It’s time for an end-zone victory dance at NFL headquarters.
The National Football League today put a price tag on its concussion-liability bill, just in time to clear the air before the season opener on Sept. 5. The legal settlement announced on Thursday with more than 4,500 retired players sounds expensive—at $765 million, that works out to about $170,000 per plaintiff. But do a little more math and read the fine print: $9.5 billion in league-wide annual revenue, 32 teams, a payment period of 20 years. Attorneys’ fees haven’t been specified yet—and they’ll be hefty—so the final number isn’t clear. Still, the owners are looking at some millions of dollars apiece per year, spread out over a couple of decades. A seven-figure-a-year tab is something NFL teams can easily handle as a cost of doing their very lucrative business.
The public-relations and legal benefits the league has purchased are beyond easy measurement, and there’s little doubt that the return of the national spotlight in a week with the beginning of the football season played a big part in hastening the settlement. Without admitting to the negligence and fraud alleged by the players’ heavy-hitting lawyers, the NFL has removed its villain’s black hat on head injuries. The settlement could take a lot of the air out of a forthcoming Frontline investigative broadcast on the concussion issue, to cite just one example.
The league has committed itself to stepped-up medical benefits and injury compensation. And as a practical matter, professional football has insulated the most financially successful industry in sports from future mass litigation over concussions and the serious illnesses related to headbanging on the field. That last point comes from former U.S. District Judge Layn Phillips, the court-appointed mediator who helped forge the football settlement. “This lawsuit about what took place in the past would be difficult to replicate in the future,” Phillips said in a press release from his current law firm, Irell & Manella. “Everyone now has a much deeper and more substantial understanding about concussions, and how to prevent and manage them, than they did 20 or even 10 years ago, and the information conveyed to players reflects that greater understanding.”
In other words, pro football players assume any risks they face as a result of the inherent violence of the sport. That awareness will likely also be ascribed to current and future college and high school athletes.
“This is an extraordinary agreement that will provide immediate care and support to retired players and their families,” lead plaintiffs’ attorney Christopher Seeger said in the same release. (Seeger’s enthusiasm might also reflect his claim on those as-yet-unspecified attorneys’ fees.) “This agreement,” he added, “will get help quickly to the men who suffered neurological injuries. It will do so faster and at far less cost, both financially and emotionally, than could have ever been accomplished by continuing to litigate.”
Once the lawyers have drawn up final papers, the settlement will go to U.S. District Judge Anita Brody in Philadelphia, the federal trial judge who’s presided over a gradually swelling docket of head-injury claims against the NFL. Brody, who appointed Phillips as a mediator two months ago, has final say over whether the settlement is fair. Given Phillips’s stamp of approval—and the undeniable fact that a truce would preclude years of additional courtroom warfare—Judge Brody’s approval seems all but certain.
Kevin Turner, a plaintiff who’s a former running back for the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots, expressed relief that money soon could start to flow to former players. “The benefits in this agreement will make a difference,” Turner said in a prepared statement, “not only for me and my family, but also for thousands of my football brothers who either need help today or may need help someday in the future.”
Turner, 44, has been diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an often-terminal neurological syndrome also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He has agreed to donate his brain when he dies so researchers can continue to investigate the links between violent sports and fatal head injury.
