Was the National Football League and a committee it established to protect players from brain injuries instrumental in killing a padded helmet cover that may have reduced the likelihood of concussions for players who wore it? And did it do so because the product possibly threatened Riddell, the helmet manufacturer that had a business relationship with the league? That’s the implication of a Bloomberg story published Monday on the ProCap, a pad that fit over players’ helmets and, according to its inventor, was able to reduce the force of blows to the head and thus the occurrence of concussions.

Industrial designer Bert Straus, the ProCap’s inventor, put his product in front of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee in 1995 after multiple players who had suffered previous concussions adopted it for use in NFL play. The committee, however, rejected his proposal and ultimately ruled that the ProCap was actually more dangerous for players. That and the committee’s recommendations against other helmets, according to Straus and others, was a result of the NFL’s relationship with Riddell, whose helmets didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the league even though, according to one study, they were more dangerous than those made by other manufacturers.

The research behind the ProCap isn’t clear. While one small-sample research project showed that it reduced the occurrence of concussions, the other supporting study was paid for by Straus’ business, and other products, like special mouth guards and helmet products, that have claimed to substantially reduce concussions have been questioned. As Paul Anderson, an expert on the lawsuit former players filed against the NFL last year, told me Monday, such products are often marketed in a way that fosters a false sense of confidence among users even though there is very little research to support claims that they make players less likely to suffer concussions (and, in many instances, research proving they don’t).

The MTBI committee ultimately came to the conclusion that the ProCap could be more dangerous for the head and neck, and Anderson suggested that the committee at least based this decision on science. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an inherent conflict of interest on the committee that could have prevented it from banning products, ProCap or otherwise, that could have offered players more options for protection on the field.

Why does that matter? The conflict between the NFL’s business interests and the MTBI committee’s stated goal of protecting players is a major piece of the lawsuit from more than 4,000 former players that claims the NFL withheld and covered up information linking football to concussions and long-term brain injuries. The MTBI committee has a long history of seeming to do just that, with its own director and its own body of research downplaying the dangers of concussions, the need for “hard and fast protocol” for treatment, and the connection between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy all the way until 2010, when it was disbanded.

Whether the ProCap itself could have reduced concussions doesn’t necessarily matter as much as the appearance of conflict that may have prevented the NFL and the MTBI committee from thoroughly considering alternative products and, more importantly, research that ran contra to the NFL’s financial interests. Even if the committee got the science right in this instance, its ability to question alternative products without examining Riddell’s helmets—one of which finished 14th of 15 helmets in one concussion impact test—with the same scrutiny seems to call into question the idea that it was operating with the singular goal of protecting the players.

That doesn’t mean the players are destined to win the lawsuit; in fact, this specific instance likely won’t have much effect on the overall lawsuit at all. If there is a smoking gun that proves the players’ claim, it will almost certainly be found in the discovery stage. That is still a ways off, given that a federal judge will decide on the NFL’s motion to dismiss next month, and it may turn out that the MTBI committee and the NFL have all the research they need to back up their actions (or lack thereof). But the narrative is building that the NFL’s lack of action on concussions was not, as former player Steve Wallace told Bloomberg, “about players’ safety, it was about the dollar bills.” That’s a characterization the NFL can ill-afford, but it’s also a characterization that with every bit of new evidence seems more and more accurate.

PHILADELPHIA — Brian Westbrook might not remember the hit itself, but he still feels the aftermath. It was October 26, 2009, a Monday Night Football game against the Washington Redskins, when the Philadelphia Eagles’ running back banged his head against linebacker London Fletcher’s knee. Westbrook lay motionless on the field for several minutes before being helped to his feet and staggering to the locker room. It was one of two major concussions Westbrook suffered during his nine-year NFL career, and he is still dealing with the effects today.

Westbrook, now retired from the NFL at age 33, suffers headaches and short-term memory loss. He struggles to remember people he met just days before. And he worries about how concussions will affect him later in life, especially amid the suicides of former players like linebacker Junior Seau and new research linking concussions in football to long-term brain trauma and increased chances of developing degenerative diseases.

“I think about it,” Westbrook said Friday. “I think everybody has their own personal battles, own personal demons. So I think Junior was not only dealing with concussions but he was also dealing with other things. But I often wonder the long-term effects of everything — playing with the bad knee, playing with the ankle, and of course the concussion situation. I think about it all the time, every time I wake up and can’t remember the name of someone I once knew. I always think about it.”

Westbrook appeared Friday on a panel at “Concussion Conundrum,” part of the Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal Symposium at Villanova University, with former NFL linebacker Jim Nelson, former Major League Soccer all-star Taylor Twellman, and former NHL all-star Keith Primeau, about the dangers concussions posed to athletes like themselves. All four suffered concussions during their careers.

The NFL has instituted new rules regulating helmet-to-helmet hits, drawing criticism from fans, media, and players that it is changing the game too much in an effort to make the game safer. Westbrook, however, said it is hard for current players to understand how the head injuries they suffer will affect them once they begin life away from football.

“It’s hard, because you’re talking about safety for your players, and keeping the game the way that it is. And it’s ultimately very hard to do both,” he told ThinkProgress. “So, there is a balance and I think the guys who are on the playing field have to understand that we’re doing this for your best interests. You may not realize, just like with children, you may not realize that I’m telling you not to touch this stove even though you might really want to touch it. But you don’t understand how bad this is until you actually do it. It’s the same thing with concussions. You don’t understand what’s going to happen when you’re 50 until you turn 50 and now you can’t remember (anything).”

The NFL’s rules committee this week will consider another change barring running backs like Westbrook from lowering their heads to initiate contact with the crown of their helmets. That change has drawn criticism from current and former running backs, including all-time leading rusher Emmitt Smith. But while Westbrook said such a rule would be “tough to enforce,” he also said anything aimed at promoting safety on the field was “a good thing.”

Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard made waves before Super Bowl XLVII in January by proclaiming that efforts to make football safer would lead to the league’s demise within 20 years. Westbrook wouldn’t go that far, though he thinks football will likely have to adapt from the game fans and players know today in order to sufficiently protect players.

“I think Bernard’s a little bit extreme, but at the same time it’s not going to be football as we know it today and probably not football as we knew it 10 years ago,” Westbrook said. “It’s going to be a different brand of football, and hopefully a more healthy brand, and if they do that and are successful at doing that, things will be better.”

In a pre-Super Bowl interview on CBS’ Face The Nation, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell repeatedly refused to acknowledge a link between brain injuries and football, even as a growing amount of research is making the link between the game and the development of debilitating cognitive diseases ever clearer and perhaps even overwhelming.

CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Goodell point blank if he would acknowledge the link between football and brain injuries. Goodell demurred: “That’s why we’re investing in the research. So that we can answer the question, what is the link? What causes some of the injuries that our players are still dealing with? And we take those issues very seriously.”

Later, Goodell again ignored the question. “We’re going to let the medical individuals make those points,” Goodell said. “We’re going to give them the money, advance that science. In the meantime, we have to do everything we can to advance the game and make sure it’s safe.” The NFL, he added, has not covered up the links between concussions and brain disease. Instead, “the NFL has led the way.”

Taken together, research has formed a strong link between football and degenerative brain diseases. NFL players are four times more likely to die from Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease than the general population, and recent studies have bolstered the links between football and degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has been linked to dementia, depression, and suicide. Other studies have shown that football players perform worse on cognitive tests than non-football players.

And the NFL has hardly “led the way” into concussion research, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Malcolm Burnley showed recently in a timeline of the NFL’s response to concussions. The first chair of the league’s concussion task force, formed in 1994, regarded concussions as an “occupational hazard,” and the league rejected the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines for returning concussed players to competition in 2000. It was still publishing research skeptical of the dangers of concussions in 2005; in 2007, it still claimed that research did not show that “having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly,” even though CTE had already been found in multiple dead former football players.

That’s not a history of leading the way. That’s a history of standing in the way. The league and Goodell have plenty of reason to continue standing in the way, given that acknowledging a link between football and brain injuries, as well as the league’s role in obscuring that link in the past, would open it up to legal and medical liabilities it doesn’t want and possibly can’t afford. It would turn the discussion from one centered around how to make football safer to one centered around whether football can be made safer. And that discussion would jeopardize the $8 billion (and growing) industry that is professional football. Goodell isn’t obstinate in the face of an increasingly clear reality because no link exists. He’s obstinate because acknowledging that link would threaten the business he oversees.

Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard leveled New England Patriots running back Stevan Ridley during the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s AFC Championship game, causing Ridley to fumble and leaving him motionless on the ground. That Ridley was hurt was apparent immediately when he ended up in the “fencing position” — arms and toes up to the sky:

The fumble came at a big moment. Ridley and the Patriots were down eight points with about 13 minutes to go, but the fumble gave the ball back to the Ravens, who promptly scored another touchdown and effectively sealed their trip to the Super Bowl. After the game, Ravens coach John Harbaugh called the hit “football at its finest“:

“That was the turning point of the game,” John Harbaugh said. “That was the turning point of the football game there on the 40-yard-line. It was just a tremendous hit. It was football at its finest. It was Bernard Pollard making a great physical tackle — just as good a tackle as you’re ever going to see in football right there. That just probably turned the game around right there.”

There’s no disputing the play was a turning point, and there was absolutely nothing illegal about it either. But that coaches view plays like that as football at its finest, and that players view injuries the way they say they do in Tom Junod’s excellent new Esquire piece, serves as a reminder that there is a significant gap between the concerns of people inside the game and those outside it about making it safer. If “football at its finest” involves leaving a guy motionless on the turf, I suppose I don’t have much interest in the finest points of the game.

ESPN and ABC News released a joint report this morning detailing what everyone already suspected about Junior Seau: that he was suffering from the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease caused by repetitive hits to the head that is linked to dementia and depression, when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest on May 2. Seau’s brain was examined by five brain doctors at the National Institutes of Health, who were able to examine it because the family donated his brain for research after his death.

There are plenty of things that stand out in this report, including the absurdity of the fact that Seau never reported suffering a concussion in his 20 years, or the fact that it doesn’t matter if he did. Players don’t need concussive blows to end up with CTE, they just need repetitive hits to the head. Concussions, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler has argued, aren’t football’s crisis. Football is football’s crisis.

What really stood out, though, is the effect CTE and Seau’s suicide had on his kids:

“It definitely hurts a little bit because football was part of our lives, our childhood, for such a long time,” said Sydney, a freshman at USC. “And to hear that his passion for the sport inflicted and impacted our lives, it does hurt. And I wish it didn’t, because we loved it just as much as he did. And to see that this was the final outcome is really bittersweet and really sad.”

Jake, a high school junior who quit football to focus on lacrosse, added: “He lived for those games, Sunday and Monday nights, you know? And to find out that that’s possibly what could’ve killed him or caused his death is really hard.”

Many of football’s defenders argue that hand-wringing over head injuries is senseless, because professional football players know the risks and choose to play the games anyway. Even if that was true, and it surely wasn’t for players of Seau’s era, the injuries don’t just affect them. Football, the game that dominated the lives of the Seau family for two decades, the game they loved, took away a father and a husband.

The game, the fame, the money, the adrenaline — is it all worth it? For many players, it might be, and it may have been for Junior Seau too. For his son Tyler, though, the answer is no. “Is it worth it? I’m not sure,” Tyler told ESPN. “But it’s not worth it for me to not have a dad. So to me it’s not worth it.”

At this point, you’ve probably seen the demolishing hit South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, one of college football’s best players, laid on Michigan running back Vincent Smith in the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day. Clowney, who would be a top five pick in the NFL Draft this year if only an arbitrary age limit didn’t force him to remain in college for another season, burst off the line and laid waste to Davis almost immediately, causing Davis to fumble and sending his helmet 10 yards backward in the process:

That hit, in short, is absolute football perfection, a combination of size, speed, strength, and total athletic dominance that, when brought together in one perfect moment, leads to the type of play that leaves fans, coaches, teammates, opponents, and announcers alike stunned beyond comprehension. It was clean, it was smart, it was beautiful. The two seconds between the snap of the ball and Clowney’s devastation were football at its absolute purest, as Dave Kindred pointed out at Sports On Earth:

I have no use for football’s jack-‘em-up fetish. I loathe the mentality that cheers a blindside block on a helpless defender whose eyes are locked on a kick returner. I have seen cheap shots and I have seen Darryl Stingley in a wheelchair. But what Jadeveon Clowney did to Vincent Smith was none of that. The old Michigan State coach, Duffy Daugherty, once said, “Football’s not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.” By that definition, Clowney’s tackle was as pure a demonstration of the game’s truest nature as we’re likely to see.

The very fact that the hit was a “pure demonstration” football’s “truest nature,” though, illustrates exactly what is so scary about the future of football: we’ve spent the last year focused on the threat concussions pose to the future of the game, but the real threat may be the game itself, the risk routine hits even less powerful than Clowney’s pose to the brains of the young men who step on the field each weekend. That, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler argued last month, “Football doesn’t have a concussion problem. It has an existential one.”

Clowney’s hit didn’t cause a concussion, and so it seems just a routine part of the game. But focusing on concussions as the major source of brain injuries in football, as Mahler argued, makes us think the problem can be fixed relatively easily. It makes it seem as if improving how we monitor concussions when they happen and eliminating head-to-head hits will reduce the amount of concussions and thus mitigate the risk of long-term brain trauma for the athletes who take the field. But recent research shows that it doesn’t necessarily take a career full of concussions to lead to the long-term cognitive problems many football players experience after retirement. Rather, chronic traumatic encepholopathy, dementia, depression, and other serious cognitive damage can result from the constant repetition of seemingly minor hits to the head — the kind that happen hundreds of times every game from the NFL level down to youth football.

“Calling the head-injury crisis a concussion crisis made it sound as if it stemmed from how the game is played, not from the game itself,” Mahler continued. It doesn’t take a concussion to damage the brain. It doesn’t even take a hit as devastating as Clowney’s. The routine plays, the beautiful plays, the most purely football plays — they all could be causing brain damage too. That’s a reality nobody wants to acknowledge, because if football’s problem is indeed existential, if the game doesn’t have a crisis but is the crisis, the future of football is in more peril than anyone thinks.

When the New Orleans Hornets’ Anthony Davis, this year’s number one overall draft pick, went down with a concussion in the team’s second game of the season last week, he was forced to exit the game and then stayed in New Orleans for further evaluation instead of traveling to the team’s next game in his hometown of Chicago.

The NBA has been proactive in dealing with concussions, and its policy mandates that players pass a series of tests to make sure they aren’t still dealing with the effects before they return to the court. So even as heightened awareness about concussions in football and other sports has made leagues and athletes more aware about the dangers of playing through head injuries, Hornets coach Monty Williams blasted the policy before the team played in Chicago:

“When you’re dealing with the brain, I guess what’s happening in football has impacted everybody,” Williams said before the game. “He got touched up a little bit last night. That happens a lot in basketball. It’s just that now they treat everybody like they have white gloves and pink drawers and it’s getting old. It’s just the way the league is now.”

“It’s a man’s game,” Williams said. “They’re treating these guys like they’re 5 years old. He desperately wanted to come, but he couldn’t make it.”

The idea that protecting players from potentially damaging head injuries is handling them with “white gloves and pink drawers,” that players are too sissy to return to this “man’s game” if they aren’t immediately back on the court, is exactly why concussion protocols like the NBA’s are necessary. Davis may have wanted to get right back on the court, and Williams may have wanted to get him right back on the court. But that doesn’t mean the best decision for Davis’ health and future was getting him right back on the court.

Williams seemed to realize that later in his rant, when he moderated his stance:

“I’m not saying I don’t like (the policy),” Williams said. “We’ve got to protect the players, but I think the players should have more say-so in how they feel. I’m sure I had four or five concussions when I played, and it didn’t bother me. The NBA is doing what’s necessary to protect the players, but this is not the NFL. You don’t get hit in the head that much. I understand it. But as a coach, I’m a baby about it. I want my guys ready to play. That’s basically the bottom line; I’m just a baby.”

It’s understandable that Williams wanted Davis on the court: he’s arguably the team’s best player. And it’s understandable why Davis would want to get back on the court: the Hornets don’t have another game in his hometown this year. But the more we learn about concussions and how they effect athletes in all sports — from football to stock car racing to gymnastics to basketball — the more evident it is that medical professionals should be the ones with the most “say-so” in when a player like Anthony Davis gets to return to the game, whether players and coaches like it or not.

This week, NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. put a new face on the concussion crisis that is hammering professional sports but has, so far, been largely limited to football. Earnhardt, one of the most recognizable racecar drivers in the world, announced that he would sit out at least two races due to concussion-related injuries, raising concerns from at least one retired driver that Earnhardt’s injury may actually be career threatening.

SB Nation’s Jeff Gluck wrote a great piece about the proliferation of concussions in stock car racing and the inner battles drivers can face when they suffer head trauma due to crashes. What stood out to me more than anything in Gluck’s piece, though, was this quote from Jeff Gordon, another of the sport’s biggest names:

“Honestly, I hate to say this, but I wouldn’t (admit it),” he said. “If I have a shot at the championship and there are two races to go and my head is hurting and I just came through a wreck…I’m not going to say anything. I’m sorry. That’s the competitor in me and many other guys.

“That’s to a fault. That’s not the way it should be, but it’s something most of us would do. I think that’s what gets a lot of us in trouble.”

Gordon’s response isn’t much different from NFL players who have said they would lie about and play through concussions, since injuries are a known risk in football. But Gordon’s answer is more problematic.

If an NFL player elects to return to the field after suffering a concussion, the risks aren’t small. Another hit suffered on top of a concussion that hasn’t been treated can even be deadly. But on the most simple level, the player’s decision, as bad as it may be, really only affects himself, and other players aren’t necessarily at an immediate risk of injury because he chooses to play.

In NASCAR, where the drivers are manipulating 3,400-pound cars inches apart from each other at nearly 200 miles per hour, that isn’t the case. A driver who isn’t sharp, whose reaction time is slowed by even a tenth of a second, is an immediate risk to every other driver on the track. That makes the risks of a driver getting back into the car while he or she is still suffering from brain trauma inherently more dangerous to the sport’s other participants than a football player who makes the same decision.

I don’t fault Gordon for his response any more than I fault Troy Polamalu for his. Professional athletics is a culture that demands winning, and from football to NASCAR, it’s a culture that rewards participants who “tough it out” and play through injuries. But that culture needs to change. The on-track death of Earnhardt Jr.’s iconic father sparked immediate investigations into how NASCAR could make its sport safer. The awareness being raised by Earnhardt Jr.’s concussions should lead to a similar level of introspection.

University of Southern California wide receiver Robert Woods — one of college football’s top pass catchers — took a nasty hit in the first quarter of the Trojans’ victory over Utah last Thursday. Woods, who was downfield blocking on a punt return, hit the ground face first after taking a hit to the head. He immediately got to his feet and attempted to head to the sideline — the wrong sideline — before stumbling and collapsing back to the turf:

A play later, Woods was back in the game. That drew an immediate reaction from sports blogs and other reporters — one of whom said on Twitter that he witnessed Woods fail a concussion test (he later said he couldn’t be sure Woods failed). Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke wrote that he was scared for Woods throughout the remainder of the game, and multiple columnists took USC coach Lane Kiffin to task for Woods’ quick return.

Woods, for his part, told reporters this week that while he got “jacked up” and was “kinda like gone” after the hit, he hadn’t felt ill-effects afterward and passed a balance test, a math test (“100 minus 7, minus 7 minus 7 a couple times,” he said), and answered a couple other questions. He was ultimately fine to return, he said. That Woods only answered a few questions before he was deemed fit to return to the game also drew a strong reaction from columnists, and the entire episode has been the subject of sports fodder for several days now.

A criticism I haven’t seen, however, is that the NCAA doesn’t have a standard procedure for evaluating potential concussions on the sidelines. The NCAA does have a standard policy for players who can be immediately diagnosed with a concussion, and it mandates all schools have a “concussion management plan” for such players. What it doesn’t seem to have is a standard process outlining exactly how players like Woods should be evaluated. Here’s what the NCAA Football Rulebook says about concussion evaluation:

CONCUSSIONS—Coaches and medical personnel should exercise caution in the treatment of a student-athlete who exhibits signs of a concussion. See Appendix C for detailed information.

Appendix C adds a list of symptoms commonly associated with concussions. It says (emphasis theirs) “athlete who exhibits signs, symptoms or behaviors consistent with a concussion, either at rest or during exertion, should be removed immediately from practice or competition and should not return to play until cleared by an appropriate health care professional.” Here is section 3 of Appendix C, the most relevant part of the rulebook for situations like Woods’:

Allow the student-athlete to return to play only with permission from a health care professional with experience in evaluating for concussion. Allow athletics medical staff to rely on their clinical skills and protocols in evaluating the athlete to establish the appropriate time to return to play. A return-to-play progression should occur in an individualized, step-wise fashion with gradual increments in physical exertion and risk of contact. Follow your institution’s physician supervised concussion management protocol.

None of this is meant to demonize the NCAA, which has been proactive in recent years about protecting football players from head injuries. For that, it deserves credit. But it seems, in the wake of the Woods case, that rather than leaving the process up to each individual school, standardizing the process for evaluating and diagnosing a player who may or may not have suffered a concussion would be another step in the right direction (the NCAA, when it mandated concussion management plans, recommended minimum evaluation techniques but does not appear to have standardized them).

I am hopeful that USC’s training staff took the necessary steps to evaluate Robert Woods before he went back into the game (USC, as Kiffin noted, has a fairly cautious record on serious injuries). But letting medical professionals develop a standard evaluation procedure — or implementing pieces or all of the standard recommended procedures that have been developed — would go a long way toward removing any doubt about when, and if, players like Woods should return to the field.