Five former players sue Kansas City Chiefs over head injuries

Five former Kansas City Chiefs sued the team on Tuesday for not warning them of the long-term dangers of concussions they claim to have received during their playing days. The suit, filed in circuit court in Jackson County, Missouri, is one of the first concussion-related cases against a specific NFL team, and may trigger other suits.

The case against the Chiefs echoes the suits brought by thousands of NFL retirees, who accused the league of negligence and fraud and sought actual and punitive damages. In August, the NFL agreed to pay $765 million (€565m) to settle those cases and avoid what was sure to be a lengthy, costly and embarrassing trial.

The league did not admit that it hid information on the long-term effects of head trauma from its players, as was claimed in the original complaint.

In settling the case before going to trial, the league left the door open for retirees to make other legal challenges. The case by the five former Chiefs seeks to exploit a critical question unanswered in the suits against the NFL: whether concussion-related cases should be heard by an arbitrator under the auspices of the league’s collective bargaining agreement.

Collective bargaining
Alexander Cooper, Leonard Griffin, Christopher Martin, Joseph Phillips and Kevin Porter, the plaintiffs, played all or parts of their careers between August 1987 and March 1993, when there was no collective bargaining agreement.

They also sued the Chiefs, and not the league, because under Missouri law employees can sue their former employers if they are ineligible for workers’ compensation, according to Kenneth McClain, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

“I would expect others in the same situation to step forward because they are not going to get anything from the NFL settlement,” he said.

The Chiefs and the NFL declined to comment. But legal experts said the NFL is unlikely to worry about any potential settlement in the case against the Chiefs. Rather, the league will be concerned about what might emerge in court about its concussion policies.

“For the NFL, it’s more of a public-relations issue than the monetary exposure,” said Jodi Balsam, who worked for the NFL and now teaches sports law at New York Law School.

The case against the Chiefs may poke at another unresolved legal question: whether the former players can prove that the concussions they claim to have suffered in the NFL contributed to current ailments.

Jeff Standen, dean of Chase College of Law at Northern Kentucky University, said it would be difficult to prove a direct link between concussions in the NFL and the players' health now because most players also played football in high school and college, when they could have also suffered concussions.
New York Times Service