BALTIMORE — Retired N.F.L. players struggling with debilitating injuries years after they leave the field have a not-so-facetious way of describing the league’s approach to doling out their health benefits: “Delay, deny and hope you die.”

Enter Paul Scott.

For 13 years, he worked for the N.F.L. benefit plan as the point person telling players what paperwork they needed to apply for disability benefits. His signature was on the letter that said whether their applications were accepted or denied, which, depending on the outcome, made him either the savior or the enemy, even though representatives from the N.F.L. and players’ union — not Scott — decided who received benefits.

Through those years, Scott said, he always wanted to help the players flummoxed by the arcane rules, which lawyers in the field of disability benefits call among the most byzantine of any employer. Yet he was allowed to tell the players only what they needed to submit, not how to submit it. Some rejections puzzled him.

“Sometimes, it just baffled me the decisions they arrived at,” Scott, 42, said over lunch in Baltimore, not far from the benefit plan’s office.