Eighteen months ago, when retired football players squared off with the NFL over whether their case against the league over alleged concussion damage should continue, media descended on the Philadelphia court.
There were dueling press conferences outside the James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse, and a crowd of reporters gathered at a nearby hotel to hear from the retirees.
What a difference more than a year later. Last week, it was as if tumbleweeds blew by the courthouse where the NFL and retirees, joined together, defended the preliminary settlement of the case against some enthusiastic but largely ineffective opponents. And while retirees and counsel again hosted reporters at the same hotel, it was in far too large a conference room, with an ample lunch spread that went to waste for the fewer than half-a-dozen scribes present.
What changed?
For one, U.S. District Judge Anita Brody is largely seen as being ready to approve the deal, despite complaints that it does not cover chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease linked to hits to the head.
And it also could be that the media has moved on to other NFL controversies, like domestic violence. One attorney, representing opponents of the preliminary settlement, tried to link the two.
“You have seen the domestic violence incidents that have been all over the media,” said Steven Molo, who represents a handful of players opposed to the deal. He then proceeded to tie those incidents with the brain injuries at issue in the case, but offered no evidence that Greg Hardy, Ray Rice or Adrian Peterson, the three players at the center of the domestic violence cases, suffer from mild traumatic brain injuries, or that such injuries contributed to their behavior.
Brody frequently questioned the opponents, and at one point allowed settlement counsel Chris Seeger to break protocol and interrupt a lawyer trying to question how the payouts under the settlement were conceived. Molo claimed that a sloppy notice of the settlement was sent to retirees, but Brody later called the notice one of the best she had seen.
Brody even interrupted a sobbing widow, Mary Hawkins, instructing her to make her objection more quickly. Brody declined to let players or widows testify if their lawyers were also testifying, and she held fast to that rule, denying the son of the late Dave Duerson a chance to testify even though he was in the courtroom.
Brody is expected to approve the settlement by early next year. However, if Molo and others appeal, that could hold up payments until the process is exhausted. The deal, initially $765 million over 65 years, is now uncapped monetarily.
Brody could reject the deal with prejudice and suggest a few changes, as she did before preliminarily approving the settlement.
That process may not be in time for all the retirees, though. At the table in the largely empty conference room, the retirees counsel had set up three name placards, for Seeger and for plaintiffs Shawn Wooden and Kevin Turner. Turner, who suffers from ALS, took a turn for the worse in the last three weeks and is now on a ventilator. He could not make the trip as he did 18 months ago when media crowded around him for quotes.
When Seeger asked Wooden if he should take a picture of the placards and send it to Turner, Wooden quickly shook his head, and a staffer pulled all three names from the table.
