The National Football League formed a committee in 1994 to conduct research into the role that head injuries and concussions played in the league on a yearly basis. From 1996 to 2001, the NFL compiled reported concussions and published them as part of that research.
For over a decade, the NFL has considered the numbers they obtained during that time both a thorough and accurate representation of the incidence of head trauma across the league.
But this week, the New York Times published a report detailing the discovery of confidential data which shows that more than 100 diagnosed concussions were left out of the NFL's studies.
Of course, omitting a number of concussions - 100 would mean about 10 percent of the total data - severely skewed the numbers in the league's favor, making it seem as though concussions were far less frequent than they actually are.
The Times contacted the NFL regarding the discrepancy and were told that not all franchises were "required to submit their data and not every club did."
Dr. Joseph Waeckerle, a member of the NFL's concussion committee, which is comprised of members generally associated with the league in some capacity (physician, trainer, etc.) seemed at a loss to explain the missing data.
"If somebody made a human error or somebody assumed the data was absolutely correct and didn't question it, well, we screwed up," Waeckerle said. "If we found it wasn't accurate and still used it, that's not a screw-up; that's a lie."
Since its publication though, the report has appeared in 13 peer-reviewed articles. The league has also pointed to it time and again in an effort to downplay the connection between football, concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has been found in the brains of 96 former NFL players by researchers at Boston University.
The NFL responded to the Times' report shortly after it went live, decrying the Times' attempt to link the NFL's approach to that of Big Tobacco, which for years used questionable science and government lobbying to hide the negative effects of smoking, and indicating that the league made clear on numerous occasions that their research was considered "preliminary" at best.
Whatever the NFL's stance is at this point on concussions and the game they make billions off of, is unclear. NFL senior vice president of health and safety Jeff Miller recently stated unequivocally during a congressional roundtable that a link between football and CTE existed.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones laughed off a connection a few days later.
The NFL stands to gain plenty by downplaying the CTE-football link, but whether they've obfuscated the data remains a question.
