High price of concussions.

• Position: Edge of Sports

The National Football League is the unquestioned, unchallenged king of the U.S. sports world. The ratings, revenue, and revelry that accompany each game rise with every season. Last year, as some Major League Baseball teams offered dollar ticket nights in efforts to get recession-America to the ballpark, some NFL teams actually raised their average ticket prices.

As cities strain to pay teachers and firefighters, teams like the Minnesota Vikings without the pretense of shame demand money for new publicly funded stadiums. Yet this leviathan of sports and commerce has an Achilles heel the size of the Cowboys offensive line: concussions.

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For years, the position of the NFL on concussions has been likened to the tobacco industry's historic views on lung cancer. According to the doctors in the NFL's employ, playing a game involving violent headfirst collisions had no connection to future brain injuries.

But in August, the NFL, and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, did a dramatic about-face, putting up in NFL locker rooms concussion advisory posters described by players as "shocking." The posters encourage players to report head trauma, and they ask for players to tell team officials if teammates are suffering the effects and not telling anyone. The posters detail that "dementia, depression, and memory problems can occur if concussions aren't treated properly." They make clear that these injuries "can change your life and your family's life forever."

How to account for this turn?

I spoke with former NFL All-Pro nose tackle Dave Pear, who has become a relentless critic of the NFL's and the NFL Players Association's handling of the issue.

"This is about Roger Goodell, that fraud, covering his own ass," said Pear. "The league had opened itself up to billions in liability claims. By claiming that the sport doesn't cause concussions, or that concussions don't lead to dementia and the rest of it, they had opened themselves up to legal Armageddon."

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