NFL chose medical director with close ties to the Patriots

Dr. Elizabeth Nabel was named NFL chief health and medical adviser, but some red flags have popped up

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The NFL has named Dr. Elizabeth Nabel as its chief health and medical adviser, a newly created position.

Creating a position like this would normally seem like a positive step for the league. But, in typical NFL fashion, they’ve found a way to make the hire a little bit suspicious.

Nabel, it appears, has very close ties to the Kraft family, who of course own the New England Patriots, one of the NFL’s flagship and most successful franchises. Per the Sporting News, Nabel’s work in various Massachusetts hospitals has brought her into close contact with the Kraft family, partnering with them and serving on the board of directors of multiple hospitals with Josh Kraft, son of Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Of course, this could easily be nothing; the Kraft family is very prominent in Massachusetts. But this is the NFL, so this isn’t the first time a situation like this has come up, and the more often it happens, the less likely it becomes that this is a coincidence. No smoke without fire, as they say.

The bond between Goodell and Robert Kraft is strong; so strong, in fact, that a GQ profile of the commissioner said that “so large is Kraft’s sway with Goodell that one veteran NFL executive likes to call him ‘the assistant commissioner.'”

Goodell’s erratic handling of serious NFL issues has become symptomatic of his tenure as commissioner. One minute he’s handing down unprecedentedly serious consequences to the New Orleans Saints for having a bounty system; the next, he’s willfully ignoring video evidence of an NFL player brutally attacking his fiancee in an elevator.

For more on the story, the Sporting News has interviews with two doctors, who wonder why the NFL hired a cardiologist instead of someone who knows more about concussions, such as a brain injury specialist.

This continues the trend of the NFL’s blindness to the seriousness of the concussion issue. In the 1990s, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue named Dr. Elliot Pellman as chairman of the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, despite the fact that Pellman was a rheumatologist with no experience studying the brain. Pellman was known to allow concussed players to re-enter games during his time with the New York Jets medical staff; and a Frontline report later revealed that he was actually Tagliabue’s personal physician.

A rheumatologist then, a cardiologist now; the trend of the NFL not taking the concussion issue seriously continues, and this issue could come back to bite them more than anything they’ve experienced so far, even in this scandal-filled year the league has been having.

Dr. Elizabeth Nabel was named NFL chief health and medical adviser, but some red flags have popped up

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