Early Tuesday, an ESPN report emerged alleging that the NFL had pulled its funding from "one of the most ambitious studies yet on the relationship between football and brain disease," currently being conducted at Boston University.
Per the report, the NFL balked at funding the study after learning that it would be led by a "prominent Boston University researcher" who has in the past been critical of the league. Two years ago, the league gifted a "no string attached" $30 million to the Foundation for National Institutes of Health to do with what they will. An NIH official told ESPN though, that the league maintained veto power over the use of the money.
The league is alleged to have exercised that power when they learned that Dr. Robert Stern, the director of clinical research for Boston University's Alzheimer's Disease and CTE centers, would be leading the study. Stern has been critical of the NFL in the past, suggesting that commissioner Roger Goodell engaged in a "cover-up," inherited from Paul Tagliabue, regarding the connection to brain injuries and the game of football.
Shortly after the report was published, the NFL responded, via a Tweet from league spokesman Brian McCarthy, denying that they had pulled their funding from the study.
ESPN story is not accurate. NFL did not pull any funding. NIH makes its own decisions.
— Brian McCarthy (@NFLprguy) December 22, 2015
It's interesting, as Michael David Smith of Pro Football Talk noted, that the NFL would so quickly respond to an ESPN report they deemed to be false, when in the past - Deflategate - they failed to respond at any point to an ESPN report that was eventually debunked. But that's beside the point.
The FNIH released a statement of their own early Tuesday afternoon, indicating that the NFL very much remains a part of the funding for the current study.
"Through the Sports and Health Research Program (SHRP) -a partnership among the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Football League (NFL), and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH)-multiple studies have been and will continue to be funded to examine traumatic brain injury in athletes. The NFL funding commitment to SHRP remains intact. NFL was willing to contribute to the Boston University CTE study headed by Dr. Stern. NIH made the decision to fund this study in its entirety and to issue a Request for Applications (RFA) early next year to support an additional study on CTE using funds from SHRP, which will double the support for research in this area."
