The NFL Continues to Fail Junior Seau

"Our mission is to honor the heroes of the game, and Junior is a hero of the game," Executive Director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame David Baker told the New York Times in an article revealing that Junior Seau's family won't be allowed to speak during his posthumous induction next month. Until recently, Seau's family believed Junior's daughter, Sydney, would speak. "We're going to celebrate his life," Baker promised, "not the death and other issues."

Not the death and other issues. After playing football at the collegiate and pro level for more than half of his life, Seau committed suicide, in 2012, at the age of 43. He shot himself in the chest, allowing researchers to look for evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease which can lead to impulse control problems, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia. They found it.

The details of Seau's death are important, but the NFL wants us to ignore them. To acknowledge football's fundamental dangers is to call into question the sport's existence. The NFL has a rich history of denying a link between the collisions of the game and the brain damage of its players. But Junior Seau's death is not only inextricable from his football life; it is the direct result of it.

The Hall asserts that allowing one of Seau's relatives to give a speech would go against policy. It claims the policy was enacted in 2010, and as supporting evidence cites the 2011 case of Les Richter, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame two years after he passed away, at the age of 79, due to a brain aneurysm—a drastically different circumstance than Seau's. His family was not allowed to speak. But 2011 was also the first ceremony after Dave Duerson, an 11-year veteran, committed suicide, at the age of 50. He also shot himself in the chest so researchers could look for CTE (they also found it). Perhaps the Hall was anticipating cases in which a potentially aggrieved family is given free reign to lambast the NFL during its own public relations event. (Seau's family told the Times it had no intention of doing this despite ongoing legal battles with the NFL over his death.) Or perhaps it was merely a coincidence. Coincidences happen all the time. That's what the NFL spent decades telling its players and the public about the preponderance of neurocognitive disorders in former players: just a coincidence.

Even if we are to take the Hall's reasoning at face value, the policy could be broken just as easily as it was made. The only thing stopping Seau's daughter from honoring and remembering her father is the Hall's inflated sense of self-importance. Of course, it's hard to believe that's all there is to it. The Hall of Fame is financially supported by the NFL, which lied to Junior Seau and thousands of other football players about what the game could do to them.

The first step to addressing a problem—medically, legally, and morally—is to acknowledge it. But the NFL is still not doing so, both explicitly, in public statements, and implicitly, through gestures such as this. With this denial comes a concerted effort by the league to undermine the concerns of its players and the research that contradicts its claims. Just last week, a review paper, published this year in the online journal PLOS ONE, that downplayed the link between CTE and contact sports was corrected to disclose that one of the authors, Joseph Maroon, had worked with the NFL in various capacities—paid and unpaid—for over 30 years. When independent researchers need to spend time debating the NFL's doctors over whether the relationship between head trauma and CTE is causal or simply a correlation, it delays critical research and limits funding opportunities for further studies.

The NFL party line took another blow last week, when Nature published an article by independent Harvard researchers linking traumatic brain injury and tauopathy, the collection of tau proteins in the brain that, in turn, leads to CTE. The researchers showed that, in the early stages of tauopathy, an antibody can slow or even block the process. Evidence suggests that the antibody could perhaps delay or even prevent CTE. It's speculative and premature, but it's a possibility—one that didn't exist when Junior Seau played football.

Now the Hall says that it will ignore all of this, "the death and other issues," and instead honor Seau. How? By placing a bronze bust in a hallway in Canton. By selling commemorative hats, pins, coins, pennants, and t-shirts. By showing a brief video tribute to his playing days. By pretending football had nothing to do with why he can't stand behind a podium and speak for himself. By continuing to operate as it always has: rejecting, obfuscating, and silencing the catastrophic effects of the game on its heroes—on the people who, like Seau, loved football the most. That is what the NFL considers honor, and that is why Junior Seau isn't here.