Court Deals Major Blow to Retired Players in Disability Suit Against NFL

A federal judge yesterday denied a class certification in a lawsuit brought in 2023 by 10 retired NFL players against the league’s disability plans.

The ruling is a major blow to the plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit after years of stories of the NFL’s disability plans turning down severely disabled players for awards or granting reduced compensation, and financial conflicts of interest among program doctors.

But federal judge Rebecca Rubin did not rule on plaintiffs claims of the NFL’s disability plans’s “repeated lies; material misrepresentations; active concealment; flagrant violations of… statute, regulations, and case law; ever-shifting inconsistent and illogical interpretations of the terms of the plans; and reliance on conflicted advisors,” as charged in the original complaint.

Instead, Rubin ruled the players did not meet the standard for creating a class under legal requirements because they could not establish that all proposed class members going back five decades had similar, or common, experiences. This is known in legal parlance as commonality.

“As Defendants note, this is not a case where Plaintiffs point to a uniformly-applied or well defined common practice that affected (or affects) each member of the proposed class; instead, Plaintiffs claims rest on the theory that Defendants employ a ‘panoply of practices and policies’ that arise based on the specific circumstances of a claim,” Rubin wrote.

“Relying on a series of policies applied in different ways to different Plaintiffs (and putative class members) fails to satisfy the commonality prerequisite…Plaintiffs have not persuaded the court that their claims arising from this overarching policy are typical of the claims of class members from decades ago, asserting their own unique medical conditions and applications, under different plans terms,” the ruling reads.

Named plaintiffs in the case are Eric Smith, Daniel Loper, Jason Alford, Alex Parsons, Willis McGahee, Joey Thomas, Charles Sims, Michael McKenzie, Lance Zeno, and Jamize Olawale.

The principal defendants are the NFL Player Disability & Survivor Benefit plans and NFL Player Disability & Neurocognitive Benefit plans (formerly, the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement plans).

The lawsuit originally named trustees of the disability plans, which included commissioner Roger Goodell, as defendants. Rubin, in her partial order of dismissal in 2024, dismissed the charges against the trustees. She left four of the five charges intact against the disability plans.

In denying class certification, Rubin leaves the plaintiffs with few options. They can start an appeals process, or bring cases individually. The lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, Chris Seeger, did not reply for comment.

Seeger was also the lead attorney on the concussion settlement that was first announced in 2013, which resolved hundreds of cases brought under a class action. Notably, that case settled before the motion to dismiss stage. Because of the early stage settlement, the federal judge overseeing the case never had to rule on whether the players from different eras could establish commonality for purposes of a class.

NFL players struggling to win disability from the league’s plans is a storyline dating back to at least the Mike Webster case. The Hall of Famer, who later in his life suffered from dementia and lived in his car, was turned down by the disability board. He died in 2002, though a federal judge in 2005 ruled the disability plan had erroneously denied coverage and awarded a seven figure sum to his estate.

Shortly before the current plaintiffs filed suit, a federal judge in a different NFL disability case brought by Michael Cloud wrote, “Behind the curtain is the troubling but apparent reality that these abuses by the Board are part of a larger strategy engineered to ensure that former NFL players suffering from the devastating effects of severe head trauma are not awarded Active Football benefits.”

That judge’s ruling in favor of Cloud was later overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.