Two Minute Warning: How Concussions, Crime, and Controversy Could Kill the NFL (And What the League Can Do to Survive)

By Michael Freeman

A look into the growing threats to the popularity of the NFL and what the league can do to avoid collapse
 
The National Football League, despite its massive success and unprecedented earning power, is at its most pivotal moment since the AFL–NFL merger four decades ago. With public awareness of the issues plaguing the NFL—from domestic violence, drug use, and health of the players to oversaturation—there is a possibility that football as we know it could vanish in the very near future. In Two Minute Warning, author Mike Freeman, who has covered the league for more than a decade, looks at all the factors that could cause the league, as we know it, to collapse in on itself. Freeman has interviewed top NFL athletes, coaches, and executives as well as economists and scientists to paint this complete portrait of the league today—and lay out the steps it can take to move into the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Triumph Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633193000

Michael Freeman

Michael Freeman is a forensic epidemiologist and consultant in forensic medicine, working in civil, criminal, and academic venues. He has provided expert testimony more than 1,000 times in a wide variety of civil cases, including injury and death litigation, product liability, toxic tort litigation, tobacco litigation, medical negligence, as well as in homicide and other criminal matters. Dr. Freeman has more than 170 published scientific papers, books, and book chapters, primarily focusing on issues relating to forensic applications of epidemiology and general and specific causation. He has published research on the topics of traffic crash-related injury and death, injury biomechanics and injury causation, genocide, cancer epidemiology, chronic pain mechanisms, and adult autologous stem cell therapy, inter alia. Dr. Freeman holds academic appointments at the CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care at Maastricht University Medical Center, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, and Aarhus University, Department of Forensic Medicine. He serves as an Affiliate Medical Examiner with the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's office in Pittsburg, PA. Dr. Freeman holds a doctor of medicine degree (Med.Dr., Umeå University), a doctorate in in public health with a major focus in epidemiology (Ph.D., Oregon State University), and an MPH degree (Oregon State University), inter alia.

Book preview

To Ella—The greatest daughter of all

—

Why did football bring me so to life? I can’t say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity—perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.

—Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes

I came to the conclusion there was nothing else to do except end my miserable life.

—Former New York Jets quarterback Ray Lucas, whose NFL career spawned 19 concussions and a painkiller addiction

Contents

Introduction

1. The Worst Year In NFL History

2. Rome

3. Heavy Is the Crown

4. Arrogance

5. The Savior

6. The Three Horsemen

7. The Monster

8. Ending the Violence

9. The Hero

10. Scoopage

11. The Plan

12. Football 2039

13. When Football Righted a Wrong

14. The Last Word

15. The Last, Last Word

Addendum

Acknowledgments

Sources

About the Author

Introduction

This book is about the power of a sports league—a league with such abilities and so wide a reach that a major television studio was frightened of it. The hack on Sony did more than provide Hollywood gossip to the media. It opened a window into the NFL and that hammer it now wields—and how even some of the most powerful entities in entertainment fear that power.

Sony is releasing a movie in 2015 called Concussion, about the life of Bennet Omalu, the neurologist who discovered Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in the brain of Pro Football Hall of Fame center Mike Webster. CTE is a frightening disease. These paragraphs, written by former NFL player George Visger in January 2015 for Esquire magazine, are some of the more succinct, yet powerful words on CTE. They show why there is so much at stake for the NFL—and why Sony is doing a movie on the subject.

Studies have also shown that the younger you are when first concussed, the lower your threshold is for the next. And it doesn’t take concussions to cause brain damage. The brain is encased in a hard skull, with sharp bony ridges on the inside, and is surrounded by cerebral spinal fluid. Each of the thousands of sub-concussive hits an average high school player takes each season causes the brain to slosh around in the skull. Sometimes it hits the front of the skull and bounces back and hits the back of the skull. They call this a coup contrecoup injury, where the neurons get stretched. Neurons are partially composed of a stabilizing protein called tau protein and as the neurons get stretched repeatedly they get inflamed. The inflammation increases over time and over time the neurons begin to die. As they die, the sticky tau proteins disengage from the tubules and form amyloid plaques, which clump together and may block cell-to-cell signaling at synapses. This build up of amyloid plaques is a precursor to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.

One of the problems with head injuries in younger players is that your brain continues to develop into your twenties. Damage to a developing brain can worsen over the long term, leading to devastating effects in adulthood. Four years ago at age 52, doctors prescribed Lexapro to me for memory problems, in addition to the Lamictal, the anti-seizure medicine I’d been on for decades. Lexapro didn’t seem to help, so they stacked Arricept and Namenda, both dementia medicines, on top of those two. Since my youth, I’ve lived with the repercussions of not taking football head injuries seriously. I was 22 when I had my first of what are now nine and counting football-caused emergency VP Shunt brain surgeries, and my football injuries have impacted not only my life, but have torn my family apart. In addition to football-caused gran-mal seizures, short-term memory problems have arisen from damage to my temporal lobes and anger management issues and poor judgment due to damage to my frontal lobe. My array of physical and psychological symptoms contributed to the loss of my environmental consulting business in 2011, my family’s home in 2012, and my 20-year marriage to the mother of my three children in 2014.

As of September 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ brain repository in Bedford, Massachusetts, reported that 76 of the 79 brains of deceased NFL players showed CTE. Also, as of that 2014 date, researchers had examined the brains of 128 football players in total. The subjects had played football on either the professional, semi-professional, college, or high school level. Of those 128 players, 101 of them—or just under 80 percent—tested positive for CTE.

Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the brain bank, told PBS.org she believes the findings show a clear link between football and serous brain trauma. She added that the higher the level you play football and the longer you play football, the higher your risk.

Publicized exposure for CTE would change everything in football, opening an arena of medical awareness the sport had never seen before. The Sony movie, with Will Smith as Omalu, is a dramatic adaption of that discovery and the subsequent fallout. It would do more than present an uncomfortable truth. The disease represents the first challenge to the long-term future of the NFL.

Among the leaked information, as originally documented by BuzzFeed.com, was a memo sent to the Sony team working public relations for the movie from Allan Mayer, who heads a PR firm called 42West. Mayer wrote about his company’s plans to counter what they expected—rightfully so—would be the NFL’s attempt to discredit, even crush the movie.

Said Mayer in the leaked document: "Concussion is going to piss off the NFL. We should not try to pretend otherwise. Moreover, there is no concession we could make short of agreeing to cancel the project entirely that could possibly satisfy them. Our strategy should thus be based on the assumption that we are going to be facing a powerful adversary that may try to prevent the movie from being made—and, failing that, to ensure that as few people as possible see it or take it seriously."

BuzzFeed writer Lindsey Adler wrote: "Mayer warns of two tactics they fear the NFL will use to push back against Concussion. He first suggests the NFL will release information that they feel will devalue the validity of Concussion’s portrayal of their relationship with Dr. Omalu. Next, he warns the team at Sony that the NFL might try to use its influential partnerships [ESPN, Nike, ‘a horde of celebrities’] to derail the marketing and promotion of Concussion.

"The second approach, which Mayer calls a ‘pressure campaign’ would not be far off from how the NFL managed to suppress the reach of a similar film: League of Denial, a 2013 documentary about Dr. Omalu, CTE, and the NFL. Last year, ESPN backed out of partnership on the documentary out of fear of damaging its relationship with the NFL. Unlike ESPN, Sony does not rely heavily on access and partnerships with the NFL, but Mayer’s memo supports the long held understanding that the NFL is an enemy that even the largest competitors don’t want to ‘piss off.’"

In other words, the NFL was able to intimidate one of its television partners, ESPN, into dropping a legitimate concussion expose because it might make the league look bad. Mayer’s memo reveals that a huge movie studio feared the NFL would try to Swift boat them as well. In many ways, the memo—barely discussed in the football media (another sign of the NFL’s power)—is one of the greatest indicators of pro football’s current influence.

There was a time, not long ago, when a PR company would have never concerned itself with pushback from football. I don’t mean the 1960s, or 1980s, or even the 1990s. Just a decade ago, a corporation would have patted the objecting NFL on the head and said, Nice try, now go practice some punting. But now…now everything has changed. The sport is embedded in every aspect of American society. It dominates television, is among the most prevalent issues on social media, and is talked about from the White House to the outhouse. Noth-ing intimidates the NFL now. Probably not even the North Koreans.

This work is a look at that seemingly all-powerful NFL from many angles—different people, scenes, and situations—and a look at the NFL’s future. A commissioner under fire. A race to make the game safer. The quarterback who could end up being the best we’ve ever seen. The football journalist who already is. The NFL’s year from hell. The owner who fights for a racist nickname. The day the NFL righted a wrong some 25 years ago, and how it still impacts the game today. Violence on and off the field. The man who could help save the sport.

This is the examination of a year in the life of pro football, a sport that is wonderful and true, full of good people who do the right thing. But this is also a sport that has changed rapidly and not always for the better despite its stratospheric television ratings and glossier appeal. The NFL has always been a business, but that is true now more than ever. Worse, those business interests often are at odds with the simple mission of playing football and keeping its players from harm. What’s become clear is that the NFL has, in recent years, compromised itself—compromised the safety of its players, in particular—to make more money.

The league’s propensity to put profit above the human beings who play the game was even noticed by a former commissioner. In a Rolling Stone article published in 2015 it was Paul Tagliabue, Roger Goodell’s predecessor, who did something I cannot remember any NFL commissioner ever doing before: criticized a fellow commissioner. Tagliabue spoke specifically about the at-times hypocritical stance Goodell—and by extension the league—has taken in disciplining players. He also mentioned how the NFL gives lip service to player safety but at the same time pushes to extend the regular season to 18 games. Speaking of the commissioner, Tagliabue’s words might as well have been referring to the NFL as a whole: If they see you making decisions only in economic terms, [players] start to understand that and question what you’re all about. There’s a huge intangible value in peace. There’s a huge intangible value in allies.

Indeed, the NFL’s future might not be as secure as many believe. There are even variations of that future (like alternate timelines in a Star Trek plot) in which children of the middle class or wealthy don’t play football at all. Instead, they play safer sports, like basketball or baseball. Yet the poor will continue to play football because the sport will still be seen as a way out of poverty—despite the real danger of long-term brain damage.

Much of the reporting in this book is from the 2014–2015 season, which happened to be the most historic—on the field and off, good and bad—the league has ever seen. The majority of this book is original storytelling. I also use some stories, in full or in part, from my writing at Bleacher Report. Put simply, there hasn’t been a more important year in the sport possibly since the 1970 merger. For the book alone, I conducted approximately 200 interviews.

Mostly, this is a new look at what seems impossible: a future in which the NFL is not the most popular sports league in the country. Such a future seems wholly improbable, but it’s entirely realistic. This book explores how that could happen and how the NFL can prevent it.

I have no proof of an NFL bubble. If I had it, this would be an entirely different book. It would be an H.G. Wells novel, and I’m not equipped with a time machine. Hell, the NFL may say this book is indeed science fiction. Yet there are warning signs. One of the big problems stems from an old saying, the one about chickens coming home to roost. That applies to guys like Junior Seau. For decades, players like him suffered from the dizzying and horrible effects of head trauma. The NFL ignored those problems, or worse. Or the players and their union ignored them. Players even hid their symptoms from doctors to stay on the field (something that still happens today). Now, finally, those issues are coming to light.

In January 2015 Seau’s family told 60 Minutes Sports that Seau had been suffering greatly. When he would come home from games, he would go straight to the room, his wife Gina said. [He’d] lower the blinds, the blackout blinds, and just say, ‘Quiet. My head is…is burning.’

I saw a man that right before my eyes [was] changing, his son Tyler Seau said. He wasn’t that happy-go-lucky guy anymore.

It was hard, daughter Sydney said, because we were all reaching for someone that wasn’t exactly reaching back, even though we know—we knew—that he wanted to.

Seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. I knew Seau well and interviewed him dozens of times. He was, outwardly, one of the nicest, most gregarious players I have ever been around in my 25 years of covering the sport. He once told me, early in his career: Football saved my life. Not sure where I’d be without it. But I believe, at the end of his life, that he knew football was destroying him. I believe it is why he took his own life in the manner he did. Seau knew football had eroded his mind, and he wanted scientists to examine it upon his death. Stories like Seau’s will only continue to emerge—and those stories are among the threats to football.

Off-field issues weren’t the only ones last season. The January 4 playoff game between Detroit and Dallas had one of the more controversial plays in postseason history when game officials backtracked on a crucial pass interference penalty late in the game. The refs picked up that flag, and also did not call a penalty on Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant when he ran onto the field with his helmet off—a clear penalty itself. The botched calls basically handed the game to Dallas. Both acts were so egregious that even President Barack Obama felt compelled to comment on the play. He told the Detroit News that he couldn’t remember a circumstance in which a good call by one of the refs is argued about by an opposing player of the other team with his helmet off on the field, which in and of itself is supposed to be a penalty. The call is announced and then reversed without explanation. I haven’t seen that before, so I will leave it up to the experts to make the judgment as to why that happened, but I can tell you if I was a Lions fan I’d be pretty aggravated.

The past year for the NFL was so remarkable, in mostly dire ways, that Obama and members of his administration actually commented on the NFL several times. In many ways, Obama’s admonishment of the league felt unprecedented for a United States president.

Separately, all of the issues—domestic violence, accusations of child abuse, underinflated footballs, flawed leadership (in some cases), and botched calls in a big game—might not seem to be gigantic. Put together, they start to show the chinks in the league’s armor. But how bad must it get before the NFL’s ratings finally suffer from so many things going so wrong?

Will the NFL survive like certain corporations—the oil companies, cigarette makers, and banks who had public relations debacles and still prospered? The greed of bankers almost caused the world to collapse, yet banks are still powerful. Oil companies pollute oceans, and still they prosper. Cigarette makers sell poison and have some of the worst public relations of any business in human history, yet they are still rich. The NFL has made numerous public missteps, mistakes that would have sunk almost any other organization or sport, and it is still top dog. One difference between the sport and, say, an oil company causing the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, is there are few mass alternatives to oil. Most economies don’t run on solar power or dilithium crystals, so we need oil, and use it despite how repugnant the practices of oil companies may be. Football, contrarily, does have easily accessible competition.

The threats to football are more theoretical but still problematic, especially as science seems to increasingly link violence with players off the field. (Seau’s entire personality changed, his decision-making was altered, and his temperament changed for the worse because of head trauma suffered while playing football.) Even potentially worse for football is an ongoing struggle with concussions. In a 2014 Wild Card game, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and tight end Heath Miller suffered from hard hits to the head late in the game. It was a game in which the Steelers were trailing. Roethlisberger’s head smashed to the turf. Miller absorbed a helmet-to-helmet blow. Cameras would later show a close-up of Roethlisberger after the Steelers’ medical staff had examined him. He clearly looked extremely dazed.

Did Roethlisberger have a concussion? It’s unfair to play armchair medical doctor. He said after the game that he had a little whiplash. We will never know. But here is what we do know, thanks to excellent reporting from the Washington Post: there was no way for the medical staff to know either, since their examination of Roethlisberger was too short to make an accurate determination. I personally watched the Steelers’ medical team examine Roethlisberger, looking at his neck and head area. Roethlisberger was out for three plays and about four to five minutes of playing time. A doctor told the Post that a proper concussion examination can’t be performed in that short a time. Roethlisberger was not serially monitored over a period of time. He was out for three plays! A medical doctor for another NFL team agreed, telling me, performing concussions tests in that little bit of time is impossible. It can’t be done. He told me that a good concussion test takes approximately 20 minutes and many go longer.

The NFL’s own concussion diagnostic tool reads in part: Signs and symptoms of concussion may be delayed, and therefore it may be prudent to remove an athlete from play, not leave them alone, and serially monitor them over a period of time. WHEN IN DOUBT, TAKE A TIMEOUT.

The Steelers organization is one of the classiest—and best run—in all of professional sports. If they have a difficult time with diagnosing concussions, then every team does.

The concussion issues even extended to the Super Bowl. Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman was smashed in the game by heavy-hitting safety Kam Chancellor with about 11 minutes remaining in the contest. Edelman stayed in the game for the rest of the series and then caught the winning touchdown pass. While an NFL source after the game said that medical officials checked Edelman for a concussion during the contest, Edelman was clearly not right. I was standing there when Edelman referred to Seattle as St. Louis in the postgame interview, and he was, in some moments, slurring his words slightly. When asked if he was still woozy, Edelman said he couldn’t answer the question, citing the Patriots’ in-house rule that players are not allowed to discuss injuries. (Months after the Super Bowl he gave the same answer when asked by the media again.)

We will see these injured and damaged players more and more, and more and more they will test our own boundaries, forcing us to constantly think about—and acknowledge—that the sport that so many of us love is doing real, long-term damage to human beings. If there ever comes a time when fans see the players as people and not commodities or gladiators or faceless entities on our fantasy rosters, everything could change. And the more information about their health becomes publicly available, the quicker that shift could come.

This story is just now beginning to hit the mainstream media. Fans still don’t understand the connective thread between the violence of football and how it destroys the human mind. Once this connection is cemented, I contend, is when the popularity of football could suffer. And that change might happen rapidly.

Wrote Nathaniel Rich in the New York Review of Books in March 2015, If some of the league’s sins remain foggy to the average NFL fan, it may have something to do with the NFL’s tenacious public relations policy. Goodell, the son of a New York senator, has sought the help of Republican pollster Frank Luntz to draft his public statements and advise league press strategy. This has resulted in Goodell’s repeating the word ‘integrity’ incessantly during press conferences, and asserting that the rate of concussions has declined thanks to new safety protocols.

He added, "The question is not why the NFL can’t be safer. It’s why we—why Americans, since football is primarily a national obsession—crave its brand of violence. Do we watch simply for the visceral thrill, the same reason we might choose to buy a ticket for the upcoming film Jurassic World [a Super Bowl sponsor]? Or is it an inoculation against real violence; that is, do we watch football in the same way that certain deviants watch extreme pornography to satisfy their perversions? Or perhaps we watch to avoid contemplating the greater [violence] occurring all around us—of foreign wars, civil rights abuses, environmental collapse…America is addicted to violence; America is addicted to football. We look up and find ourselves at a strange moment."

Even more importantly, some players are starting to—finally—understand the health risk football presents and speak out about it. Sean Morey, a longtime NFL player who in the spring of 2015 ran to become leader of the NFL Players Association, sent a letter to players outlining his platform. In the letter, Morey made several blunt—and I think brave—statements about the nature of the sport now. I can’t remember a union head or person running to become one ever saying something remotely like it. One part of Morey’s letter read:

Owners continue to socialize their costs, privatize profits, and abuse their political influence to insulate themselves from uninsured liability, while diminishing the rights of our members. NFL Players must understand that we are a rapidly depreciating luxury good. We have decades of personal investment and a PhD in football, and yet we are considered migrant workers in a sharecropper system. Agents, Financial Advisors, Scouts, Coaches, and General Managers will all continue to generate revenue for the league as we are forced to retire and become a liability.

We are a rapidly depreciating luxury good…

I’ve always felt that the current crisis involving CTE was a by-product of both league and union inaction. In the documentary The United States of Football,