ESPN

The NFL doesn’t always push back publicly when it finds itself subject to reporting with which it doesn’t agree. When the league does push back, however, the league does so aggressively.

In response to an ESPN Outside The Lines story regarding the league’s involvement in concussion research, NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart has issued a lengthy press release disputing various points. Titled “what’s wrong with the ESPN story — just the facts,” Lockhart has produced a series of bullet points in response to various aspects of reporting from Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. Portions of the statement are quoted below.

In response to the ESPN claim that the league is trying to “retake control of scientific research,” Lockhart says the contention is false. (“I was tempted to say ‘fake news,'” Lockhart adds.) “We set up the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) to have leading independent experts, doctors, scientists and clinicians direct us to the most important areas of research,” Lockhart explains. “The SAB, chaired by Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army Gen. (Ret.), is doing its work. They are scheduled to send out a ‘Request for Proposals’ in the next week or so. That’s the way science works — developing a set of criteria and a process for grant proposals takes hard and deliberate work.”

As to the ESPN contention that NFL has provided funding for research by “industry friendly” groups, Lockhart says it’s “patently absurd.”

“If we wanted to do fake science, why would we go to outside advisors and take so much time to get this right?” he adds. “If ESPN/OTL is right, wouldn’t we want to flood the zone with junk science as quickly as we could?”

Lockhart also responds to an allegation from ESPN that the league “only engages with experts who are willing to pursue an NFL agendas” by saying, “In some ways, this is the most troubling claim.” He contends that “these are independent and widely-recognized . . . experts in their fields.” Lockhart then goes on the offensive with ESPN, arguing that “anyone who does not agree with ESPN/OTL’s agenda is defamed, diminished, and mocked in its reporting. . . . If you have any doubt, call the engineers and researchers quoted in the story and ask them if their comments were accurately represented or if they were cherry picked and taken out of context.”

Last year, the league took a similarly aggressive position in response to a New York Times article that drew comparisons to the NFL and the tobacco industry, suggesting that the league is using the same playbook as to concussions that the cigarette companies used regarding the addictive and harmful aspects of nicotine. The difference, of course, is that the New York Times isn’t a broadcast partner of the league. ESPN is. While a firewall of sorts has been established between ESPN’s NFL reporters and the OTL crew, an even more obvious firewall existed between reporting and the fictional show Playmakers. And the league didn’t hesitate to use the threat of losing its slate of NFL games to get ESPN to drop a popular show that, in hindsight, was prescient in many ways.

With ESPN hemorrhaging cash and the rights fees expiring in a few years, it’ll be interesting to see whether this incident, and any subsequent reporting of that same ilk (if there is any) will impact the future relationship between the three-letter league and the four-letter network.