One of the advantages of writing a blog on a particular subject for as long as I have – going on 17 years now – is that you become your own sort of institutional memory, in a way. When I saw this article in Forbes today, discussing barriers that the NFL’s disability system throws up in front of injured players, I immediately remembered writing about this same issue back in 2007, as you can see from this post.

I try to be an evidence-based skeptic and I admit that I cannot tell from the anecdotes used in the Forbes article whether the system is still as broken as it was when Mike Webster, the former Steelers’ great, struggled to obtain benefits decades ago. If it is though, or even if the improvements to the system since then have only been marginal, then it is well past time for a systemic fix.