NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has supported the assertion of a senior league official who last week acknowledged the connection between football and the degenerative brain disease CTE, describing the statements as “consistent with our position over the years”.
Goodell’s comments on Wednesday at the annual owners meetings directly referenced NFL senior vice president Jeff Miller, whose remarks to a congressional roundtable last week represented the first time a league official has acknowledged a link between football and CTE by a league official.
“The most important thing for us is to support the medicine and scientists who determine what those connections are,” Goodell said. “We think that the statements that have been made by Jeff Miller and others have consistent with our position over the years. We’ve actually funded those studies. So we’re not only aware of those and recognize them but we support those studies. A lot of the research is still in its infancy, but we’re trying to find ways to accelerate that.”
The remarks came one day after Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones characterized the connection between football and CTE as “absurd”.
The commissioner addressed a broad range of topics at the news conference on Wednesday, including the potential relocation of a team to Las Vegas and the reports suggesting the league is near a deal to host a regular-season game in China in 2018.
Goodell wouldn’t dismiss America’s gambling capital as a potential home for an NFL team when asked about Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis’ interest in moving his club there.
“Mark Davis is appropriately looking at all his alternatives,” Goodell said, adding the city’s association with legalized betting “are things we’d have to deal with. We would have to understand the impact on us. Each owner would have a vote; it would be a factor many owners would have to balance, the league would have to balance.”
The commissioner stopped short of confirming the Los Angeles Rams’ would play a regular-season game in China – news first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday and by NFL.com on Wednesday – but acknowledged the league’s well-documented global ambitions.
“I think the size of China in the global marketplace, that’s something you can’t ignore. We know we have lots of fans over there, and more important, potential fans over there,” Goodell said. “We have multiple teams that are interested in playing. We have more than we can handle at this point in time.”
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