THE ENEMY WITHOUT

                In my early years in Arizona, when I was a lot sprier than I am now, I ran a couple of hiking programs, one part of which took Scottsdale public-school 4^th graders, aged nine or 10, into the local environs. We’d cover, maybe, three miles, stopping often to talk about the flora we saw and the fauna we didn’t see, desert animals being notoriously people-shy.

                The hikes were popular with the kids, teachers, parents and our volunteer leaders, who enjoyed the youngsters’ curiosity about subjects with which most were unaware. That was strange, I thought, because the desert was, literally, the back yard of many of them, but it seems that parents these days keep the kind of tight rein on their children that discourages individual exploration. Too bad, huh?

                Alas, however, the program was canceled one fall because the insurance policy that covered the school-bus transportation of the kids between their schools and the trailheads no longer covered such extracurricular trips and the schools didn’t wish to pay extra to provide them. Insurance problems ruled the playgrounds and had curtailed other school activities, we were told with a shrug.

                Insurance came up again several weeks ago in a story on the excellent ESPN web site by the brothers’ reporting team of Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, and the focus was a lot larger than a few kids’ hikes. It was the entire sport of football and most particularly the National Football League.  Liability for the head injuries that have enveloped the American sport have sent insurers running for the hills, and without insurance the games can’t go on.  That’s not an immediate threat to the professional league but it already has happened here and there, and looks to get worse before it gets better.

                Reporting by the Fainarus revealed that the NFL no longer has general-liability insurance covering head traumas, and just one carrier is willing to sell it the workers’-compensation coverage the laws mandate; before the concussions’ uproar began in earnest in 2011 at least a dozen carriers vied for the league’s business, their story said. To continue to get coverage last season the NFL had to double its per-claim deductible for head injuries to $1 million and “significantly” increase the amount of damages it would self-cover before its insurer’s share kicked in. The NFL and its present and former insurers currently are embroiled in lawsuits over who will pay what in the $1 billion-plus settlement the league reached in 2013 with dozens of former players who claimed they were misled about concussions’ long-term dangers.

 The story went on that the insurance market for the junior, high school and college leagues that provide the sport’s underpinning is similarly pinched, as was the liability coverage for football-helmet makers, which also is down to a single carrier.  Last spring the Maricopa County Community College system in Arizona, which covers the area in which I live, eliminated football at its four schools after it determined that the insurance bill for its 358 varsity football players accounted for nearly one-third of all the insurance costs for its 200,000 students.

The Pop Warner organization, a non-profit that oversees leagues involving 225,000 youth players, could face a similar outcome. “People say football will never go away, but if we can’t get insurance it will,” Jon Butler, Pop Warner’s executive director, is quoted as saying.

What scares insurers most about head injuries is that the entire subject is pretty much terra incognito. The Fairanus pointed out that there are roughly 300,000 football-related concessions annually, but research into the effects of CTE, the Alzheimer’s-like brain condition most associated with them, is just getting started.  CTE can’t be diagnosed until after death and its triggers, and the factors that determine which players will or won’t develop it, remain a mystery. Further, research could enlarge the area of risk, linking football to other forms of dementia.

Worse, CTE’s symptoms might not become evident for years or even decades after an injury is sustained, making it the sort of open-ended, “long-tail claim” insurers fear most. Last June, the first of many head-injury-related lawsuits against the NCAA went to court. It resulted in a settlement with the widow of a former University of Texas linebacker and defensive tackle who was diagnosed with CTE after his death in 2015, 44 years after he last played.

“Thirty years from now you could be on the hook, and that’s a very difficult situation for an insurance company to be in,” the piece quotes James Lynch, chief actuary for the Insurance Information Institute of New York, as saying. “This is why the industry is concerned about it. You want to be able to box up that risk.”

As dire a situation as the story describes, there’s little doubt in my mind that it alone won’t bring down the NFL or the NCAA. The central fact about big-time football in the U.S.—both the pro and college varieties-- is that people like it despite (or perhaps because of) its gladiatorial aspects. By itself the NFL is a $15 billion-a-year business with immense market and political power. It can deep-pocket its way out of any number of problems and, now that the dangers of concussions are widely known, probably could get Congress to pass laws absolving it of blame for injuries to the players it enlists, volunteers all.

Chances are, though, that gnawings from without, both financial and moral, can undermine it to the point where it no longer commands the influence it has today.  Football will outlive me but, maybe, not my grandkids.