NFL Retirement Benefits: Player Health and Pension Gaps

The Human Cost of Professional Football

Heisman Trophy winner and NFL Hall of Fame member Earl Campbell was a premier running back in the 1970s. In an era when 300-pound linemen and sub-4.5-second forty-yard dash times for skill-position players were both a novelty rather than the norm, Campbell — at 5'11", 240-plus pounds with 4.6 speed — was the most formidable big back in the game. Today, at an age when many of his fans are either at the peaks of their professional careers or enjoying very active retirements, Earl Campbell must rely on a wheelchair because he cannot walk more than a few feet without assistance.

At home in Tyler, Texas, the then-52-year-old looked like a man twenty or thirty years older than he was. Still, he remained thankful for his NFL career. Other retired NFL players from the same era fared even worse after their careers, whether they played just a few years before career-ending injuries — like Chicago Bears defensive lineman Roger Stillwell — or like Hall of Fame Oakland Raiders center Jim Otto, who retired after 14 seasons. Stillwell was disabled from the moment his career ended on a single play in 1979, after just four seasons in the NFL.

Otto and Stillwell were both profiled in the 1985 documentary Disposable Heroes, which detailed Otto's impending knee replacement surgery and Stillwell's constant pain, physical disability, and financial destitution. Otto, whose right leg was later amputated, described his more than forty surgeries in his 2000 book, The Pain of Glory. Stillwell died at the age of 54 in 2006.

That same year, retired Philadelphia Eagles star safety Andre Waters took his own life, reportedly suffering from depression linked to early-onset Alzheimer's disease. According to a neuropathologist who examined him, Waters' brain looked more like that of a man in his mid-eighties — damage attributed to the repeated violent impacts sustained by the All-Pro safety during 11 years in the NFL. Waters was 44 years old.

By all accounts, it was the players of Otto's era who laid the groundwork making today's NFL the $6 billion business it has become. Long before the $1 million average player's contract of today, players like Otto, Stillwell, and Campbell played under conditions where their health was of far less consideration than their performance. Running backs like Campbell were routinely injected with painkillers, with little concern for the dangers of incurring even worse injuries or for the long-term effects on their bodies. Even with modern emphasis on conditioning, injury prevention, equipment design, and rule changes intended to make the game safer, the average NFL career remains just 3–4 years.

Long-Term Medical Problems and Football-Related Dementia

Cerebral concussions — which today trigger automatic removal of players from games and strict neurological protocols before clearance to return — were not even considered injuries until relatively recently. In his 1997 book The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL, retired Atlanta Falcons defensive end Tim Green (1986–1993) recounts how, until the late 1990s, concussions were simply called "getting your bell rung" or "getting dinged," and that it was not uncommon for a player to suffer multiple concussions in a single game or dozens throughout a typical NFL season.

Since then, neurological researchers have concluded that the damage from repeated blows to the head sustained in professional football is identical to the types of cerebral damage known to afflict former boxers. In the 1990s, several successful players — including New York Jets receiver Al Toon and Pittsburgh Steelers running back Merril Hoge — retired while still in their prime because of postconcussive brain syndrome and fears of long-term disability. Both had already experienced symptoms such as chronic migraine headaches and the early stages of memory and vestibular problems after multiple on-field concussions. Research on postconcussion syndrome also demonstrated that with each subsequent concussion, an athlete becomes more easily susceptible to further concussions and that the damage is cumulative, even after apparent full recovery.

After examining the brain of Andre Waters following his suicide, neurologist Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh stated that Waters' repeated concussions were "the significant contributory factor... no matter how you look at it, distort it, bend it — it's the significant forensic factor given the global scenario," referring to the violence taken for granted in professional football. Dr. Omalu further described the uncontroverted link between early Alzheimer's and clinical depression, suggesting that "Andre Waters would have been fully incapacitated" within the next decade, well before the age of 60, had he lived.

Hall of Fame Baltimore Colts tight end John Mackey and San Diego Charger Ralph Wenzel, who played together on the same offensive line, appeared together on national television hoping to call attention to their plight. Both Mackey and Wenzel, aged 65 and 64 respectively at the time, already suffered from advancing Alzheimer's disease requiring full-time assistance and medical care that far exceeded their pension income. Despite having played together on the same line for years, neither man remembered the other, and they forgot each other's names even after being reintroduced only minutes earlier.

Inadequate Pension and Disability Benefits

The NFL retirement system is administered by the NFL Players Association (NFLPA). It provides pensions of between $200 and $500 per month for most retired players from the 1950s through most of the 1980s, and only modest disability benefits for approximately 3% of its nearly 10,000 members, while rejecting the claims of the vast majority of those who apply.

By comparison, retired Major League Baseball players enjoy comprehensive retirement benefits including full medical coverage for life for every player who appeared even once on an MLB active roster. Likewise, the NBA agreed as early as 1999 to a retiree pension described as "the maximum allowed by law," and negotiations were underway to incorporate subsequent changes to the law that, as of 2001, allowed for additional benefit increases of up to 60% over those then currently provided.

Conclusion

Professional football is, by all accounts, a violent sport whose participants frequently suffer significant physical injuries on the playing field. Because of the nature, frequency, and intensity of the collisions inherent to the game — especially at the professional level — the effects of football injuries often persist long after retirement. Most insidious are the cumulative effects of repeated cerebral concussions, only recently identified as a specific category of injury, particularly with regard to their delayed neurological aftereffects.

The deaths of several high-profile retired NFL stars at relatively early ages, and the disclosure of the debilitating physical conditions of others, have increased attention to the need for improved retirement benefits. In particular, the documented causal connection between postconcussion syndrome and early-onset dementia afflicting numerous players from the 1960s and 1970s has inspired some changes in medical benefits provided by the NFLPA — but overall, retirement benefits available to NFL retirees still pale in comparison to those available to retirees in the NBA and Major League Baseball.

In 2007, the U.S. Congress addressed the situation by issuing questionnaires requiring relevant information from the NFL and the NFLPA to ascertain the truth pertaining to various accusations of federal retirement benefit law violations, and some form of resolution appears to be on the horizon. Ultimately, what NFL retirees are asking for is a system of retirement benefits that appropriately accounts for the physical abuse entailed by their careers and the long-term medical consequences that are direct functions of having contributed to making the NFL the success it has become.