Mark Sutterly’s job title did not exist on Wednesday morning. By Thursday it had an office, a budget line, and a spreadsheet with 1,696 names on it.
Sutterly, 44, spent two decades in football operations — he ran equipment logistics, then the practice-squad roster, then, during the 2020 bubble season, the hotel room assignments, which his colleagues describe as the only posting that ever broke him. On Thursday, the NFL promoted him to Vice President for Longitudinal Optimism, a position created, per the league’s one-paragraph announcement, “to support the wellness of current players through long-term study.”
The timing invites itself. On Wednesday, researchers led by Boston University published a study in JAMA Network Open estimating that nearly 75% of all former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It is the highest estimate to date, and it was built partly by extrapolating from the brains that families donated to science, because there was no other way to finish the arithmetic.
The league’s response was not to study that finding. The league’s response was to study men who are not in the finding — that is, living men. Sutterly’s commission will follow every current player for the duration of his eligibility, testing cognition, mood, and memory, and publishing the results “as they emerge,” in the league’s phrase, which inside the building is understood to mean “if they emerge.”
Sutterly took the assignment seriously. He has a whiteboard. The whiteboard has two columns. The column on the left says CURRENT. The column on the right says LATER, and it is the larger column, and he has explained to visitors that this is simply good planning.
He has also read the study, or the press release for the study, which is the version of these documents that circulates in the building. His takeaway, delivered without irony, was that the data is “heavily historical.” He noted that the study period ended in 2023, that helmets have been redesigned since then by companies that charge the league for the redesigns, and that a modern player, studied while modern, “is a different dataset.”
Whether players will volunteer is the commission’s first practical problem. A player approaching his final season, or a player whose knees have already filed their own separate lawsuits, may not wish to be a data point in a study whose control group is, by construction, unavailable for comment. The league has addressed this by making participation enthusiastic and optional at the same time, a tone the memorandum achieves in its first sentence, “Every player is encouraged,” and its fifth, “Participation is voluntary.”
The commission’s charter runs 40 pages. Page one defines “player.” Page forty defines “still.” Sutterly keeps the charter in his desk and describes it, in his own way, as the most optimistic document in professional sports.
On Thursday afternoon he stood at the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker, at the top of the left column, and wrote the first name on the roster. The name is fine. For now, the name is fine.