On Wednesday the NFL finally pushed their most divisive medical expert out the door. The question is: why did it take so long?
Elliot Pellman has long been a strange presence around the league. Once a team doctor for the New York Jets, he managed to make himself a key advisor for professional sports leagues including the NFL and Major League Baseball. Back in 2005, baseball rolled him out as an expert on steroids policy when congress began looking at performance-enhancing drugs. A few years later, the NFL made him their leading voice as links between the game and long-term head trauma were made. The only problem with this was that Pellman was a rheumatologist who went to medical school in Mexico despite claims in his biography that he was educated in New York.
Pellman may have been a fine rheumatologist, just as he could have been an excellent advisor to football and baseball teams. Obviously, some very influential people put their trust in him. But his presence in the steroid hearings raised eyebrows and his constant appearances on behalf of the NFL questioning the growing evidence of football-related CTE made him both he and the league look tone deaf. In the face of brain experts armed with studies that at least suggested a strong link between football and brain trauma, the NFL’s continued reliance upon his advice was startling.
He became something of a punchline for the league as it battled lawsuits from former players convinced the game had damaged their brains. Why was the most lucrative sports league in the world still taking advice on complicated matters from a man trained in the treatment of gout and arthritis at a school in Guadalajara? The league’s vast wealth could have bought them the advice of countless experts in brain research, educating them on the effects of concussions and general hits in football practices. So how was it that Pellman was still around?
Perhaps it is fitting that on the day a poll was released saying that 85% of the US believes that football causes the potentially debilitating brain condition CTE, the league announced that Pellman was gone. USA Today reported that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had shoved Pellman out the door. The league has had several public-relations blemishes in recent years including the endless Deflategate saga, the Ray Rice domestic violence case, the Saints bounty-gate fiasco and their constant battles against doctors who insist the game is responsible for CTE in former players. Pellman’s name on traumatic brain injury committees and his face on television interviews only made the league appear hopelessly out of touch. Calls for his dismissal have been coming for years.
It seemed Pellman wouldn’t have survived last fall’s release of the movie Concussion in which he was played by the actor Paul Reiser. If his name had disappeared from general conversation before the movie hit theaters, it burst out again, raising, once more, the question of why he was still a part of the NFL.
In a way, Pellman represented an old NFL, one that is slowly disappearing from a more modern league office. Despite its wealth and power, the NFL has until very recently been an old fashioned place where many of the teams were owned by generations of the same family. When teams needed medical advice they relied on who they were comfortable with, regardless of expertise. This has started to change in the last 10 years. Teams and players want the best doctors and demand specialists. No longer is the word of a doctor kept around for decades by the team owner good enough for both coaches and players. Science has demanded better care.
The NFL says it will hire a new doctor soon. Chances are it will be someone from outside the league, someone with a name and credentials that won’t make the league look careless. It won’t just be a guy who knew a couple of guys in the league office and looked professional enough in a white coat. Those days are over.
