Days before Covid-19 temporarily ground daily life to a halt, the family of John Davis sued the NCAA. Davis played on the line at SMU from 1955-59, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2001 and was posthumously diagnosed with Stage 4 CTE in 2017. The Davis family argued the NCAA knew of the risks of tackle football at the time and did not properly study the issue, nor did the organization properly inform Davis of the risk he was taking by participating in the sport. The family sought $1 million.
This past Monday, a Dallas jury awarded the Davis family $140 million.
Davis's attorneys uncovered literature from the 1930s which outlined the treatment for concussions, which they say were not followed when their client played more than 20 years later.
“In 1933, the NCAA’s medical handbook for schools and colleges recommended that players with concussions should receive rest and constant supervision and not be permitted to play or practice until symptom-free for 48 hours,” the suit says. “For symptoms lasting longer than 48 hours, it recommended players ‘not be permitted to compete for 21 days or longer, if at all.’ Additionally, it stated ‘there is definitely a condition described as ‘punch drunk’ and often recurrent concussion cases in football and boxing demonstrate this. Any individual who is knocked unconscious repeatedly on slight provocation should be forbidden to play body-contact sport.’”
Davis's son, John Mark Davis, testified that his mother had to quit her job to provide full-time care for his father before he died of a stroke. "Players like my dad should have been warned about the risks of playing college football, and the NCAA should have done more to study the issue," he said, via EIN Presswire.
The NCAA reportedly argued that there was insufficient evidence linking blows to the head to CTE, that CTE causes the symptoms commonly attributed to it, and at one point reportedly calling it a "hypothetical" disease.
SMU was not named in the suit, only the NCAA, but leaders (and their general counsels) across college athletics are no doubt discussing now the system's liability from the thousands of ex-players with stories to tell like Davis, and how decisions made by leadership from decade ago may or may not have created a liability for college football today.
The NCAA settled with the wife of a former Texas lineman in 2018, and so the Davis case is believed to be the first CTE lawsuit against the NCAA to go to trial. And with a jury returning a verdict of $30 million plus $110 million in punitive damages, this case will grab the attention of current university presidents and former college players (and their lawyers) alike.