Former NFL playmaker renews quest to be paid by concussion settlement program

For months, Donald Frank waited anxiously to learn the fate of a $955,115 bet.

That’s how much money the 59-year-old former San Diego Chargers cornerback potentially stood to receive from the NFL’s $1.5 billion concussion settlement program, according to its payment tiers for retired players who have developed neurocognitive illnesses.

Beginning in 2018, Frank submitted claims four times to the settlement program; neurologists had diagnosed him with significant memory and executive functioning impairments, among other struggles.

Each of his claims, though, had resulted in rejections.

But in November, Frank’s then-attorney filed an appeal, arguing that the settlement program’s Appeals Advisory Panel had wrongly denied Frank a payment because of a lack of recent neuropsychological tests.

There was a chance he still might get paid.

On Feb. 11 — two days after the NFL staged Super Bowl LIX, the most-watched title game in the league’s history — Frank received an email in his Wake Forest, N.C., home: A court-appointed special master who oversees the administration of the settlement program had denied his appeal.

“It left me feeling like there was no hope,” Frank said.

Then he decided to restart his quest; even the special master who denied his appeal implored him to press on.

In May, Frank will travel to Alpharetta, Ga., to meet with new doctors who are part of the settlement program’s network, and redo a six-hour neuropsychological evaluation that he first completed in 2014.

The evaluation measures a broad range of cognitive abilities, from attention span and language comprehension to visual-spatial perception skills, memory, and problem-solving abilities, explained Nancy Minniti, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.

“These tests yield a detailed profile of brain function, and patterns are analyzed to distinguish intact cognition or normal aging from neurologic disease or injuries leading to cognitive impairment,” said Minniti, who is not treating Frank or involved with his case.

Results of this evaluation help to determine how much money a former NFL player might be awarded if he is suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).

As ex-players grow older, potential payouts get smaller.

“I can’t say that I’m looking forward to the testing,” Frank said. “But it is what it is. I have to do it.”

Frank’s case is something of an outlier among his peers. More than 4,200 claims have been submitted to the settlement program. BrownGreer PLC, a third-party company that administers the program, previously told The Inquirer that only three ex-players have had their claims denied four times.

Yet many former players who suffered traumatic brain injuries during their careers and developed neurological illnesses later in life — from the late Tennessee Titans tight end Frank Wycheck to members of the Philadelphia Eagles’ first Super Bowl team — have complained that they found it difficult to obtain compensation from the settlement program.

When Frank’s appeal was denied, he fell into a tailspin, said his girlfriend, Deirdre Brown.

“It wasn’t a good time. He said, ‘I’m not going through this anymore,’” Brown recalled. “I tried to encourage him: You can’t give up now.”

David A. Hoffman, the special master, expressed empathy for Frank’s ordeal in his February ruling.

“I can only imagine the frustration of Mr. Frank’s family … particularly when they know (and the records demonstrate) that he suffers from cognitive loss as well as quality-of-life sapping behavioral and emotional problems,” he wrote, according to a copy of the ruling obtained by The Inquirer.

Hoffman faulted one of Frank’s prior doctors for relying on a patchwork of older and sometimes contradictory medical records to support his settlement claim.

“I urge Mr. Frank’s family to try again,” Hoffman wrote.

Frank is accustomed to overcoming long odds.

As a strong safety at a Division II college, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem State University, Frank attracted little attention from scouts. He had a bodybuilder’s physique, though, and could run the 40-yard dash in 4.4 seconds.

Those attributes convinced the Chargers to take a flier on Frank in 1990 and sign him as an undrafted free agent. He made the team and quickly impressed coaches with his flair for game-changing interceptions, prompting the Los Angeles Times to liken his rise — from relative obscurity to an NFL roster — to a fairy tale.

By 1993, Frank earned a role as a starting cornerback. That season, during a Halloween game against the Los Angeles Raiders, Frank intercepted a pass from Raiders quarterback Jeff Hostetler and returned it 102 yards for a touchdown.

Frank also sustained numerous brain-rattling collisions that left him seeing stars or feeling disoriented — telltale signs of a concussion. By the time his playing career reached an end, following the 1995 season, he noticed that he was struggling to recall defensive play calls.

“When I think back to those early days, when I first entered the NFL, I think about how underpaid I was, not knowing that someday, those [collisions] were going to have an effect on my way of living,” he said.

“I was happy because I came from nowhere, and was the talk of the whole NFL. I knew I made it.”

Retirement proved to be the inverse of Frank’s NFL experience, a rocky and unexpected decline into misery.

His memory problems began to grow more profound in 2008, according to medical records viewed by The Inquirer, and he also grappled with depression and unpredictable mood swings.

Eventually, he stopped driving, and had to rely on Brown to help care for him on a daily basis. Frank often speaks haltingly, as he struggles to find the right words to express his thoughts.

Many former professional athletes have suffered their own versions of Frank’s painful saga, as their once-formidable bodies and minds crumble from the fallout of countless concussions and non-concussive impacts that they endured during their playing careers.

In 2011, dozens of ex-players sued the NFL in California and Pennsylvania, accusing the league of downplaying the risks of repeated brain injuries. The number of plaintiffs climbed into the thousands, and the cases were consolidated in Philadelphia federal court.

Three years later, the NFL settled the case. The league admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to fund, for 65 years, a program that would pay retired players who developed neurological illnesses.

The settlement program has three tiers of cognitive impairment: level 1.0 for moderate decline; level 1.5 for early dementia; level 2.0 for severe cognitive decline. Independent neurologists have criticized this classification system as being outside the norm of traditional neurological care.

In 2016, the chair of Duke University’s Department of Neurology evaluated Frank and determined that he had a “major neurocognitive disorder,” according to the medical records.

That same year, the NFL awarded Frank a benefit through the league’s 88 Plan, which provides financial reimbursements for medical care for players who have dementia, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s. (The league spends more than $20 million a year on such reimbursements.)

In a 2024 email to The Inquirer, Brad S. Karp, the NFL’s lead outside attorney, wrote that a “diagnosis from the 88 Plan is not sufficient on its own” to determine whether a former player will receive a payment from the concussion settlement program.

In his ruling, Hoffman, the special master, noted a recurring theme that ran through some of Frank’s rejected settlement claims: Some doctors had diagnosed him with illnesses that were not supported by contemporaneous tests.

The appeals panel rejected two of Frank’s claims for Alzheimer’s, writing that while some of his symptoms met a clinical definition of Alzheimer’s — like cognitive deficits that interfere with independent activities — it was not clear that his decline had steadily worsened. A brain scan for amyloid beta plaque, a sign of Alzheimer’s, was negative.

For his fourth claim, a neurologist diagnosed Frank with a level 2.0 impairment.

That neurologist objected to having Frank complete an updated neuropsychological evaluation because of the stress that the test would cause him.

“The tests are long,” Frank said. “You’re asked things you don’t have an answer for. A lot of [the testing] has to do with memory. And these days, my memory is just not there.”

Minniti, who also serves as the director of neuropsychology at Temple University Hospital, said that some patients who participate in a neuropsychological evaluation might “feel anxious about their performance and the implications of the results, or confronting their cognitive difficulties directly.”

The fact that the appeals panel has sometimes faulted his neurologists’ diagnoses is maddening to Frank. Former players, after all, are required to be evaluated by doctors who belong to a network that BrownGreer established for the settlement program’s monetary award fund.

In November, BrownGreer said that the number of doctors in that network had dropped from 149, in 2018, to 58.

Though his settlement claims have repeatedly fallen short of the goal line, Frank said he will likely submit another claim — his fifth — later this year, once he has the results of his latest neuropsychological test.

To ease the strain on Frank, the clinicians who will administer that evaluation agreed to divide it into separate three-hour sessions over two days.

“I hope [the settlement program] will agree with the doctors,” he said. “The injury is there. I know that.”