Cowboys’ Jerry Jones questions link between football, CTE

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Tuesday he is not convinced there is a definitive link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased former NFL players.

“We want to continue to be safer and want to continue to support any type of research that would let us know what [the] consequences really are,” Jones told a small group of reporters at the NFL’s annual spring meetings. “In no way should we be basically making assumptions with no more data than we’ve got about the consequences of a head injury.”

Jones’ take appears to be at odds with comments from Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety, who said last week during a congressional roundtable discussion on concussions that he believed there is a connection. Asked by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) whether there is a link, Miller replied, “the answer to that is certainly, yes.”

A league spokesman said the comments were consistent with the league’s thinking.

When asked if he believed there is a definitive connection between playing football and developing degenerative brain disease, Jones said, “No, that’s absurd. There’s no data that in any way creates a knowledge. There’s no way that you could have made a comment that there is an association and some type of assertion. In most things, you have to back it up by studies. And in this particular case, we all know how medicine is. Medicine is evolving. I grew up being told that aspirin was not good. I’m told that one a day is good for you . . . I’m saying that changed over the years as we’ve had more research and knowledge.”

An ongoing study by Boston University researcher Dr. Ann McKee has shown evidence of CTE in 90 of 94 brains of deceased former NFL players. McKee has acknowledged that, because the brains she has studied have been donated mostly by families who were concerned about the players’ behavior that may have been influenced by repeated head trauma, there may not be that high a prevalence of CTE among the football-playing population at large.

“The thing that I don’t want to get caught up in is semantics, the semantics of it,” Jones said. “We as a league, we have not in any way changed our desire to do everything we can to make it safe, make it safe as to head injury. We hope and will support any data that would give us more insight into any short- and long-term consequences. We would support that.”

Jones added, “There has to be a lot of research, just as the heart did 50 years ago. And certainly everybody that had heart issues 50 years ago didn’t live a normal life. Nature takes care of that. So no, I didn’t think at all that his statements altered anything . . . It didn’t alter anything about where we are.”

Giants president and co-owner John Mara said Monday that CTE is “our No. 1 challenge,” but didn’t think Miller’s comments were “anything new. You have to remember that the population that’s been studied [for CTE] for the most part played football long before we started to have any understanding as to what we’re dealing with. We still don’t have a complete understanding of it. It’s something that we’re pouring millions of dollars of research into and trying to adjust the rules to make the game safer. We have concussion protocols now that are strictly enforced. We’ve had a couple of slip-ups, but we’re trying to change the way these things are dealt with and the way the game has been played.”

Jets owner Woody Johnson, a great-grandson of Johnson & Johnson co-founder Robert Wood Johnson, said the league is “always concerned about player health and player safety. I come from a health business. My whole life has revolved around health. We take these issues very seriously. Whether I agree with [Miller’s] statement or not, I’ll leave that to the neurologists, the PhD’s, the people who really understand the causation. We want to make the game as safe as we possibly can.”

By Bob Glauber

Special to NewsdayBobGlauber

Bob Glauber retired in 2022 after covering the NFL for nearly 40 years. He was selected in 2021 for the Bill Nunn Career Achievement Award by the Pro Football Writers of America, and is a three-time winner of the New York State Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. President of the PFWA for the 2018-20 seasons, he is the author of “The Forgotten First” and “Guts and Genius.”