$140m CTE judgment makes NCAA's other problems seem small | Goodbread

The NCAA thought lawsuits over NIL was a problem. It thought eligibility lawsuits were a problem.

Then came Davis vs NCAA, and the governing body for college sports learned its troubles run much deeper.

The family of former SMU football player J.T. Davis sued the NCAA in 2020, alleging negligence in Davis' battle with CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) dementia, due to concussions sustained during his playing career from 1955-1959. The family initially sought $1 million, but a Dallas jury last week awarded $140 million, most of it in punitive damages.

That's a massive sum that surely sent a chill through the spine of NCAA administrators, and just as surely got the attention of former college athletes suffering from concussion-related symptoms. An appeal is a certainty, but relief isn't. The NCAA was unprotected by its settlement of a class-action suit in 2014 that brought about concussion protocols in college sports, as that case — Arrington vs. NCAA — did not preclude former athletes from suing for bodily harm individually.

That settlement cost the NCAA $75 million, mostly designated for research, protocol establishment, and other proactive steps.

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The link between CTE, which can only be diagnosed posthumously, and football isn't nearly as big a legal issue for the NFL, which settled a class-action suit that covered thousands of former players. The NCAA services hundreds of football teams, not the NFL's 32, to say nothing of all the other NCAA sports in which concussions are a risk.

Davis was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2001, and passed away in 2017. In making their case, attorneys for his family introduced as evidence an NCAA medical handbook from the 1930s that recommended concussion protocols that it claimed weren't subsequently followed. The number of former athletes who could potentially have a winning case, particularly those who competed prior to the NCAA's establishment of protocols in 2014, is incalculably large.

On the heels of a $2.8 billion settlement in the House vs. NCAA case that ushered in revenue sharing, here's a fair question: how deep does the NCAA money pit go? How many $140 million judgments from concussion sufferers could it withstand? It's not as though billions in TV revenue goes into a single administrative coffer; most of it gets distributed to member schools.