Keith Strudler -The NFL’s Problem With Numbers

As is often said, numbers never lie. People, on the other hand, are quite adept in the art. Particularly when it comes to numbers. It’s like Mark Twain popularized, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Perhaps there’s no need for such subtlety in the most recent revelation around the NFL’s claims towards teaching safer football to kids in a program called “Heads Up Football,” which the league helps fund and promote. Heads Up Football supposedly teaches kids to tackle, well, with their head up, among other things, thereby reducing the risk of concussions and other injuries. It all sounds reasonable, and certainly a good PR move by the league in softening the intensifying harsh rhetoric around football, concussions, and future links to CTE. At the very least, it looked like the NFL was trying, something that didn’t appear true when it cut funding to Boston University’s research on football and head trauma.

Now, it seems, Heads Up might get a big thumbs down, as it’s just been revealed that the league and football’s youth governing body USA Football have been overstating the effectiveness of the program.  Specifically, the NFL has stated that youth leagues that use Head Up have 76 percent fewer injuries, 34 percent fewer concussions during games, and 29 percent fewer concussions in practices. These numbers came from a study commissioned by USA Football through its funding from the NFL. The study was done by an independent research firm, the same one that handles injury statistics for the NCAA. The numbers they found around Heads Up Football and injury reduction would be a remarkable turn, and potentially one that could keep kids from dropping the sport.

That is, if those numbers were correct. Which apparently they aren’t. Instead, these stats were from preliminary results that didn’t tell the whole story, but which the researchers – and the NFL – felt compelled to release anyway. When the study was done, the final numbers told a different story; only a 45 percent reduction in overall injuries and no statistically significant change in concussions, either in games or practice. So that’s a lot different, even if it’s still meaningful. The recent uproar around playing football – particularly among parents, and particularly among educated parents of means, as our HBO Real Sports/Marist Poll data indicated, and that’s real data – the uproar isn’t because football causes injuries. We’ve always known that. The uproar is about concussions and their tie to CTE, which doesn’t heal like a broken leg. I think we all get that playing football can destroy your knees later in life – which, by the way, was reason enough for me not to play. It’s whether it destroys your brain that matters to most. Which is why posting misleading information about the increased safety of youth football is like an Australian lifeguard telling swimmers not to worry about sharks.

The NFL and USA Football have apologized for not realizing their data was incorrect – and that’s giving them way too much credit. Which speaks to exactly how much interest both parties took in actually reviewing the commissioned study – so much that they simply grabbed positive data from a preliminary press release and never looked back. These are the people to whom we are supposed to trust our kids’ well-being. People who are either too busy or perhaps too disinterested to bother figuring out if what they’re doing even works.

What does this all mean? Well, obviously, it suggests that the NFL’s interest in making football safer is more marketing than mission. And look, I assume that the NFL wants to improve the concussion problem as much as anyone – more, I’m sure, since it’s an existential threat. But through this confluence of corruption and carelessness – and you pick which is more accurate – they’ve dismantled any public trust Heads Up Football might have built anyway. It’s like finding out your medication was a placebo.

It also affirms an increasingly common narrative in our society. The idea that we might discount, or at least selectively use science. By marginalizing a study around the safety of youth football – and mind you, this wasn’t ground breaking work by any means, but a simple correlation analysis – the NFL has suggested they’ll use data when it helps and disregard it when it doesn’t. Of course, they’re not alone in this – and I’m just talking about sports. Just yesterday NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said he isn’t convinced of a link between concussions and CTE. He prefers his league take a “more measured approach.” I don’t even know what that means.

There is no simple answer to preventing concussions and potentially later CTE in football. Other than simply ban the sport or play flag football, neither of which fit well into the NFL’s business model. For the short term, it seems the plan is to kind of work on the issue and play loose with the truth. That not a great long-term strategy. Because in the end, even if the NFL lies, the numbers, those things that actually matter, never do.

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