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.”

When National Football League owners locked out players before the 2011 season, they did so claiming that the league’s financial system was driving it down a path of unsustainability. Even though league revenues were growing steadily, many owners, including Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, argued that they were destined for financial hardship because players were enjoying too large a share of the pie.

According to a team financial statement obtained by the Deadspin last week, however, Richardson wasn’t telling the truth. The Panthers, in fact, made more than $100 million in profits in 2011 and 2012, even as Richardson was claiming poverty:

The statement is for the years ending March 31, 2011, and March 31, 2012. Over the first period, as Richardson argued that the NFL’s business model was hopelessly broken and steered the owners toward a showdown to extract more money from the players, the Panthers recorded an operating profit of $78.7 million. The team had gone 2-14 on the field, but Richardson and his partners were able to pay themselves $12 million.

Over the following year, after the owners had won their lockout and reduced the players’ share of league revenue from 50 percent to 47 percent, the Panthers brought in $33.3 million in operating profit. Richardson began lobbying for public subsidies to renovate his 17-year-old stadium. The team went 6-10.

NFL teams, like franchises in other sports, aren’t required to disclose financial statements, and they refused to open their books when players asked during lockout negotiations. That allowed owners in a profitable league to claim poverty and hardship without any check into whether those claims were true. At the same time, tax breaks and special financing deals with the league allows NFL owners to make their financial pictures even more obscure.

As a result of that obscurity, labor disputes like the NFL’s become even more tilted away from players. Owners already hold leverage in such disputes, since the vast majority of players, unlike owners, depend on the game as their only source of income and players have short careers (the average NFL career is between three and six years long), so missing games or full seasons to negotiate more favorable bargaining agreements often isn’t palatable. The results, then, are predictable: owners are able to extract huge concessions from players to their direct financial advantage. In the NFL, NBA, and NHL, all of which locked out players in the last two years, players gave up substantial shares of revenue in their latest negotiations, and in the NFL, the salary cap is now growing at a far slower pace than it once was. While player salaries are still growing, the slowing growth of the salary cap means there will be less money to divide among them, even as the value of all 32 NFL teams continues to grow and league revenues continue to skyrocket.
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If National Football League teams are asking prospective players about their sexuality, that would be a violation of the law and the league’s collective bargaining agreement, the NFL Players’ Association said Wednesday. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio reported this week that teams wanted to know if Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o is gay, after the projected first-round pick was embroiled involving a fake girlfriend this winter. A second player, University of Colorado tight end Nick Kasa, said today that NFL teams had asked questions about his sexuality.

Kasa, who is projected to be selected in April’s draft, told an ESPN Radio affiliate in Denver that teams have asked him whether he has a girlfriend and if he likes girls, Queerty noted:

“[Teams] ask you, like, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ Are you married? Do you like girls?’ Those kinds of things, and you know it was just kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face, and it’s a pretty weird experience altogether.”

Such questions from NFL teams would be a violation of the league’s collective bargaining agreement, which includes a non-discrimination clause that covers sexual orientation. In a statement emailed to ThinkProgress, NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith said the league should “seek out information” about which teams have asked questions about sexuality:

“I know that the NFL agrees that these types of questions violate the law, our CBA and player rights. I hope that they will seek out information as to what teams have engaged in this type of discrimination, and we should then discuss appropriate discipline.”

The non-discrimination provision was added to the collective bargaining agreement during labor negotiations in 2011. It covers all current and prospective NFL employees.

The NFL will investigate the line of questioning, it said in a statement to CBS Sports. “Like all employers, our teams are expected to follow applicable federal, state and local employment laws,” the NFL said in a statement. “It is league policy to neither consider nor inquire about sexual orientation in the hiring process. In addition, there are specific protections in our collective bargaining agreement with the players that prohibit discrimination against any player, including on the basis of sexual orientation. We will look into the report on the questioning of Nick Kasa at the Scouting Combine. Any team or employee that inquires about impermissible subjects or makes an employment decision based on such factors is subject to league discipline.”

When news broke that the highly-publicized death of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Teo’s girlfriend had never actually occurred, and that the girlfriend herself did not actually exist, one of the first things many people asked was about his sexuality. ABC host Katie Couric asked Te’o whether he was gay in his first public interview after the story broke, to which he replied, “No, far from it, far from it.”

But now National Football League teams want to know the same thing of the projected first-round draft pick at the league’s annual scouting combine, according to NBC and Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio, who told radio host Dan Patrick that the issue of Te’o's sexuality has become “the elephant in the room” for NFL teams interested in drafting him. CBSSports.com’s Mike Freeman has the transcript, part of which is here:

“On the field, you still have to account for what happened in the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama,” Florio told the Dan Patrick Show. “Here’s the elephant in the room for the teams and it shouldn’t matter, but we have to step aside from the rest of reality and walk into the unique industry that is the NFL. Teams want to know whether Manti Te’o is gay. They just want to know. They want to know because in an NFL locker room, it’s a different world. It shouldn’t be that way.” [...]

Patrick interrupted Florio to ask: “You’re telling me that you’re hearing from teams who want to know this, but how do you ask it? Are they trying to find a finesse way to ask that question, or are they going to do investigative work on finding out if Manti Te’o is gay?”

Florio said: “It’s been described to me as the proverbial elephant in the room and I don’t think anyone knows how to solve this dilemma yet. It’s just that they want to know what they’re getting. They want to know what issues they may be dealing with down the road. We just assumed that at some point there would be an openly gay player in an NFL locker room and the team would have to work with the realities and make sure that everything’s fine.”

In 2011, the NFL and the NFL Players Association added sexual orientation to the league’s nondiscrimination statute, effectively barring NFL teams from using sexuality as a factor in employment decisions, so if NFL teams are asking Te’o about his sexuality, they could be in violation of that policy. But even if it isn’t, and even if that statute didn’t exist, NFL teams shouldn’t be asking that question. Though there are no openly gay players in the NFL, multiple former players have opened up about their sexuality after retirement. The teams have no right or reason to know about a player’s private life, especially when it won’t affect the way he plays the game he is being paid to play.

But the NFL teams who asked this question aren’t alone in being wrong. So is Florio. He insisted repeatedly in the interview with Patrick that “it shouldn’t matter” if Te’o is gay, and yet he passed on the fact that Te’o was being judged based in part on his sexuality, openly speculating that Te’o may in fact be gay while hiding behind anonymous sources to do it. Granting anonymity to those sources and their concerns about Te’o's personal life gave the queries an air of legitimacy, even though asking not to be named is a tacit admission that asking about Te’o's sexuality is something these sources would be embarrassed to do in public. In effect, they’ve persuaded Florio to do it for them. But if Florio truly believes “it shouldn’t matter,” he ought to treat it like that by condemning the questions instead of acting as a stalking horse for them. Instead, Florio painted Te’o's situation as a “dilemma” and a “distraction” that he and his future team will have to overcome.

Te’o, like every other player at the combine, should be judged on his performance, both on the field and in his interviews. But invasive questions about his sexuality shouldn’t be a part of that process, both because he has already answered them and because even if he (or any other player) were gay, it is his choice to decide whether, and how, he wants to open up publicly about it. One would hope that when a gay player does talk openly about his sexuality, he would be supported by his teammates, his team, and the league, and treated fairly and responsibly by reporters like Florio. Unfortunately, this episode makes it obvious that the NFL hasn’t yet reached that point.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Catholic Youth Organization banned 11-year-old Caroline Pla from playing in a boy’s football league earlier this year, even though she had played in the same league for more than two years and had been voted onto the league’s all-star team after the 2012 season. Last week, the CYO reaffirmed that decision, upholding its ban on female participants in grades 5 through 8.

The original ban was about safety, the CYO explained then, even if there were no indications that Pla was in any more danger than any of the 11-year-old boys playing football. When they upheld the ban, the reasoning shifted to fears of “inappropriate contact” between male and female players, even though neither Pla nor her family had ever given thought to such an issue before.

At nearly the same time, a football league far larger than the Catholic Youth Organization took a step in the opposite direction. In 2012, the National Football League formally instituted a rule allowing women to participate in its league, and next week, the annual regional scouting combines for amateur players will feature its first female participant.

Lauren Silberman, a 28-year-old former college club soccer player, is attending a regional combine with the hope of becoming the first woman to play in the NFL. The odds that Silberman, a kicker, will make a team are longer-than-long, but that doesn’t matter: the NFL provided a path for women to participate, and for the first time, one will. There are more than 1,600 girls playing on boys’ high school football teams, and multiple women have played college football, so Silberman almost surely won’t be the last woman to go out for the team.

But these stories aren’t as much about football and making the team as they are about just having the chance to play. Women now enjoy far more access to sports than they did 40 years ago, when Title IX became law, but female participation still doesn’t match that of men. Neither does funding, even though sports participation has substantial health, education, and economic benefits for the women and girls who participate. It’s wonderful that the NFL is expanding access to women, but those efforts are undermined when youth leagues like the CYO, where there are more girls who want to play and fewer who have access, refuse to let the Caroline Plas of the world play the games they love.

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.