EDITOR’S NOTE: Dave will be heading in to the hospital tomorrow morning (Tuesday) for his scheduled total right hip replacement. We’ll keep you posted on his progress. In the meantime, we’ve been following the growing number of new concussion and helmet lawsuits over the past couple of months from all across the country. It’s been hard keeping up with all the details and lawyers and players behind each suit. Last week, many of them were consolidated in a Federal Court in Pennsylvania under Judge Anita Brody. Dave asked one of his attorneys, Jason Luckasevic, from the firm Goldberg Persky & White, to provide an overview and summary of what has happened so far. .continue reading »
And for those of us with shorter attention spans, the highlights are now up on YouTube from our June 20th 2011 Retired Football Players Press Conference. We’ve uploaded it to YouTube in HD – you can enlarge it to full screen for easier viewing using the enlarge button in the lower right corner of the video window. .
And once again, thanks to Jennifer Thibeaux and her crew. We’re working on shorter individual clips to also be posted daily on YouTube over the following weeks to keep this issue front and center with the fans and general public. Retired Players are NOT going away! .
And for those of us with shorter attention spans, the highlights are now up on YouTube from our June 20th 2011 Retired Football Players Press Conference. We’ve uploaded it to YouTube in HD – you can enlarge it to full screen for easier viewing using the enlarge button in the lower right corner of the video window. .
And once again, thanks to Jennifer Thibeaux and her crew. We’re working on shorter individual clips to also be posted daily on YouTube over the following weeks to keep this issue front and center with the fans and general public. Retired Players are NOT going away! .
. And a little something extra: Hall-of-Famer Gale Sayers is mad too! .
. HOW YOU CAN HELP: Click on the Like button on YouTube, as well as passing these videos along to all of your friends. You can also post our video links to your Facebook page if you have a Facebook account and Tweet it to Twitter (you can use those buttons at the bottom of each of our posts). And please be sure to click on the Sign Our Petition link at the top of the sidebar on the right to let everyone know you support these guys! .
Thanks to Jennifer Thibeaux and her crew, we now have the full video of our June 20th 2011 Retired Football Players Press Conference held at the Washington Press Club. We’ve uploaded it to Veoh in HD – you can enlarge it to full screen for easier viewing using the enlarge button in the lower right corner of the video window. You can turn the volume up using the sliding volume bar next to that Full Screen button .
. Be sure to click on the Sign Our Petition link at the top of the sidebar on the right to let everyone know you support these guys! .
We’re back from attending the Press Conference at the Press Club in Washington DC. Thanks to the incredible efforts of the teams at Hausfeld LLC and Zelle Hofmann Voelbel & Mason and Carl Eller, everything came off even better than anyone could have expected. Retired players who attended the conference included Carl, Irv Cross (who moderated), George Visger, Joe DeLamielleure, Lem Barney, Conrad Dobler, Paul Krause, Elvin Bethea and Greg Koch. For the first part of the conference, the retirees were also joined by a group of active players who also made statements in support of the retired players efforts, which included Brendon Ayanbadejo, Duane Starks, Will Witherspoon, Hannibal Navies, Sean James, Anthony Adams, Duane Starks, Stalker McDougal and Mike Dean. We had a strong media presence and there was also a lot of attendance on the conference phone line provided. . We have video of the entire event and will be posting clips from the news conference over the next few days along with a full version of the entire meeting (thanks to our friend, Jennifer Thibeaux, and her young assistant, Elizabeth). And here’s a slideshow of pictures from Reuters News Service at the conference (Click on the picture to open the slideshow in another window): .
Posted with the express consent of Evan Weiner: THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS . Fans don’t matter in sports
Monday, 16 May 2011 BY EVAN WEINER NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM . THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS . And so the National Football League lockout has become a version of the People’s Court. The good guys, the National Football League Players Association, are fighting for workers’ rights and are begging “fans” to help them lift the lockout. The owners, the bad guys, want to take away the players ability to make truckloads of money and are threatening their long term health care. Wait, the players have done such a great job in past collective bargaining agreements that former players lose health benefits five years after their playing careers are done and only if a player has three years in the league. .
The “People’s Court” is now playing in Minneapolis, Minnesota where United States District Judge David Doty is figuring out of the owners owe the players money over how the league managed to negotiate TV contracts to protect that side if in the event of a 2011 lockout. The players are seeking $707 million in damages. The fans will get ZERO if Judge Doty gives the players a monetary award even through a good chunk of that TV money comes from the cable TV subscriber-based ESPN and the satellite pay service DirecTV. In fact a good many people who never watch an NFL game on either ESPN or DirecTV are subsidizing the billions of dollars that ESPN and DirecTV pays the NFL. .
The chances are that Judge David Doty will not address relief for subscribers are great. Fans are not a part of the lockout equation. Cable TV subscribers never received a rebate in 1994 and 1995 when Major League Baseball shutdown the 1994 season and the National Hockey League’s lockout did not end until January leaving cable TV subscribers without a product from mid-September 1994 through January 1995. An awful lot of teams had local cable TV deals in 1994 and 1995 and subscribers were playing for something that they didn’t get. Programming in terms of games which they were charged for. In 1998-99, the National Basketball Association locked out the league players for about 30 games. Not one cable TV subscriber received a penny back for missed games. Interestingly enough the owner of the Golden State Warriors, Chris Cohan, tried to stiff the Oakland Alameda Coliseum Authority and not pay rent at the Oakland Arena during the NBA lockout. . continue reading »
On Monday, Minnesota U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson carefully picked apart all four of the NFL’s arguments to the NFLPA’s suit to overturn the League’s lockout. In her 89-page ruling, she not only addressed everything in painstaking in detail but basically set the scenario for her ruling to stand in higher court on appeal by keeping the focus correctly on the antitrust issue. . Here’s a summary from Andrew Brandt: .
. And the detailed analysis from ESPN – click HERE. . And for the legal minds out there, here’s a copy of the entire 89-page ruling from Judge Nelson posted on Scribd for easier viewing and to make it downloadable. (You can click the link to go over to Scribd’s site where you can enlarge it for easier navigation (hit the ESC key to close). You can also click the DOWNLOAD button to save a PDF copy for printing and reading later.) . Judge Nelson Ruling Against NFL Lockout . .
Posted with the express consent of Evan Weiner: THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS .
NFL lockout 2011: Why are Gov. Christie and other politicians strangely silent?
Thursday, 21 April 2011 BY EVAN WEINER NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM . The National Football League Draft is on the horizon and there has been a deafening silence from a group of people who actually have some power to exert some influence on what appears to be stagnating talks between the owners, who have locked out their employees — the players — and the players’ representatives. .
People like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who has no problem yelling at his employers in public settings — New Jersey voters — has gone mute on the issue. Christie is no better than Texas Congressman Lamar Smith who doesn’t think Congress ought to be involved in the dispute or President Barack Obama. Christie is in a governor’s league that includes both Democrats (Andrew Cuomo of New York, Jerry Brown of California, Mark Dayton of Minnesota among others) and Republicans (Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Rick Perry of Texas, Jan Brewer of Arizona, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana) who should be out there jawboning NFL owners to get a deal done with the players.
All the governors are cutting costs so you figure the potential of losing money because there will be no business conducted because of the lockout would stoke their combative fires. .
But it hasn’t. .continue reading »
We’ve written about the hypocrisy of the drug culture in the NFL over the past three years. On the one hand, you’ve got the Commish running around like Chicken Little enforcing the steroid bans while on the other hand, you have a large number of current and retired players surviving day-to-day on the “legal” painkillers that the NFL chooses to ignore. (Read our post The NFL Drug Culture – click HERE.) Last year, we posted a request from Washington University and ESPN for retired players to participate in an anonymous study on pain management and the use of painkillers. (Read the original request from February 2010 – click HERE.) We just heard back from John Barr this morning:
Well, the NFLPA finally moved forward with filing its collusion claim against the League today. The two sides had agreed earlier to delay the filing as part of an effort to continue negotiations but it looks like they’ve hit another impasse so the claim now goes into the hands of appointed Special Master Stephen Burbank. Read the press announcement on Sports Illustrated: Click HERE.
We understand that this past Wednesday evening, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was given an Impact Award at the Sports Legacy Institute‘s Third Annual Impact Awards held in Boston MA.SLI has been involved with Boston University in the forensic study of the long-term effects of concussions on athletes’ brains. Many players have already pledged their brains to the Institute for study after they die. The award was to “recognize the NFL’s new advocacy and educational programs on youth sports concussions.” Of course, a year earlier, the NFL had donated $1 million to the Sports Legacy InstituteBoston University School of Medicine’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
ESPN is sponsoring an independent study on NFL retired players’ pain and pain management issues. This study will be conducted by Dr. Linda Cottler from Washington University in St. Louis through phone interviews. They’ve assured everyone that participants and personal details will be kept completely anonymous. (Click on the letter to enlarge for easier reading.)
While The NFLPA is continuing to implement cuts to overhead and expenses, as well as advising its active players to start saving as much money as they can, the NFL is apparently cutting any and all outlays that don’t put money in their pocket.
On Monday, Matt Stover, retired kicker for the Baltimore Ravens, took the bold step of sending a letter to the NFLPA laying out his case for dumping Executive Director Gene Upshaw. Way to go, Matt! Donald Trump would be proud.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dave will be heading in to the hospital tomorrow morning (Tuesday) for his scheduled total right hip replacement. We’ll keep you posted on his progress. In the meantime, we’ve been following the growing number of new concussion and helmet lawsuits over the past couple of months from all across the country. It’s been hard keeping up with all the details and lawyers and players behind each suit. Last week, many of them were consolidated in a Federal Court in Pennsylvania under Judge Anita Brody. Dave asked one of his attorneys, Jason Luckasevic, from the firm Goldberg Persky & White, to provide an overview and summary of what has happened so far.
ESPN is sponsoring an independent study on NFL retired players’ pain and pain management issues. This study will be conducted by Dr. Linda Cottler from Washington University in St. Louis through phone interviews. They’ve assured everyone that participants and personal details will be kept completely anonymous. 