Racial Norming in the National Football League’s Concussion Settlement: A Nested Approach to Addressing an Ongoing Crisis

Abstract

For more than two decades, the National Football League (NFL) has been in the spotlight over the concussion crisis, resulting in a lawsuit by 5,000 NFL players and a subsequent 2013 settlement of more than $765 million. In 2020, a new crisis emerged out of the settlement, one of perceived inequities in criteria used to allocate settlement funds. The practice of racial norming, adjusting test scores for race, created another headache for the NFL during a time in which racial injustices in the U.S. spawned public and media discourse. Our case study explores this crisis through the Nested Theory of Conflict to illustrate how conflicts may arise from numerous sources and be intertwined, or nested within one another, and offers a nested model of crises lens from which this case and other crises can be explored.