Game-changer? Not while NFL plays prevent defense

So.

An NFL-commissioned study has discovered what other studies already have — Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia have been found in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population.

“This is a game-changer — the whole debate, the ball’s now in the NFL’s court,” Dr. Julian Bailes, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, told The New York Times. “They always say, ‘We’re going to do our own studies.’ And now they have.”

Yes, the ball’s in the NFL’s court. That doesn’t mean the league is going to do anything with it soon.

The NFL’s Greg Aiello told The Times that the study did not formally diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that “there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems.”

“Memory disorders affect many people who never played football or other sports,” Aiello said. “We are trying to understand it as it relates to our retired players.”

In other words, the league will continue to obfuscate in order to delay doing anything substantive — such as ponying up funds for dementia victims’ care — for as long as it possibly can.