The National Football League, so good at hyping its own games and stars, may have inadvertently sprinkled some of that promotional fairy dust on “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis,” a “Frontline” installment about brain injuries among players.

The program, Tuesday night on PBS, is mostly a recap of the league’s response to mounting medical evidence about the dangers of the sport, and, in our cynical age, it would probably have generated only modest interest and a “What do you expect when billions of dollars are involved?” reaction. But reports in August that the N.F.L. had pressured ESPN into withdrawing from a partnership with “Frontline” on the program became big news.

That is likely to bring “League of Denial” more viewers, and what those viewers will see is decidedly unflattering to the league, though dismayingly predictable. The program, reported by Jim Gilmore and the brothers Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, traces the slow accumulation of evidence that the repeated violent collisions of football can lead to the neurological disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The league, the program relates, turned a blind eye to these discoveries for years and, in some cases, tried to discredit the research.

The program doesn’t give the league much credit for recent rule changes and other safety initiatives, instead underscoring its continuing reluctance to acknowledge a link between the sport and brain injuries and its reliance on language that pushes any day of reckoning into the future.