Jerry Jones says it’s ‘absurd’ to link football and CTE without more research

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Tuesday he thinks NFL executive Jeff Miller spoke too soon last week when he said there is “certainly” a link between football-related brain trauma and a degenerative disease that can be diagnosed only after death.

“We want to continue to be safer and want to continue to support any type of research that would let us know what [the] consequences really are,” Jones said at the annual league meeting in Boca Raton, Fla. “In no way should we be basically making assumptions with no more data than we’ve got about the consequences of a head injury.”

While appearing before a congressional committee on March 14, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety was asked whether there is a link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, based on the research of neuropathologist Ann McKee.

“Well, certainly Dr. McKee’s research shows that a number of retired NFL players were diagnosed with CTE, so the answer to that question is certainly yes,” Miller said. “But there’s also a number of questions that come with that.”

Jones made it clear he supports all efforts to make the game safer, but he just doesn’t think there’s been enough research to definitively link the sport with the disease.

“We don’t have that knowledge and background and scientifically, so there’s no way in the world to say you have a relationship relative to anything here,” Jones said. “There’s no research. There’s no data.

“We’re not disagreeing. We’re just basically saying the same thing. We’re doing a lot more. It’s the kind of thing that you want to work … to prevent injury. A big part of this is prevention. But the other part of it is to basically understand that we don’t know or have any idea that there is a consequence as to any type of head injury in the future.”

He added: “So no, I didn’t think at all that [Miller’s] statements altered anything. … It didn’t alter anything about where we are.”

Asked one more time whether he thinks there’s been enough research to establish a link between football and CTE, Jones answered:

“No, that’s absurd. There’s no data that in any way creates a knowledge. There’s no way that you could have made a comment that there is an association and some type of assertion. In most things, you have to back it up by studies. And in this particular case, we all know how medicine is. Medicine is evolving.

“So we are very supportive of the research. … We have for years been involved in trying to make it safer, safer as it pertains to head injury. We have millions of people that have played this game, have millions of people that are at various ages right now that have no issues at all. None at all.

“So that’s where we are. That didn’t alter at all what we’re doing about it. We’re gonna do everything we can to understand it better and make it safer.”

Times staff writers Sam Farmer and Nathan Fenno contributed to this report.