The NFL is running out of junk science to peddle, so it has issued a bounty

The National Football League has announced that it is offering $40 million for neuroscience research. Expect that money to spin the narrative in its favor.

What do you do when all your existing “research” on neuroscience as it relates to your product has either been debunked for its fallacies or compromised because of the researchers’ conflicts of interest? Use your deep pockets to create more bad research and keep the propaganda machine on life support, of course. That’s exactly what the NFL has done with a recent announcement of available funding.

According to Barry Wilner of the Associated Press, the NFL’s Scientific Advisory Board is setting aside up to $40 million of the $100 million that the league pledged to medical research last year specifically for neuroscience research. While that sounds great at face value, reading between the lines is often necessary to understand what a statement from the NFL really means. A quote from the NFL’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Allen Sills, is very telling.

"I agree with many medical experts that there are still a lot of unanswered questions relating to the cause, incidence and prevalence of CTE."

In the real world outside of the NFL’s insulated concussion denial cult that Sills is now a chief priest of, there is a verified (acknowledged by the NFL nonetheless) strong positive correlation between repeated head trauma, like concussions sustained while playing in the NFL, and neurological diseases like CTE. Sills is technically correct that the research isn’t yet sufficient to establish solitary causation, but part of that can be attributed to the fact that it’s still impossible to diagnose CTE in the brain of a living person. If and when that hurdle is cleared, much more research that can establish causation can be done.

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This is exactly what we should expect to hear from Sills, not only because of his current position, but also the professional company he has kept. Prior to his hire by the NFL, Sills spent the previous six years working with Dr. Gary Solomon at the University of Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Center.

Solomon’s stance on the issue of neurological disease couldn’t be any more clear than his participation in and comments during a July 2016 seminar that he appeared in with guest speakers who were league officials from the NFL and NHL. At the seminar, Solomon denied that a link between concussions and psychiatric illness exists, along with calling the balance of research which contradicts his opinion “anecdotal.” Sills also spoke at the seminar.

With medical experts hand-picked for their league-friendly rhetoric like Sills leading the board which will determine which research proposals get funded, and the funding coming from the league itself, there should be no doubt about what kind of results this research will produce. It will be more of the same junk “science” from biased researchers, as the NFL has already built a reputation for peddling.

It looks like the NFL is committed to using its financial resources to protect its business interests regardless of the cost to players. The hope remains that no medical experts will be willing to sell their integrity and do the league’s bidding, subjecting the public to more of the NFL’s tainted research.