The NCAA Has Known About the Dangers of Head Injuries Since 1933. Former Players Are Now Holding It Accountable.

This page documents what the NCAA knew, when it knew it, and why that history is central to every brain injury lawsuit we bring on behalf of former college football players and their families.

A Paper Trail That Stretches Back Ninety Years

The NCAA's own records tell the story. In 1933, the organization published a medical handbook that acknowledged the dangers of head trauma in football. By 1958, the NCAA Sports Injury Committee was formally studying the relationship between repeated blows to the head and lasting neurological harm. These were not outside researchers raising alarms — this was the governing body of college athletics documenting the problem in its own institutional literature.

That history matters in a courtroom. When we argue that the NCAA had a duty to protect the athletes under its authority, we are not asking a jury to accept a theory. We are asking them to read the NCAA's own words.

What the NCAA's Internal Documents Actually Show

Across more than a decade of litigation, we have assembled a proprietary database of deposition testimony from NCAA executives and internal documents produced in discovery. The pattern they reveal is consistent: the NCAA understood the risk of repetitive head impacts long before it took any meaningful action to address that risk.

Key documented facts include:

• The NCAA's 1933 medical handbook addressed head trauma in football — more than 80 years before the organization claimed to be learning about CTE for the first time.
• The NCAA Sports Injury Committee began formally studying head injuries in 1958.
• For decades, the NCAA issued voluntary guidelines rather than enforceable rules, leaving individual schools and coaches to decide how to handle concussed players.
• NCAA Chief Medical Officer Brian Hainline acknowledged in sworn testimony the organization's longstanding awareness of the concussion problem.
• Internal communications produced in discovery show ongoing debate within the NCAA about how to respond to mounting evidence — and repeated decisions to defer action.

This is not a case built on inference. It is built on the NCAA's own record.

The Legal Standard: What "Duty to Protect" Means for Former Players

In negligence law, a duty to protect arises when one party has assumed authority over another and that authority creates a foreseeable risk of harm. The NCAA's relationship with college athletes fits that standard precisely. The organization controls eligibility, sets the rules of play, governs medical protocols, and profits from the labor of student-athletes. With that control comes a corresponding obligation.

Courts across multiple jurisdictions have recognized this duty in the context of NCAA concussion litigation. The Ohio Supreme Court's decision in Schmitz v. NCAA, decided October 31, 2018, was a watershed moment — holding that a former player's awareness of in-career head injuries was not sufficient to start the statute of limitations clock for latent CTE. That ruling, which our firm obtained, established that the NCAA cannot escape liability simply because a player knew he had been hit.

How the Geathers Verdict Proved the Duty in Court

On October 23, 2025, a jury in Orangeburg County, South Carolina returned a verdict of $18 million against the NCAA in Geathers v. NCAA — the first jury verdict in American history against the NCAA for latent CTE and brain disease in a former college football player. The jury deliberated for less than two hours.

Robert Geathers played college football at the University of Georgia. Years after his playing career ended, he began experiencing the neurological symptoms that define CTE: memory loss, mood changes, cognitive decline. His wife, Debra, watched it happen. The jury awarded $10 million to Robert and $8 million to Debra for what the NCAA's negligence had cost their family.

That verdict is not just a number. It is a jury's formal finding that the NCAA breached its duty to protect the athletes in its care — and that the breach caused real, lasting harm to a real family.

The Gap Between What the NCAA Knew and What It Told Players

The NCAA's negligence was not simply a failure to act on new information. It was a sustained failure to translate institutional knowledge into enforceable protections for the players generating billions of dollars in revenue for the organization and its member schools.

Players were not told that the hits they absorbed in practice — not just the ones that dropped them to the turf — were accumulating into a disease process that could surface decades later. They were not told that sub-concussive impacts, the routine contact of every practice and every game, carried their own long-term risk. They were cleared to return to play under protocols that prioritized the schedule over their health. The gap between what the NCAA knew and what it disclosed to players is the foundation of the negligence claim in every case we bring.

What This Means If You Are a Former Player or Family Member

If you played college football and are now experiencing memory problems, mood changes, difficulty concentrating, or other neurological symptoms — or if a family member who played college football has been diagnosed with CTE, dementia, ALS, Parkinson's, or Alzheimer's — the NCAA's documented history of knowledge and inaction is directly relevant to your situation.

You do not need a posthumous CTE diagnosis to have a viable claim. You do not need to have played at a major program. What matters is the combination of your college football history, your current neurological condition, and the timeline of when symptoms emerged relative to your playing career. The discovery rule — established in part through our work in Schmitz — means that the limitations clock may not have started running when you think it did.

We evaluate every inquiry carefully. We accept roughly one in ten cases we review, because we only take cases we believe we can win and are prepared to take to trial.

Questions Families Ask About NCAA Negligence and the Duty to Protect