Earlier this season the National Football League announced a $100 million initiative to do more to study and reduce the effects of concussions and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) on its players—an apparently sizeable figure for which it took a number of bows. While this appears at first glance to be a commendable effort on the part of the NFL, the sad reality is that it is not nearly enough to combat a player safety problem that threatens the very existence of the league.
The new spending amounts to a five year commitment, with $12 million per year going to fund efforts aimed at creating a safer helmet and another $8 million toward research on CTE itself. To put this in perspective, the NFL’s new commitment allocates less money towards improving player safety than the Baltimore Ravens pay their very average quarterback Joe Flacco. Yet the league still makes a big show of patting itself on the back.
For context, consider that the NFL took in more than $12 billion in revenue in 2015, and the collective value of the 32 teams is north of $50 billion. This new initiative represents just 0.16 percent of revenue, a figure that suggests the NFL does not consider CTE to be a threat to its long-term prospects.
Owners would understandably prefer not to write a big check that reduces their profits. However, by getting creative with the schedule, there is a way to generate enough new revenue to adequately fund more CTE research and prevention.
If the league extends the regular season by three weeks it could generate as much as $1 billion more revenue each year, and there’s no reason that the bulk of that money could not go toward research to alleviate or mitigate the negative impacts of CTE.
The league could lengthen the season without making the teams play more games by simply adding three additional bye weeks over the course of the season. A logical schedule would be for each team to play the first two and last two weeks of the season, with the 16 weeks in between turned into four four-week periods during which each team would have one bye week. Evenly distributing the bye weeks would ensure that the league still has plenty of games to broadcast each week.
Furthermore, additional bye weeks by themselves would improve player health to some extent, since the downtime would give players a chance to better recover during the season. It would also allow teams playing on Thursday nights to have a bye week before that game – meaning no team would have to play twice in five days. Ideally, the lengthened season should also make it possible to eliminate two preseason games and the Pro Bowl (something that would happen with little complaint), making it possible to keep the actual length of the season the same.
If the networks increased their annual TV rights payments commensurate with the extended season it would generate roughly $1.3 billion a year. To make it palatable to the owners, we would have 75 percent—or just under $1 billion—of the revenue increase be dedicated to fund better retiree health care, more research into the effects of CTE, including helmet and other equipment improvements, and an increase in the minimum salary for roster players and members of the practice squad.
That would leave $320 million in added revenue for the owners, or $10 million per team, per year. The 70/30 player/owner split of this new revenue is somewhat higher than the 55/45 revenue split under the current collective bargaining agreement, but only a fraction of this new revenue would actually go toward higher salaries, and then only to the lowest-paid players.
It would be in the interest of the owners to embrace such a change. As things stand, it’s not difficult to imagine that thousands of former players rendered brain-damaged by CTE could one day lead to the demise of the NFL. This proposal would help alleviate that prospect while putting more money in their pocket today.
Head trauma affects millions of Americans and their ranks go far beyond those people injured in football games. Patrick Donohue, the president of the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation, an entity devoted to preventing and treating children afflicted with shaken baby syndrome, notes that even the basic regimen upon diagnosing a person with some sort of brain trauma from any cause varies wildly across the country.
We still don’t understand the long-run impact of head trauma and what (if anything) can be done to alleviate it. The NFL can argue that it is doing its share to address this, and it probably isn’t too far off from the truth. But when you actually crunch the numbers, it’s clear that they’re not doing nearly enough.
Ike Brannon is president of Capital Policy Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington, and Travis Reuther is a writer in Washington.
