First the NFL tried to buy itself a talking point of spin. The cost: $30 million, courtesy of a "no strings attached" donation to the National Institutes of Health, which was conducting a study on the relationship between CTE and football. Hey, look, we care so much we are funding the study. That was 2012.

However, a doctor named Robert Stern, who had been critical of the NFL, was chosen to run it rather than doctors the league preferred. The NFL responded by trying to strong-arm doctors back in, fighting for a system where the conclusions would not face aggressive peer review and eventually pulling $16 million out of the "no strings attached" donation. What the league first claimed was goodwill was actually a way to control the conclusions.

View photos Commissioner Roger Goodell is having a hard time protecting the shield. (AP) More

ESPN was the first to report this last year. On Monday, a Congressional investigation backed it all up in a damning, 91-page report.

So rather than Roger Goodell getting his league a water-muddying "scientific" study, it gets itself this: a massive embarrassment, a blow to whatever credibility it still has on the topic and another round of headlines that make everyone suspicious about football and brain injuries, because why try to shape a scientific study unless you fear it?

The claim that there is a so-called "War on Football" is simplistic, but not without some merit. There is definitely a faction of people who relish in blasting the sport. They don't appear to be the type who would be troubled if it was somehow abolished.

Tactics like this from the NFL do more damage than all the complaints, studies and columns combined. If there is a War on Football, Goodell's NFL keeps supplying it the ammo by acting in ways that prove the other side's worst fears, willingly playing the movie villain.

"The NFL's interactions … fit a longstanding pattern of attempts to influence the scientific understanding of the consequences of repeated head trauma," the report concluded. "These efforts date back to the formation of the NFL's now-discredited MTBI Committee, which attempted to control the scientific narrative around concussions in the 1990s.

"In this instance, our investigation has shown that while the NFL had been publicly proclaiming its role as funder and accelerator of important research, it was privately attempting to influence that research," it continued.

A league that is deathly afraid of parents steering their sons away from the game essentially paid $30 million for the kind of story that makes football seem like a game parents should steer their sons away from. Well done.

This is a disastrous leadership. The entire thing is unnecessary. The NFL's arrogance made it believe it could gin up a study and get people to believe that repeatedly slamming your head against something isn't bad for you – and assumed no other scientists would cry foul when it tried it. The tobacco industry tried this too.

Who is the target audience here anyway? What is the point of this argument?

View photos Concussion protocol in the NFL has drastically changed in the past few years. (AP) More

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