NFL Week 12: A Vast Criminal Conspiracy

"Crisis" might not be the appropriate term to describe the National Football League as Week 12 begins, but trouble is definitely brewing, and brewing in several different pots.

Take for instance this morning's Associated Press report, "Silent to News Media, Seahawks’ Marshawn Lynch Is Fined Again." Some of you will recall that in the heat of last season's Super Bowl run, the NFL went after Beast Mode for his vow of silence towards the media. A $50,000 fine was levied, which apparently was held in abeyance until now because the Seattle running back refused to talk to reporters after the Week 10 Giants game and the Week 11 Chiefs match-up. The league has added on another $50,000 for good measure.

But what is interesting is that Lynch, true to his gridiron form, is not going to go down gently; from the AP story it is apparent that he will comply with the letter of NFL's news media policy but challenge the league to try to enforce its spirit. In other words, can the league force Marshawn Lynch to say the words it wants him to say? I think not.

The league spokesman Michael Signora said penalties against Lynch would total $100,000. Along with the $50,000 for violations of the news media policy this year, the league is collecting a $50,000 fine that was imposed on Lynch for violations last season. The fine from 2013 was postponed in anticipation of future cooperation from Lynch. 

The league’s policy mandates that players be available during the week and in the locker room after all games. Lynch did not talk to reporters the past two weeks after games against the Giants and Kansas City. 

Lynch spoke at his locker for nearly 10 minutes Wednesday, but he answered almost every question by talking about music or his shoes.

Beast Mode's free-speech crusade -- free silence, rather -- is minor compared to other "headaches" the NFL currently has, foremost of which is the migraine over a pending preliminary concussion settlement. Substantive questions have been raised about the payment formula that is the basis of the settlement between the league and the class of 5,000 former players suffering from the debilitating effects of brain trauma.

For an excellent introduction to the concussion issue and the class-action suit against the National Football League, read Michael Sokolove's "How One Lawyer’s Crusade Could Change Football Forever," which appeared a couple weeks ago.

Sokolove explores the concussion class-action suit through the lens of the young attorney, Jason Luckasevic, who got it rolling. Luckasevic just happened to be friends with the forensic pathologist who published a scholarly article equating the repeated brain trauma of Steelers great Mike Webster with dementia and early death:

As Luckasevic was getting started on his legal career, his older brother, Todd, was in his medical residency at the Allegheny County medical-examiner’s office, working under a forensic pathologist named Bennet Omalu. The Nigerian-born doctor spent some Thanksgivings with the extended Luckasevic clan. He and the Luckasevic brothers sometimes went out for beers together or to hockey games. Luckasevic found Omalu to be good company, “an easy guy to be around, even though you could tell he was brilliant or even a genius.” 

In 2002, Omalu performed an autopsy on Mike Webster, a former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman and a member of pro football’s Hall of Fame. Webster was just 50 when he died, and he spent the last years of his life suffering from dementia, at times living in his pickup truck. When Omalu studied Webster’s brain in his laboratory, he noted a degeneration of tissue and other markers of decline usually present only in people decades older or sometimes in boxers suffering from “punch drunk” syndrome. Over the next few years, he autopsied five other former N.F.L. players, none of them old, and saw the same patterns: tangled brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein, a characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

Omalu published his findings on Webster in 2005 in the journal Neurosurgery. He identified what he was seeing as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., and suggested that football caused irreversible brain damage. The N.F.L.'s response was to attack him, and N.F.L.-affiliated doctors demanded, without success, that Neurosurgery retract the article. Later his conclusions were called “preposterous” and a “misinterpretation of the facts.” 

Luckasevic by this time had begun to take on other types of cases: auto accidents, slip-and-falls — the bread and butter of the plaintiffs’ bar. He did not seem to be on the verge of initiating a landmark case. At first, his response to the public controversy picking up around Omalu, whom he occasionally employed as an expert witness, was just to step up and defend his friend. He remembers thinking: Why would Bennet make this stuff up. I mean, why would he? It’s just not done. He worried that Omalu would pay a professional price. “It looked to me like Bennet had raised his hand and said there’s a problem we need to be aware of, and he got savaged for it.”

Sokolove frames the problem facing the NFL, a corporate colossus that dominates television and posts $9 billion in revenue per year, as analogous to the tobacco industry, a deeply-embedded pastime that has been gradually shunted to the margins.

But, wait, there is more trouble for the NFL. After Sunday's Week 11 games plainclothes agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) swept in on visiting ball clubs -- Seahawks, 49ers, Buccaneers, and others -- to question team physicians about the distribution of prescription painkillers. Ken Belson reported on Monday, "Federal Investigation Into Painkillers Targets N.F.L. Teams’ Medical Staffs," that

The unannounced visits by the Drug Enforcement Administration were spurred, in part, by reports of widespread abuse of painkillers that were included in a class-action lawsuit against the N.F.L. The suit, which is being heard in federal court in California, claims that team doctors routinely dispensed Percocet, Toradol, Novocain and other drugs to energize players before games and relieve pain afterward. 

More broadly, the agency has increased its policing of prescription drugs in recent years as addiction and abuse of painkillers and other medications have skyrocketed.

A spokesman for the agency characterized the inquiries on Sunday as administrative in nature and said agents were looking to ensure that team doctors and other medical-staff employees were properly licensed to possess and distribute prescription medicine outside their home states. They also wanted to confirm that team trainers and other nonlicensed staff members were not handling prescription drugs. 

“Our role is law enforcement, and we have the regulatory authority to make sure anyone who has a license operates within the law,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the D.E.A.

In addition to the concussions settlement there is the painkiller class-action suit against the league:

Lawsuits contending that N.F.L. doctors have mishandled prescription drugs date back at least to 2011. That year, a dozen former players accused the league and its teams of repeatedly administering the painkiller Toradol before and during games, worsening high-risk injuries such as concussions. 

The players also contend that the league and its teams failed to warn them of the consequences of taking the drug, a blood thinner that, according to the suit, “can prevent the feeling of injury” and therefore made it harder for players to recognize when they had concussions. 

The dozen retired players, including Joe Horn and Jerome Pathon, played in the late 1990s and early 2000s and said they had anxiety, depression, short-term memory loss, severe headaches, sleeping problems and dizziness. 

“We took it like clockwork,” said Horn, a receiver who played 12 years with the Kansas City Chiefs, the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons and who said he was now experiencing bouts of dizziness and blackouts. 

In a class-action suit filed this year, hundreds of former players said that team doctors often dispensed painkillers “without a prescription and with little regard for a player’s medical history or potentially fatal interactions with other medications.” 

The complaint also said that the N.F.L. “sanctioned and/or encouraged the misuse of narcotic pain medications” in combination with other anesthetics and alcohol as a way to help players deal with a demanding slate of games. 

The N.F.L. has asked a federal judge to dismiss the suit. 

Toradol and other painkillers have been routinely distributed in baseball, hockey and other sports, and have been an open secret in locker rooms for years. 

But their use in the N.F.L. is notable because of the violence of the game and because painkillers taken as prophylactics before games can mask injuries, including concussions. 

The N.F.L. has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a suit brought by about 5,000 former players who said the league hid from them the dangers of concussions and repeated hits to the head. A federal judge in Philadelphia will hear objections to that proposed settlement this week.

Then there are the Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice domestic violence imbroglio's. Peterson was charged with a felony for taking a switch to his young son's genitals; that was plea-bargained down to misdemeanor reckless assault. The NFL suspended him for a year. An arbitrator will hear that case in December. Ray Rice punched his wife unconscious in a hotel elevator, a moment captured on video that went viral. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, after tacking back and forth, suspended Rice for the year. Rice is appealing that suspension. An arbitrator will decide that appeal.

Even if in both cases the arbitrators side with the league, Belson, in another Monday story, "Adrian Peterson’s Path to Reinstatement Is Bogged Down in N.F.L.'s Complex Process," sees an erosion in Goodell's -- and the league's -- power:

The N.F.L. has been scrambling to overhaul its personal conduct policy in the wake of the debate over its handling of the Rice case. One of the effects of that controversy is that Commissioner Roger Goodell, who in past cases often heard appeals, was forced to bring in an outside arbitrator, an erosion of his power. 

Though no formal decision has been made about whether arbitrators will be used in all future cases, it is notable that an independent arbitrator was chosen to hear Peterson’s appeal. 

“You will see a trend away from the N.F.L. controlling everything,” said Mark Conrad, who teaches sports law at Fordham University’s School of Business, referring to the league’s personal conduct policy. “I don’t think the owners will want to do it all at once because it would be a sign of weakness.” 

To avoid ad hoc responses to player conduct cases in the future, the union has called on the N.F.L. to collectively bargain any changes to its personal conduct policy, which allows the commissioner broad discretion to penalize players. 

The league has said that it has consulted with the players and their union about potential changes to its personal conduct policy but that it remains the province of the league.

To add heft to the issue of domestic violence in the NFL, and no doubt ratchet up the stress in the NFL corporate suites, was a two-part series published on Monday and Tuesday by the Gray Lady.

Titled "Nowhere to Turn," reporter Steve Eder outlines a system where teams use off-duty police, "Whisked Out of Jail, and Back to the N.F.L.: N.F.L. Teams’ Ties to Police Put Victims of Domestic Violence in a Bind," as well as official personnel, "N.F.L. Was Family, Until Wives Reported Domestic Abuse," to make sure domestic violence goes unreported.

All in all it has been a brutal week for the NFL.

Right now on the field I'd say the two best teams are the Packers and the Patriots.

This Sunday the defending Super Bowl champs have a huge test when the Cardinals come to Seattle to try to silence the 12th Man for the second year running. The Seahawks must win four of the next six games to squeak into the playoffs as a wild card.

As I see it they cannot drop anymore games at home. So in essence the season for the Seahawks comes down to Sunday.