As the Super Bowl approaches, and the mainstream media is flooded with promotional spots put out by the NFL, we can’t but help feel that this year is different. It is obvious that the sport is in a declining state, using viewership and attendance numbers alone to tell the tale. What hasn’t been so obvious is the reason why the NFL and their chairman Roger Goodell, are letting this happen.
I say letting this happen, because the wounds upon the NFL are surely self-inflicted. What was supposed to be an a-political popular sport has turned into a partisan slugfest with all the trappings of an orchestrated operation designed to create political divisions. Normally, when viewing such activity, it would be prudent to assume dirty tricks being played to distract from an unfolding narrative that ran counter to the orchestrator’s best interests. Here at Stone Cold Truth, that’s what we first thought was going on, put into play by the Left to distract from the trove of scandals being uncovered today in Washington, D.C. After our research, we’ve amended our position.
Before we continue let it be said that we simply love the sport of football. We’ve watched it in our youth, played it amongst friends, and have been lifelong fans. To be sure, we who put this story together are saddened by making this report. It is our profound hope that the NFL will make a course correction, right the ship, and carry on with smooth sailing, restoring our National Pastime to former glory.
Now on with the report.
Roger Goodell is no stranger to politics. His father, Charles Goodell was a Republican U.S. Representative and then later a Senator from the State of New York. As such, Roger Goodell has been ‘plugged in’ from almost the time he could speak.
Many don’t know that it was Charles Goodell who was hand selected by then New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to replace the just assassinated Robert F. Kennedy. Charles was the youngest Republican Senator of his day. As a serious researcher of the Kennedy family along with the various conspiracies swirling around them, and as a top author on the subject, many longtime followers will know that little credence in placed in the official narratives released at the time of these events.
Even though Charles Goodell was a registered Republican, hand selected by the same, his views stilted more to the left. In fact, the primary reason why he lost his Senate seat in 1970 was because he introduced a bill to cut off funding to the Vietnam war. At the end, Spiro T. Agnew, then Vice President to President Richard Nixon, publicly disavowed Charles Goodell, calling him a “Radical Liberal”.
With this historical perspective to provide context, there were these nagging little details about the NFL Social Justice narrative that caused us to revisit it, a metaphorical check-under-the-hood if you will. In our January 18th, 2018 piece on InfoWars War Room with Owen Shroyer, we first discussed our initial findings, and they weren’t pretty.
Information regarding the NFL Concussion Settlement had been pointed out to us around January 15th. Our source was anonymous, but the tip was sound. The basis of the tip was the recently released statistics from the official NFL website www.nflconcussionsettlement.com. The statistics show that after four years of legal fighting, and over a year of time since a supposed settlement was reached, only a tiny fraction of the players have been paid for their lifelong traumatic injuries. We, like many of you, were not fully aware of this monumental lawsuit and resulting settlement, but a well-trained political nose can always smell a rat. When we saw these statistics, everything just snapped into place for us. It became, and still is, our opinion that the reason why Goodell is allowing the NFL to commit seppuku on the knife of social justice, is to distract from the fact that they are not honoring the settlement payout agreement. Using a lessor negative to cover for a greater negative is indeed a trick out of the Book of Political Dirty Tricks. Why is the Concussion Settlement a greater negative? Because it shows clearly that the sport of football, as played today, is destroying the lives of the players and that of their families too. Is it still as entertaining to watch teams slam into each other on the scrimmage line knowing that most of them will be permanently scarred from it? Not for us it isn’t.
We concluded the report by vowing to dig deeper into the nitty gritty of this story, and what we uncovered shocked us. Seeing what we’ve seen over the years, and being as jaded as we are, shocking us is not easy to do.
When we start going through some of the statistics, it is import to consider that for every number you see, there is an entire support network of family and friends who are affected by these grave series of events.
The NFL’s handling of the traumatic head injuries lawsuit settlement has left thousands upon thousands of former professional football players in dire straits. Many of the former players were and are still suffering from a variety of severe ailments like Early Onset Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and other Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) symptoms.
The billion dollars “NFL Concussion Settlement”, a disingenuous name assigned by the NFL themselves, was supposed to be an all-encompassing uncapped solution for the players and the NFL in response to the multiple lawsuits directed at the NFL by the players and their representatives. It took four years of fighting to reach the effective date of January 7, 2017. The injured players, an overwhelming number of whom are African-American, were relieved when they were told that their payments would be swift and hassle-free.
In general, the lawsuits claimed that the NFL knew about the harm caused to the players in pursuit of the sport of football, and that the NFL did their best to obscure the risks and absolve themselves of any responsibility.
The process to make a claim was supposed to be easy, but it has turned into a moving target by the NFL with the full complicity of the Lead Class Counsel Attorney Chris Seeger and Federal Judge Anita Brody who is overseeing the settlement. In a nutshell, the process runs like this: A class member receives a qualifying diagnosis by a properly credentialed physician. The class member then files a claim with the court appointed claims administrator. The claim is supposed to then be reviewed and promptly paid if it is in order. This has not happened at all. Even though most of the claims have been submitted by law firms skilled in these matters, on behalf of class members, the claims administrator delays the claim by saying something is missing from the package, or worse audits to scan for fraud or denial of the claim. Of the few claims that are approved, almost all of those are then appealed by the NFL.
Of the roughly 12,656 potential claimants, one year after the settlement went into effect, only 1,605 have filed claims as of January 22, 2018. Only 101 of these filed claims have been paid. While the filed claims are for symptoms that run the range of CTE, over a thousand of them are for dementia. Only four of these dementia claims have been paid.
To put this into perspective, 127 former players for the NFL died during the same period, with fifteen of them being 48 years old or younger at time of death.
Again, remember, behind all of these numbers lay real people who gave their all to the sport, and all their family and friends who have to deal the results of the NFL’s deliberate actions on a daily basis.
The class action settlement has all the hallmarks of a sham. The only true beneficiary being the Co-Lead Class Attorney Chris Seeger, who is to make at least a $70 million-dollar fee, after not demanding any discovery at the start of the lawsuit. Seeger also dropped his individual clients, leaving him no responsibility to get any single claim paid. Now he is abetting the NFL to slow walking the claims in the hopes that the claimants will die before being paid.
With such grave accusations it would seem natural that other attorneys would step forward to litigate the issue, but they are stymied every time by Seeger and the Federal Judge who blocks the courthouse from everyone but Seeger and always takes the side of the NFL, to the direct detriment of the class members.
As we dig into this story we are finding all sorts of information that seems to point to collusion at the highest levels of the NFL along with the lead class attorney. That will be the subject of our next report on this topic, to be released next week. The more deeply we look into this story and the human cost, the more we see that the players and their families need help, right now.
