Ira Casson, co-director of the MTBI, was at the May meeting, and he came away from it still committed to the NFL’s talking points—the ones he had first put out in 2005 when he co-authored the letter asking for the retraction of Omalu’s article in Neurosurgery.

Has Casson’s position changed, now that scientists from across the country have come to accept the research as sound?

"No," he says. "Nothing has happened that has changed any of our opinions about what we wrote in those letters. Is there a relationship between professional football, a career in the NFL, and changes in the brain? Well, we don’t know. Maybe."

So why does he think so many independent scientists are saying there is?

"I think there are a lot of...gaps," he says. The main problem, as he sees it, is that all scientists have really looked at, after all, are dead people. There has been very little clinical data, he says, collected on living people—which is what the MTBI committee’s study is designed to do.

"Essentially," he says, "if you look at the cases that have been reported in the medical literature—and I don’t include The New York Times as medical literature—for the most part, the clinical data was collected posthumously: interviews with families, ’people told me this,’ and so forth. You don’t see any data that says, well, here’s what a doctor found when they examined him; here’s what their psychiatric evaluation showed; here’s what their neurologist found. There’s none of that!

"To me that creates a question of what exactly is the clinical picture? I don’t think it’s fair to jump from a couple cases that were suicides to assume that some of the others that, well, the guy was driving fast down the highway, it must have been a suicide. Well, we don’t know that. I don’t think anybody can tell you that unless you had a psychiatrist who was treating the person. I think there’s a lot of people jumping to conclusions."

"Very little clinical data."

Fitzsimmons and Bailes and Omalu are sitting in Bailes’s conference room in West Virginia, contemplating what Casson has said.

"Very little clinical data?" Fitzsimmons says. But he had five doctors, including one from the NFL, who examined Mike Webster and concluded he had a closed-head injury. "I had a file this thick of clinical data."

"Why is he doing this?" Bailes says. "I just don’t understand why the NFL is doing this. You know, pick up a textbook." He picks up a textbook, the kind you’d find in any neurosurgery department of any medical school. "Here’s The Neuropathology of Dementia. It describes, in great detail, tau pathology. There’s a whole chapter here about trauma causing dementia. That’s why this is very quixotic to me that’s there’s even any resistance. It’s well-known that brain trauma is a risk for dementia. Why are we arguing this? Why can’t we accept this and move on and try to prevent it?"

"Clinical data?" Omalu says. "_Clinical _data? Pardon me, but what is the gold standard for diagnosis? Autopsy! That is the gold standard for diagnosis. Only when you open up the body, look at the tissues, do you find proof of disease."

They have proof of the fifteenth case right here, sitting in a jar, a story still to tell.

And then there is the sixteenth case: Gerald Small, Dolphins cornerback in the 1980s. He was found dead at 52 in Sacramento, California, where he was unemployed, living with an aunt, drunk. The Sacramento coroner sent the brain to Omalu, who is by now well-known on the coroners’ circuit.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

The seventeenth case is Curtis Whitley, center for the Chargers, Panthers, Raiders, in the 1990s. He was just 39 when he was found facedown in the bathroom of a rented trailer in West Texas, shirtless, shoeless, wearing blue warm-up pants.

Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.

"You would think that sooner or later, like most things in life, you have to deal with the truth," says Bailes. "I think that was part of the NFL’s intent on sending their expert to Morgantown. Maybe they’re planning their strategy now, I don’t know."

*On December 13, 2006, seven years after the initial filing and four years after Webster’s death, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the ruling that Webster had been totally and permanently disabled as a result of brain injuries from playing professional football. The ruling, a 3-0 decision, resulted in an award of more than $1.5 million to Webster’s four children and former wife.

DON’T MISS THIS