A New Low for the NFL: Citing ‘Ceremony Redundancies,’ Junior Seau’s Family Barred From Speaking at HOF Induction

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Given the events of the past year, at this point it’s fair to assume that if there’s something to be bungled, the NFL and its commissioner Roger Goodell will move hell and high water in an effort to bungle it—even if they have to make something to bungle out of nothing, that’s exactly what they’ll do.

Such is the case with the upcoming enshrinement of Junior Seau into the Hall of Fame. The legendary linebacker committed suicide in 2012 and it was later revealed that his brain showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), trauma surely suffered during his 20-year career in the league.

CTE contributed to the bouts of depression Seau battled, before ultimately taking his own life with a shotgun blast to the chest. His final years were plagued by violent mood swings, substantial memory lapses and suicidal tendencies—in 2010 Seau drove his SUV off a cliff along a California highway, miraculously surviving the 100-foot fall.

Seau’s suicide put a very famous face on a problem the NFL had been denying for decades. Compounding matters currently is the family’s decision to opt out of the class-action settlement brought by 5,000 former players. The potential $4 million payout to Seau’s widow, Gena, was rejected because it offered nothing additional for his children.

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Despite the ongoing legal proceedings, the family was looking forward to putting differences aside for one day in August to honor Seau’s outstanding playing career during the ceremony in Canton. In keeping with past practice, which allowed presenters to speak on behalf of the deceased, Seau’s daughter, Sydney, planned to give a speech at the event.

That was until the family learned nobody would be allowed to speak on Seau’s behalf, due a sudden and arbitrary change in format. “It’s frustrating because the induction is for my father and for the other players, but then to not be able to speak, it’s painful,” Sydney said. “I just want to give the speech he would have given. It wasn’t going to be about this mess. My speech was solely about him.”

Rather than admit the ugly truth, which is that the NFL and the supposedly autonomous nonprofit NFL Hall of Fame coordinated efforts to once again silence the voice of its players, they settled on a transparent and hollow cover story that raises far more questions than it answers.

Like, for example, isn’t it mighty convenient that the HOF decided this was the year to ban all testimonials for posthumous enshrinements? While they’ve made a concerted effort in recent years to reduce content overlap from speeches to tribute videos for each inductee, an outright ban on speakers is a drastic new policy.

One that, according to HOF spokesman Joe Horrigan, isn’t personal. “There was an acceptance speech for deceased players but it got redundant,” Horrigan said. “The honor is supposed to be for the individual.”

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Executive director David Baker added, “We’re not the NFL, but the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Our mission is to honor the heroes of the game and Junior is a hero of the game. We’re going to celebrate his life, not the death and other issues.”

It’s not personal, it’s just that the HOF wants to celebrate Seau the player, and they don’t want the attention-seeking antics of his painfully redundant family to ruin that by making the entire ceremony all about his death and other issues, even though they said they wouldn’t. And even if that sounds a little personal, well then suck it—nobody cares!

Certainly not the suddenly magnanimous NFL, which is completely insulated in this matter by the HOF’s laughable assertion of autonomy and authority. All by design, of course.

It’s hard to believe, but the exclusion of the Seau family from the HOF ceremony represents yet another new low for the league. Blindly assuming Junior Seau’s daughter would use the moment as a platform, or do anything beyond appropriately honor her father, proves just how cold and cynical the NFL has become.

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Keep in mind, we’re talking about a multi-billion corporation that is about to start paying taxes for the first time in more than 70 years—having recently waived their tax-exempt status for impressively self-serving reasons. One that split $6 billion in pure profit last season, but thus far has committed to spending just $40 million on concussion-related research. That after decades of actively covering up the threat.

Sure, what they’re doing to the Seau family is an absolute disgrace, but isn’t that just standard operating procedure in the NFL these days? Concocting an elaborate scheme in order to sidestep a few (potentially non-existent) PR land mines, while creating even more in the process, is just par for the course.