pretty tame. This is tougher : http://deadspin.com/crazy-ass-italian-sport-combines-rugby-w...

follow the fucking money don't listen to words ... when will people learn?

The NFL is probably going to be subject to an RJR vs. United States thing soon enough.

Why didn't they go to Paul Allen's brain institute for research?

Private parties trying to influence research in a way that it benefits them ? I am not surprised at all.

I think the worse trend is when government authorities do this. Then it becomes witch-hunt.

"Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker used Greenpeace list to target climate change skeptics" http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/4/virgin-island...

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