League of Denial

League of Denial is a novel written by two brothers who are both investigative reporters for ESPN. Mark Fainaru-Wada was co author of the new York times best selling book Game of Shadows which broke the news and never before seen documents relating to Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid scandal in major league baseball.  Steve Fainaru is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist for his coverage of the war in Iraq.  League of Denial is about how the NFL has handled the mounting concussion crisis in the league today, and how they have tried to cover it up for over a decade leading to the demise of former NFL greats such as Mike Webster and Junior Seau. The NFL created its own research board which did flawed research on concussions, released false reports in medical journals, and did its best to completely discredit any doctor who said that football caused brain damage.  One of these discredited doctors is Dr. Omalu who performed the autopsy on Steelers legend Mike Webster.  Due to the tremendous amount of force generated on each and every snap in the NFL between the offensive and defensive line, head injuries are almost inevitable.  Each collision in the trenches is said to create the same amount of force as running a mid sized car into a brick wall at a speed of 35 MPH.  Despite these astonishing numbers the NFL still stated that frequent NFL players did not receive frequent blows to the head (Tagliabue).  This type of clear neglect from the NFL in the past is what has landed them in hot legal water today.  NFL Veterans formed a class action suit against the league with an original price tag of 2 Billion Dollars, The NFL ended upv paying out over 700 million plus all legal fees, but as an understanding, still neglected any form of liability and was not required to reveal what they knew and when they knew it.  This novel does a great job of exposing the scandal on a very public forum, but this issue is still a developing and hot button issue in sports today.

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