It has been more than a year since Black former players seeking payments from the landmark NFL concussion settlement first drew attention to the use of race-norming, a controversial practice in neuropsychology in which Black patients’ cognitive test scores are curved differently than White patients’ scores.
The NFL publicly pledged in June to remove race-norming from the settlement. But the league and its lawyers have continued to defend the practice in public statements and court filings. Race-norming did not make it harder for Black players to qualify for payouts, the NFL has asserted.
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But a Washington Post review of hundreds of pages of confidential medical and legal records, provided by the families of these three former players, underscores how race-norming put Black players seeking settlement payouts at a disadvantage and illustrates how the practice easily could have affected the potential dementia claims of hundreds of former players, saving the NFL millions of dollars.
For [former Pittsburgh Steeler Carlton] Haselrig, who died suddenly last year at 54, The Post found that race-norming prevented him from qualifying for NFL-funded medical care and potentially a seven-figure payment in the final years of his life.
