Marcus Lee's List: Annotated Sources

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    2. USE - I will directly quote the highlighted portion of this article to combat the contention that the former NFL players - like Junior Seau - are suing the NFL for the wrong reasons/because they have spent their life savings.
    
• • 1. SUMMARY - Regularly updated by the Associated Press, this article provides a timely, unbiased view of the Junior Seau v. NFL lawsuit regarding the NFL's fault in withholding information of the further detriments of head-to-head collisions. Its primary elements include: the reasons/intentions behind why the Seau's are suing the NFL, the greater context in which 3800 players are suing the NFL for head injuries/similar reasons, and Junior Seau's NFL legacy. Its publication on a mainstream website like ESPN suggests a nationally spread-out readership and because its purpose is to cover rather than to make a case for any one side, it seems to be directed towards a more general sports-following public.
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    3. CONNECTION – I am using this article because it sums up the multiple aspects of the Seau family's lawsuit directed towards the NFL on behalf of Junior Seau. Since Seau was one of the key faces that represented the 3,800 former players suing the NFL, the elements of his case can be generally applied to/representative of those of others' cases.
    Furthermore, the fact that Seau's family issued such a statement that focuses on the greater good in the midst of Junior Seau's death can be used to show the integrity of this family and makes it difficult to truly contend that they sued the NFL primarily for financial profit.
    
• The lawsuit claims money was behind the NFL's actions.
• "We know this lawsuit will not bring back Junior. But it will send a message that the NFL needs to care for its former players, acknowledge its decades of deception on the issue of head injuries and player safety, and make the game safer for future generations."

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• • 1. SUMMARY - An editorial cartoon written by Charles Beyl, a cartoonist for Lancaster News, on the day of the 2013 Super Bowl, the source focuses on the matter of players’ growing concerns over the long term effects of head-to-head, concussion-inducing conclusions. It tries to portray the irony/bitter-sweetness of the Super Bowl champions (the Baltimore Ravens), as they instead of all-out celebrating a win that they've dedicated their whole season to/always dreamed of, are concerned over their future health due to concussion-related defects to those interested in sports.
• • 2. USE – I will reference this cartoon to validate my description that there is a growing concern over the long-term effects of concussions amongst NFL players.
• • 3. CONNECTION – In the cartoon, a female reporter is interviewing a football player who just won the 2013 Super Bowl (indicated by his holding the Vince Lombardi trophy). I will be using the irony (refer to SUMMARY) shown in this cartoon to develop a pathos-driven case to show that former players/plaintiffs need due compensation because it has taken so much sacrifice (i.e Junior Seau's death) from their part for the NFL to finally begin to take action regarding concussion-related player safety. By showing the great difference in the knowledge of the issue that current players have and that which former players had, I will be able to further depict how much fault lies on the NFL for previously withholding information about concussion-related problems from its former players in its earlier days.

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• • 1. Summary – Written in early January this year by Barry Wilner, this recent news article not only covers the finding that Junior Seau had CTE but characterizes this diagnosis to be simply one in a line of reasons why 175 lawsuits have been filed against the NFL. Since its primary purpose is to describe/cover/deliver information to the everyday sports enthusiast rather than argue, it’s mostly unbiased/matter-of-fact tone gives the article more credibility. In addition, reading how Seau’s family spoke on behalf of Seau and remarked on the days before Seau killed himself provides casual sports fans like me with a clear, first-person view of a former NFL player suffering from degenerative brain disease.
• • 2. Use – I will use the story of Seau’s personal tragedy to begin my introduction to provide a first-hand look at the pressing concerns on the concussion question at an individual, more relatable and understandable level.
• • 3. Connection – Much like the ways movies focus on a certain object of significance and then zoom out to capture the entire scene in the introduction, I plan to place the story of Junior Seau’s personal tragedy in my introduction because it represents the reasons why 3,817 similarly suffering households are suing the NFL. Put simply, because circumstances seen throughout Seau’s tragedy (i.e. suicide and accusation against the league for having withheld information about the long-term effects of concussions) are also so characteristic of that of the suing former players, in the process of introducing his case, I intend for the reader to gain an adequate sense of the status quo with ease.
• Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease often linked with repeated blows to the head.
• esearchers from the National Institutes of Health said Thursday the former NFL star's abnormalities are consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE
• The hard-hitting linebacker played for 20 NFL seasons with San Diego, Miami and New England before retiring in 2009. He died at age 43 of a self-inflicted gunshot in May, and his family requested the analysis of his brain.
• You can't deny it exists, and it is hard to deny there is a link between head trauma and CTE. There's such strong evidence correlating head trauma and collisions and CTE."
• Seau joins a list of several dozen football players who were found to have CTE. Boston University's center for study of the disease reported last month that 34 former pro players and nine who played only college football suffered from CTE.
• The NFL faces lawsuits by thousands of former players who say the league withheld information on the harmful effects of concussions. According to an AP review of 175 lawsuits, 3,818 players have sued. At least 26 Hall of Famer members are among the players who have done so.
• NFL teams have given a $30 million research grant to the NIH.

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  "The only way we can improve the safety of players, restore the confidence of our fans and secure the future of our game is to insist on the same quality of medical care, informed consent and ethical standards that we expect for ourselves and for our family members," the NFLPA said in a statement.
• "This is why the players have asked for things like independent sideline concussion experts, the certification and credentialing of all professional football medical staff and a fairer workers compensation system in professional football," it said.
• Before shooting himself, Duerson, a former Chicago Bears defensive back, left a note asking that his brain be studied for signs of trauma. His family filed a wrongful-death suit against the NFL, claiming the league didn't do enough to prevent or treat the concussions that severely damaged his brain.

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• 1994 - The NFL establishes the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee

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  Neuropathologist Bennet Omalu later finds evidence of CTE in Strzelczyk's brain.
• . Neuropathologist Bennet Omalu later examines Long's brain and concludes he suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. 

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  Steelers neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon says Omalu is employing "fallacious reasoning" saying "I don't think it's plausible at all ... to go back and say that he was depressed from playing in the NFL and that led to his death 14 years later, I think is purely speculative.
• The paper also again rejects The American Academy of Neurology's guidelines,
• • 1. Summary – Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates just two months ago, this timeline chronologically outlines the major events /landmark occasions that characterize the NFL’s historical reaction to the long-term effects of concussions. The timeline focuses on covering the formation and changes of the league’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee, unique individual cases in which NFL players were affected by previous concussions, and Roger Goodell’s, the league commissioner’s, recent statements that shed light upon his approach in dealing with problems that have risen from concussions. The timeline focuses its lens on these three forms through which the league responded to the concussion question In order to allow readers themselves to conclude whether or not the NFL’s stance that its players always knew about the risks of head trauma holds true in light of its actions.
• • 2. Use – On multiple occasions I will reference specific parts of this timeline to validate my description (providing context) that until 2009 the league completely dismissed/neglected any claims from professional, external institutions that shed light on the long-term effects of concussions.
• • Connection - I will incorporate the highlighted portions of the timeline (mainly those dealing with the MBTI’s dismissal of findings linking head trauma to long-term defects) in my first body paragraph in order to clearly establish the context that for more than a dozen years the league and its MBTI deliberately concentrated its efforts in trivializing the concussion issue by renouncing independent studies that suggested a link between concussions and long-term head problems. The flat-out (yet ungrounded) rejection of Bennett Omalu’s diagnoses of CTE in three former players who had taken actions that had led directly to their deaths (two purposeful suicide and one accidental suicide) exhibited by the MBTI serve as concrete evidence that until 2009 the MBTI dismissed the conclusions of outside studies linking concussions to debilitating diseases.
• 2006 - In May,The NFL's MTBI committee attack Bennett Omalu's analysis of Webster claiming it contains "serious flaws." The committee then demands a retraction.
• fter examining his brain, Omalu diagnoses Waters as having suffered from CTE

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• As Matt Crossman of Sporting News first pointed out, Gray is one of more than 4,000 former players currently suing the NFL over football-induced brain trauma, alleging that the league not only failed to warn athletes about the long-term dangers of repetitive blows to head, but also actively hid information about the threat to their mental and neurological health.
• Scientists have found CTE in the brains of 34 former NFL players, including suicide victim Junior Seau; according to Nathan Fenno of the Washington Times, researchers at Boston University told Matson's children that their father's case was the most severe they had ever seen. 
• This, in a nutshell, is the problem with the league's approach to brain trauma, past and present. Like the kickoff spot, it's dishonest. Conflicted. At odds with reality. More concerned with the health and well-being of the sport than the health and well-being of the people who play it. An exercise in damage control, liability reduction and manipulating public perception, rife with revisionist history and intelligence-insulting spin.

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  Has the NFL improved its brain safety policies since, say, 2008? Yes. No question. Is that actually saying much? No. Particularly not in context. Not with a modicum of historical understanding, the kind you won't get from a slick, 30-second Super Bowl spot.
• Roger Goodell. Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation" last Sunday , he once again denied that the NFL ever attempted to hide the long-term effects of head injuries from players or the public. No surprise there. Such is the party line. The league's boilerplate statement on the concussion lawsuits reads: the NFL has long made player safety a priority and continues to do so. Any allegation that the NFL sought to mislead players has no merit. Predictably, Goodell also refused to confirm whether the no s—t link between football and long-term neurological problems even exists -- instead stating "we're gonna let the medical individuals make those points" -- yet still managed to tout the league as a leader in studying brain damage, citing a concussion committee the NFL established in 1994 as a "way to advance science."
• With apologies to the NFL communications intern charged with faxing and/or emailing the same brain trauma statement over and over again, allegations that the league sought to mislead players, cover up the problem and generally keep the football universe's collective head stuck in the sand do have merit. Lots of merit, actually. Maybe not in a legal sense, inside a courtroom, where culpability is determined by billable hours and the fate of the free world can hang on the semantics of what "is" is. But definitely in a moral sense. And definitely in a common sense sense. Consider the facts. Not the facts that may be uncovered during a future discovery process, assuming the concussion lawsuits progress to that point. Just the facts we know right now. The stuff already in the public domain. The stuff I -- and others -- already have written about.
• Medical research dating back to the 1920s indicates that absorbing multiple blows to the head that are not allowed to properly heal can result in degenerative and irreversible cognitive impairment -- known in boxing as "punch drunkenness." Meanwhile, football experience consisting of, say, a single week of practice indicates that absorbing multiple blows to the head is, in fact, part of what makes football different from chess. 
• In 1997, the American Academy of Neurology established return-to-play guidelines for concussed athletes, recommending that players who lose consciousness be kept off the field for at least one week. The NFL rejected the recommendation. In 2003, Pellman appeared on HBO's "Inside the NFL" and dismissed a study linking multiple concussions with depression among former players; the next year, his committee wrote that there was "no evidence" that concussions produced "permanent or cumulative" damage.

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  In 2005, Pellman's committee published a paper that concluded, in part, that "return to play does not involve a significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season." The next year, the committee published a summary of its work-to-date, proclaiming that concussions in professional football "are not serious injuries." (Note: not a misprint).
• ng a landmark 2005 study of over 2,550 former players which found that individuals who had suffered three or more concussions during their pro careers were five times more likely than retirees without a history of concussions to be diagnosed with a loss of brain function affecting memory, thinking, language, judgment and behavior. (Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how did you like the play?)
• … Current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems ... it is important to understand that there is no magic number for how many concussions is too many … research is currently underway to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussion in NFL athletes ...
• According to a damning 2009 GQ magazine article written by Jeanne Marie Laskas, the NFL repeatedly dismissed Omalu before sending an independent expert to examine his work in 2008. The expert, neuropathologist Peter Davies, was dubious. Right until he saw Omalu's brain tissue samples. "I did not think there was anything there," Davies told the magazine. "But when I looked at the stuff, he was absolutely right. I was wrong to be skeptical." So what happened next? The way GQ tells it, the league declined to make Davies' report public. It never spoke to Omalu again.
• Was the NFL simply clueless? An innocent victim of a mismanaged concussion committee? Doubtful. As ESPN's "Outside the Lines" and PBS' "Frontline" reported last year, the league's retirement board awarded disability payments to at least three former players after concluding that football caused their crippling brain injuries -- payments that were made during the late 1990s and 2000s, the same period the NFL committee was blithely denying any link between football and long-term cognitive impairment.
• retirement board is an independent body, the payments indicate that: (a) the NFL likely knew something; (b) the committee's seeming ineptitude may have been intentional, a way to sidestep potential liability in future brain damage claims and lawsuits. How so? As leading brain scientist told ESPN's Keating, the NFL may have been "basically trying to prepare a defense for when one of these players sues ... they are trying to say that what's done in the NFL is OK because in their studies, it doesn't look like bad things are happening from concussions."
• "[The NFL's] actions smacked of them knowing it was a very serious problem," Sanchez told me. "And them trying to deny it and cover it up with very vague-sounding and un-alarming information, because, let's face it, there's a heck of a lot of money at stake. If they could deny and delay anybody putting this together, then they could avoid being held liable for these former players suffering these very severe aftereffects.
• By spinning and dissembling -- by denying the obvious and ducking responsibility; by aping big tobacco, right down to hiring some of the same defense lawyers; by whistling past brain trauma the way the fossil fuel industry has whistled past global warming -- the NFL has made itself more liable, not less.
• Damage control isn't the solution. It's part of the problem, a losing defensive crouch, preventing the NFL from fully addressing a concussion crisis that may or may not be resolvable, yet still deserves an honest, open attempt. 
• When the NFLPA donates $100 million to a longitudinal study of player health, the league could follow suit, and give even more money to: (a) actual brain research; (b) taking care of former players who are suffering right now. When concussion expert Dr. Robert Cantu -- a senior advisor to the NFL's new committee -- says that children under age 14 shouldn't play tackle football because their immature bodies and developing brains are particularly vulnerable to injury, the league could concur, and perhaps even lead the way, signaling to concerned parents and a confused public that a multibillion-dollar industry cares about something beyond its public image and publicly-subsidized bottom line.
• • 1. Summary – Written by a regular sports columnist Patrick Hruby in early February of this year, this column - by documenting the NFL’s previously deliberate unwillingness to address the concussion question and identifying the improvements the league has made since then on the player safety front as superficial gestures (the two main ideas) - delivers a strong case that the NFL has and will only continue to care for itself. As such the main purpose of this article seems to be to accuse (and convince other casual NFL followers to accuse) the NFL for not doing enough in the way of player safety mainly by pointing out Roger Goodell’s unwillingness to answer an obvious question (the existence of long-term defects from concussions) and the symbolic meaning of a recent NFL, Super Bowl Ad that “protects the game. Not the players.”
• • 3. Connection – While the highlighted sections of the Atlantic timeline will reference certain examples of the league utterly dismissing the validity of an outside study concerning the long-term effects of concussions, the highlighted sections of this opinion article underline the growing number of independent studies that drew a strong causal relationship between concussions and CTE. By establishing the context of an increasingly undeniable link between concussions and CTE in the midst of the NFL’s consistent dismissal of the link between the two, I will be able to identify either how flawed the MBTI’s research procedures were or how conflicted its true intentions were. In addition, by strongly questioning/diminishing the credibility of the MBTI’s work, I can therefore deliver a much more compelling argument that the league’s dismissal of independent studies was misguided and further demand that the NFL speed up in correcting its approach toward the long-term effects of concussions.
• • 2. Use – The highlighted sections of this article (especially the one confirming that individuals who suffered three or more concussions had a five-time more likely chance of being diagnosed with permanent/partial loss of brain function) will be used hand-in-hand with the highlighted portions of the Atlantic Timeline in order to provide the context that until 2009 the MBTI dismissed the conclusions of outside studies linking concussions to debilitating diseases.
•  celebrating the glories of the Pee-Wee game, where scientists have recorded 7 and 8-year-olds hitting each other in the head with as much physical force as college athletes. Forever forward. Forever football. Forever CTE.

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• • 1. Summary - An official site designed jointly by the NFL and the NFL Players’ Association to introduce former players to the sudden influx of programs within the NFL Life Improvement Plan, this webpage lists out the many programs and for each program provides a brief, simple paragraph explaining the benefits made accessible by each along with requirements needed to have access to such benefits. By covering the multilayered, intensive aspect of the Former Player Life Improvement Plan, this website clearly indicates the degree to which over the past few years the NFL has actively invested in attending to its former players.
• • 2. Use – This site and its many former player benefit programs will be called upon to suggest that the NFL indeed is trying to tackle many former-player-related issues, a deviation from its previous course of action.
    
• • 3. Connection – By pointing out the plethora of components/programs within the NFL Former Player Life Improvement Plan, I wish to address/to a certain degree concede to the counterargument that the league is already doing more than enough and all it has to do is stay the course. However, as I mention these programs given the context that Roger Goodell, the league commissioner, in an interview as recently as in this year’s Super Bowl, still failed to acknowledge the proven link between concussions and debilitating brain defects (like CTE), I wish to convince the reader that rather than view such programs as the league’s genuine wish to save its former players, he/she should view the programs as a political maneuver/defense (a “we have been leading proponents of player safety”) to save the league from all the litigation it faces from its former players. Ultimately setting the league up for a change in its approach toward the concussion question.

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• If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist.
• o matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it's not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures.
• In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
• otball starts with liability suits.
• Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits.
• A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a "contagion effect" with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit.
• he risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today.
• NFL's feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.
• A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family.
• NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE.

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  Along the way, you would have an NFL with much lower talent levels, less training, and probably greater player representation from poorer countries, where the demand for money is higher and the demand for safety is lower. Finally, the NFL is marginalized as less-dangerous sports gobble up its market share. People — American people — might actually start calling "soccer" by the moniker of "football."
• eague revenues are around $10 billion per year while U.S. GDP is around $15,300 billion. But that doesn't mean everyone would be fine.
• Any location where football is the only game in town will suffer.
• Imagine a small place of 12,000 people that periodically receives a sudden influx of 100,000 visitors or more, most of them eager to spend money on what is one of their major leisure outings. It's like a port in the Caribbean losing its cruise ship traffic. (Overall, the loss of football could actually increase migration from rural to urban areas over time. Football-dependent areas are especially prominent in rural America, and some of them will lose a lot of money and jobs.)
• No football Saturdays on college campuses means less binge drinking, more studying, better grades, smarter future adults. Losing thousands of college players and hundreds of pro players might produce a few more doctors or engineers. Plus, talented coaches and general managers would gravitate toward management positions in American industry. Heck, just getting rid of fantasy football probably saves American companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
• • 1. Summary – Written last February by a duo of academic economists who apply their craft to analyzing the sports world, this article makes the everyday NFL fan seriously ponder and question whether or not the league’s future may be up for grabs. It accomplishes this feat by comparing the NFL’s current prosperity to the peaks of the once nationally popular boxing/horse racing categories of sports and the many stocks on the Fortune 500 from 1983 that have seized to exist. Systematically showing how increasing awareness/fear of the long-term damage of football may lead to both a dwindling talent pool in the sport as parents pull their children away from the sport and more focus towards academic achievement raises doubts on whether or not the NFL truly is a needed staple in America’s livelihoods.
• Schools would have to compete more on academics to be nationally prominent, which would again boost American education.
• One of the biggest winners would be basketball. To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy), high-octane basketball is the natural substitute.
• • 2. Use – I will use the highlighted portions of this article in my final body paragraph to reinforce the notion that the NFL must undergo a fundamental change in its stance towards guaranteeing more benefits for its former players by the lessons it has hopefully learned from its concussion-to-CTE debacle.
• • 3. Connection – I will use the highlighted portions of this article (focusing mostly on those that draw analogies between the NFL’s current prosperity with the peak of other now-in-terms-of-popularity-peripheral sports and those that associate growing fear of concussions with lessened participation at the school level) to support my last body paragraph that will incorporate these pieces of information in order to make the case that without a fundamental change in its stance towards the concussion question the NFL has much too much to potentially lose in the long run. By presenting a potential harm too significant to dismiss, I will convince my readers that rather than having the NFL continue to safeguard only itself, it must take a leading role in guaranteeing the future safety of its former players. In doing so, I hope to make room for one last point indicating that the league ultimately owes it to the former players to shift its attention towards bettering the livelihoods of former players because the weekly effort that they put out on the field years ago, provided the legacy that allowed for the league to reach its current level of prosperity.
• This outcome may sound ridiculous, but the collapse of football is more likely than you might think. If recent history has shown anything, it is that observers cannot easily imagine the big changes in advance.

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