NFL Taking Page from Big Tobacco Playbook?
Posted on: March 25, 2016 NFL Concussion Lawsuits
An investigatory report published by the New York Times shreds the legitimacy of research papers produced by an NFL committee which downplayed the danger of head injuries. While the report chronicles the league’s use of faulty data in its reports (for example, the Dallas Cowboys didn’t report one concussion from 1996-2001, but I think Troy Aikman might disagree with that assessment,) even more interesting is the insight that the NFL shared a number of lobbyists, lawyers, and consultants with Big Tobacco. You might be asking yourself why a professional sport would be entangled with Big Tobacco. Without coming right out and admitting it, I think the Times is trying to get the readers to draw their own conclusion that the NFL borrowed Big Tobacco’s strategy of using questionable science to downplay the danger of its product. Depending on how you interpret the facts in the article, it certainly seems like the NFL could have learned a thing or two from Big Tobacco about dealing with a product crisis, but something tells me I doubt it was during a smoke break.
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