ESPN thoroughly covers concerning NFL-CTE study

Just one day after ESPN largely dropped the ball in covering breaking news about San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York’s arrest during a prostitution sting in Ohio, the network is proving to viewers it can cover tough stories related to the NFL when it wants to.

On Tuesday, ESPN addressed the concerning new study published by the British Medical Journal that found at least one-in-four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, commonly known as CTE, at death. In the six-year period studied, 878 former NFL players died. Of those 878 players, at least 215 had CTE at the time of death, the British Medical Journal concluded, though the actual rate could be far higher; the Journal found 215 diagnoses in a sample of 235 brains.

This is about as negative a headline as the NFL could possibly face, especially as the degenerative effects of CTE become more widely known. When concussions and CTE became a top storyline for the NFL throughout the 2010s, participation in the sport declined at an accelerated rate. And if fewer young athletes pick up the sport of football, the NFL’s product is at direct risk.

That matters to ESPN, a network which not only benefits from the value of NFL programming, but is partly owned by the league itself.

But even given those circumstances, ESPN addressed the new study on its two most prominent morning shows, Get Up and First Take; its biggest NFL reporter, Adam Schefter, posted about the study on social media Tuesday morning, and ESPN’s website published an article about the study as well.

Here’s how ESPN’s morning shows covered the news:

Mike Greenberg addressed the concerning new report of CTE in NFL players during ‘Get Up’ on ESPN pic.twitter.com/yWaTzjDnHa

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) August 25, 2026

“There’s another story that we’ve just seen as of this morning,” Get Up host Mike Greenberg told his audience. “And it is a new … study in today’s British Medical Journal in which they discovered that nearly 25 percent of former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE. Researchers say 878 former players died during those six years. They examined the brains of 235 of those, and found that 215 of them had some level of CTE. CTE is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head. It can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death. Studies have shown the rate of CTE in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero.”

ESPN’s approach to covering the CTE story was noticeably different than Monday’s big headline about Jed York, which raises the question: why? Both stories, on their surface, are negative for the NFL. So there’s clearly some calculus going into ESPN’s editorial decisions that is more complex than avoiding bad headlines involving the league.

Perhaps it has to do with who is implicated. The York story shows one of the NFL’s 32 owners in an embarrassing and compromising light. Historically, the league has gone to great lengths to protect owners from negative press, and maybe ESPN makes a calculation when covering stories about ownership specifically. There’s also the lewd element of the York story. He was arrested for soliciting prostitution. Now, ESPN is far from the family-friendly brand it once was under the Disney umbrella, but there may be simply less desire to cover a story where York was arrested on prostitution charges than if he, say, was arrested for a DUI. (Though ESPN has covered tough stories involving athletes and sexual misconduct in the past, so the network has not historically shied away from these types of stories.)

The CTE story, on the other hand, is broader in focus. It doesn’t tarnish the reputation of an individual owner. It is more a pox on the sport of football itself, and the league for not doing more to protect athletes from repeated head-on collisions. From a league office perspective, that type of story might be preferable to the York story. No one is directly to blame. Football is an inherently violent sport, and this is an unfortunate and deadly externality.

That might make it an easier call for ESPN to cover the CTE story than the York story. Not to mention, ESPN has a long history of aggressively covering concussions and CTE in football dating back over a decade.

If nothing else, the past two days of ESPN’s television coverage have provided an interesting case study as to what types of stories it’s willing to cover about the NFL, and which stories it prefers to shy away from. Credit where it’s due, the network showed up for what will likely prove to be a major development in how people view CTE in relation to football and the NFL, even if that development creates a significant challenge for the league.