Dozens of Black retired N.F.L. players will now be eligible for payouts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the league’s billion-dollar concussion settlement, reversing previous decisions made because of cognitive tests that used race-based measures to determine whether the players had dementia.
The decision, included in a status report filed by the settlement administrator that was entered into the court docket Thursday, came two years after two former players sued the league to end the use of race as a criteria in evaluating the players’ claims, a process known as “race-norming.”
The settlement administrator found that 646 players who had been tested for dementia but did not qualify for cash payouts could have their tests automatically rescored without using race as a criteria.