NFL: Injuries Come With The Job

ByABC News
July 30, 2002, 2:39 PM

Sept. 20 -- On any given Sunday this season, dozens of National Football League players will get injured.

Some will shrug off their pain. Others will need extensive treatment or a visit to the operating table. And then there are a few professional football players, inevitably, who will suffer career-ending injuries.

Add up the toll over a 16-week season, and, in the words of John Yarno, a former lineman for the Seattle Seahawks, "Every single player every year is hurt."

There is little doubt that pro football creates major health problems for its players. What's less clear, however, is who should assume responsibility for those problems: the players themselves, or the teams who employ them?

Workers' Comp Can Be Limited

Tension between players and teams over medical care has long been a fact of life in the NFL and one that is increasingly becoming a matter of for lawmakers and courts.

The odds are, the NFL's workplace health issues are downright murky compared to the office where you may be reading this. And increasingly, they are only being resolved by lawyers.

Take a recent Pennsylvania court case, in which former Pittsburgh Steelers tight end and special-teamer Mitch Lyons has been suing to receive greater workers' compensation benefits.

Lyons played for the Atlanta Falcons and Steelers from 1993 until 1999, when he blew out his knee on a kickoff return, ending his career. He had been making $400,000 a year for the Steelers, but is now receiving $117 a week in workers' comp, because of a 1993 Pennsylvania law specifically limiting benefits received by athletes in the four major U.S. team sports football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey.

Lyons challenged the law but lost a July decision in which Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court stated that football players, essentially, make a tacit deal to accept the possibility of injury, saying they "willfully hold themselves out to risk of frequent, repetitive and serious injury in exchange for lucrative compensation."