Jim Irsay is one of the more outspoken owners in the NFL. In fact, the only guy who may have a louder media presence than the man who controls the Indianapolis Colts is Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. It's not surprising then that two of the first voices to be heard when it comes to the issue of football, concussions and the development of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), were those of Jones and Irsay.
What is surprising though, is the contention by both men - only a week or so after NFL senior vice president of health and safety Jeff Miller willingly admitted during a congressional roundtable that a connection between football and CTE exists - that there's too little known about the link between football and concussions and the resulting health issues to say with any definitiveness that the game is unsafe.
"I believe this: that the game has always been a risk, you know, and the way certain people are," Irsay said. "Look at it. You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin, it might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body ... may reject it, where I would be fine. So there is so much we don't know."
Irsay also compared football, a game based on repeated, jarring and oftentimes catastrophic collisions, with Olympic bobsledding, citing the inherent "risk" involved in both.
Irsay's comments come only days after the New York Times released a report based on previously unpublished findings which alleged that the NFL had left over 10 percent of diagnosed concussions out of the research that they have, over the span of a decade and a half, often cited as part of their defense against critics of the game and the former players seeking damages as a result of their post-playing days ailments.
The NFL, of course, reacted strongly, denying the report and honing in on the Times' insinuation that the league had attempted to follow Big Tobacco's lead when it came to obfuscating the scientific truth.
But with Miller's admission and the mounting evidence that a professional football career and the ensuing head trauma will result in the development of CTE - Boston University researchers have now found evidence of CTE in the brains of 96 former players - the comments by Irsay and Jones ring hollow and, really, come across as dishonest.
