Two weeks ago, Jeff Miller, the NFL’s Senior Vice President of Health and Safety Policy, became the first person affiliated with the league to admit that a link between football and neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has been established. “The answer to that question is certainly yes,” said Miller, who was attending a roundtable discussion on concussions in Washington. The news was noteworthy, obviously, and seemed to suggest that the NFL had finally come to grips with reality.

Alas …

Last week, two of the NFL’s highest profile owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Bob McNair of the Houston Texans, publicly questioned whether there is a link between football and diseases like CTE. Jones stated, “There’s no research. There’s no data [linking football and CTE].”

Pressed further on this stance, he doubled down:

“No, that’s absurd,” said Jones. “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.”

Not to be outdone, McNair followed suit by claiming, “We don’t know; does CTE exist among people who’ve never had any contact? We don’t know because when you’re alive they can’t check for it. The only players, the brains that have been checked, were ones who clearly were having problems. So it wasn’t a scientific sample that they were dealing with.”

Which begs the question: Where, exactly, have Jones and McNair been all these years?

There are, of course, multiple studies available for them to read. You know, like that postmortem study performed by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University that found evidence of CTE in the brains of 95 percent of the deceased former NFL players examined. If reading words is too daunting a task for Jones and McNair, perhaps they might watch PBS’s “League of Denial” instead.

And by the way, kudos to Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, who points out that McNair’s dubious claims — how we can’t verify CTE’s existence among people who’ve never participated in contact sports — are directly refuted by a Mayo Clinic study published last December. That study didn’t find a single case of CTE in 198 controls (males and females who reported never having participated in contact sports), but DID document 21 cases of CTE among 66 contact sport athletes.

To be fair, Jones and McNair are two of the most influential owners in the NFL, and perhaps the other owners — who were reportedly shocked and blindsided by Miller’s public statements on the issue — pushed the Texan duo to take one for the team by acting as mouthpieces.

Not that it matters, especially when the denial of a link between football and CTE by any league figurehead(s) — despite credible mounting evidence (scientific and otherwise) — is so strangely reminiscent of the now-infamous day in 1994 when the CEOs of Big Tobacco denied to Congress that nicotine in cigarettes was addictive, even in the face of significant medical evidence to the contrary:

After continued pressure and investigation, and after the intervention of a skilled and zealous group of plaintiffs’ attorneys, Big Tobacco’s facade eventually collapsed.

And while we haven’t yet reached the point of a Congressional inquiry when it comes to football and concussions, the prospect of the NFL being called before lawmakers is not that remote. Just last Wednesday, Congress sent a letter to the NFL asking some very pointed questions about why the league reversed its decision to provide a $30M grant to fund a study on football and brain disease.

On March 24, The New York Times published an article alleging, in part, connections between the league and the tobacco industry:

On March 28, outside counsel representing the NFL responded to the Times story by sending a letter demanding the newspaper issue a retraction:

The Times’ intent was obvious: It sought to publicly associate the NFL with the tobacco industry and all that implies, in a “front-page” story, no less — without a scintilla of evidence to support such a link. And there is no doubt that the Times achieved its purpose and defamed and substantially damaged the NFL and its reputation. Just read any of the hundreds of comments the story has generated, almost all of them expressing disgust at the NFL for “the ties between the health-destroying greedy tobacco industry and football,” as one reader put it. The damage to the League caused by the Times story is manifest and continuing.

Two days later, the Times’ General Counsel did some doubling down of his own, responding with his own letter, not only refusing to retract anything in the March 24 story, but also reaffirming everything in the Times report.

Oh, that letter also included an interesting little nugget: The law firm demanding the retraction on behalf of the NFL, Paul Weiss, is the same firm that represented Phillip Morris in the Department of Justice’s RICO case against that tobacco company. Let’s see if I have this straight: The NFL does not want to be associated or compared to Big Tobacco and they claim there is no such evidence of a connection, yet they use a Big Tobacco law firm to demand the New York Times retract a story comparing them to Big Tobacco? Can the league not see the perception created by this type of action?

The NFL using the same law firm that represented a Big Tobacco company is, shall we say, ironic — even though the league’s retraction demand makes very clear that it does not like being compared to Big Tobacco.

It may very well be true, as the league asserts, that comparing the NFL to Big Tobacco is like comparing apples to oranges, but only if you believe that the league never engaged in a conscious or intentional effort to cover-up the warning signs surrounding its players and concussions. After all, sending letters to the media demanding retractions and apologies was the exact same tactic initially deployed by the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

As for the players, their representatives weighed in, too, when the Director of the NFLPA deemed the league’s internal equivocation “unacceptable.” Keep in mind, the class action settlement between the NFL and ex-players only covers one group of claimants. Players who are not a member of the “class” can file suit anytime they like, in any state. It would stand to reason that many former players are just waiting in the wings, watching what the NFL does and how it responds to the mounting evidence of causation between head trauma in football and brain damage later in life.

That is precisely why statements like the ones made by Jerry Jones and Bob McNair are sure to be used by plaintiffs’ lawyers when trying to convince impressionable juries to award significant punitive damages. In the end, the best way to get to the truth — and force the NFL to act — may be to look to the strategy that eventually took down Big Tobacco: Make it a government health issue. It is undeniable that the players will continue to need medical treatment and somebody’s going to have to pay for it. If the players can’t afford it, the government will be left to pick up the bill, and governments generally don’t like having to do that.

Consider the actions of former Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore, who finally got to Big Tobacco by framing the issue as a cost of medical treatment concern. In 1994, he filed the first lawsuit against thirteen tobacco companies, claiming that they should reimburse the State of Mississippi for costs incurred by treating those with smoking-related illnesses.

Attorneys General from several other states joined the suit, with Moore as the lead negotiator. After tobacco insider Jeffrey Wigand outed Big Tobacco in his Pascagoula deposition, the settlement was worth $246 billion to the states, including $4.1 billion for Mississippi. The costs associated with and resulting from tobacco-related illnesses were/are clearly much higher than for the finite group of former NFL players who have or will be diagnosed with CTE and other forms of neurological disease from playing football, but the legal strategy can be the same. And it can be just as effective.

Not that it all has to be bad news for the National Football League. Sure, Big Tobacco was forced to publicly admit the connection between cigarettes and diseases like lung cancer — and that cost them billions — but it didn’t bankrupt them.

Cigarettes are still for sale, people still smoke, and Big Tobacco is still in business; BIG business. Professional football is like tobacco. People still want it, and their addiction isn’t going away anytime soon. Let’s see if the league can recognize the obvious, pay the legitimate debt that’s owed to its players, and, for once, do the right thing.