Report: NFL Tried To Wrongly Influence Government Concussion Research

The NFL isn’t having the best Monday.

As Tom Brady’s lawyers ripped commissioner Roger Goodell in their petition to appeal the New England Patriots quarterback’s Deflategate suspension, the league got hit with another bombshell: A 91-page congressional report describing how NFL officials attempted to improperly influence a National Institutes of Health study on the link between football and brain disease.

The NFL originally helped fund the study by presenting the NIH with a “unrestricted gift” of $30 million in 2012. But after the NIH earmarked $16 million of that funding to Robert Stern, a Boston University nuerology professor who has been critical of the NFL in the past, the league pulled its funding, according to ESPN’s “Outside the Lines.”

Per the latest report, obtained by OTL, the NFL’s decision to pull funding was part of a larger campaign to influence the study’s findings for its own gain. Even after an NIH panel voted to keep Stern as the lead researcher, the league reportedly tried to funnel the $16 million to a separate project led by researchers on its own brain injury committee. That plan, the report notes, would have allowed those researchers to avoid the NIH’s “rigorous peer-review process.”

“In this instance, our investigation has shown that while the NFL had been publicly proclaiming its role as funder and accelerator of important research, it was privately attempting to influence that research,” the report states, via ESPN.com.

What’s worse, the report also notes that taxpayers ended up bearing the cost for the NFL’s decision to remove funding. The NFL reportedly offered the NIH a last-minute $2 million payment to try to smooth things over, but the NIH turned it down.

The NIH study attempts to find methods of detecting the brain disease CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy — in living patients. CTE recently has been found in the brains of several deceased NFL players.