Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones yesterday at the NFL owners' meeting said it is “absurd” to describe a relationship between playing football and developing CTE. The comments came after he was asked about remarks made last week to Congress by NFL Senior VP/Health & Safety Policy Jeff Miller, who acknowledged a link between CTE and playing football. Jones would not say he disagreed with Miller, whose comments have roiled the league. The NFL previously denied there is evidence to say there is a connection, and that is the position Jones took yesterday in speaking to reporters. Jones: "We don’t have that type of knowledge and background, and scientifically there is no way to say that you have a relationship there. There is no research, there is no data.” Jones compared the science of the brain to where heart research was 50 years ago, pointing out that then-experts said taking aspirin was bad and today it is recommended. Asked if he was saying there is not enough data to establish a connection between CTE and playing football, he replied, “No, that's absurd. There is no data that in any way creates a knowledge. There is no way you could make a comment there is an association." He added, “You have to back it up by studies. We have had millions of people who have played this game, millions of people at various ages, right now, who have no issue at all" (Daniel Kaplan, Staff Writer). More Jones: "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: "The thing that I don’t want to get caught up in is semantics, the semantics of it" (WASHINGTON POST, 3/23). Jets Owner Woody Johnson said, "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" (NEWSDAY, 3/23).
LIVING IN JERRY'S WORLD? USA TODAY's Andrew Joseph noted Jones "said all this while admitting that he would like to make the game safer." Joseph: "Something is wrong here, and it is absolutely Jones" (USATODAY.com, 3/23). On Long Island, Bob Glauber writes Jones' take "appears to be at odds" with Miller's comments (NEWSDAY, 3/23). The N.Y. DAILY NEWS writes, "Maybe Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is the one who needs to get his head checked" (N.Y. DAILY NEWS, 3/23). But PRO FOOTBALL TALK's Mike Florio writes if Jones is "trying to say there hasn’t been a double-blind study comparing the brains of a randomly selected group of football players and a randomly selected group of non-football players, he’s right." CTE to date has been "found in the brains of a self-selected group of football players." But if that is what Jones is "trying to say, he needs to say that more clearly." Jones' comments "show that the league's owners have not yet come up with a clear, coherent message on the subject" (PROFOOTBALLTALK.com, 3/23).
