Indiana appeals court hears case over NCAA’s duty to warn athletes about head trauma

The Indiana Court of Appeals heard arguments Tuesday in a wrongful death case that could shape how far the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s responsibility extends to former college athletes who later develop degenerative brain disease.

The estate of Christopher Riggs, a former Texas A&M football player who died in 2020 and was later diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, contends that the Indianapolis-based NCAA failed to warn athletes of known risks tied to repetitive head impacts.

Riggs played football for Texas A&M from 1965 to 1968.

The Marion Superior Court granted summary judgment for the NCAA in January, finding the association owed Riggs no “duty of care.” His family is now asking the appellate court to overturn that ruling.

The three-judge panel — Chief Judge Melissa May, Judge Leanna Weissmann and Judge Dana Kenworthy — heard nearly 45 minutes of oral arguments Tuesday morning at DePauw University.

Attorney Tyler Zipes, arguing on behalf of Riggs’ estate, told the court the NCAA was founded in 1906 “explicitly to address health and safety issues in college sports, and specifically to address brain injuries in college football.”

He said President Theodore Roosevelt helped lead to the NCAA’s creation when he called out college football’s “alarming” high rate brain injuries and deaths.

Zipes argued that, despite decades of research, the NCAA “failed to warn somebody in an inferior position who has less knowledge about that risk,” even though the organization “knew in the 1930s all it had to do was warn” about repetitive head trauma.

After Riggs’ death, his family filed a wrongful death claim in 2022, alleging that the NCAA breached its duty to protect athletes from long-term neurological harm.

“Throughout its history, the NCAA has not only embraced the duty or responsibility of addressing brain injuries for men and women across college sports, but specifically football,” Zipes said. “The NCAA promotes college football. It profits off college football. It profits off these players. These players go out there without knowledge of the risk that they’re being put into by taking repetitive hits over and over. And the NCAA says, ‘Well, we don’t have any duty to tell them about that?’”

“Since the 1930s, the NCAA knew that repetitive head trauma — not necessarily concussions — but repeated hits over and over to the head, can cause degenerative, latent brain disease down the road,” he continued. “To suggest that it doesn’t have a duty to tell the players … that’s bad public policy.”

‘You can’t impose duty by hindsight’

But the NCAA, represented Tuesday by Brian Paul of Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, countered that it had no such legal duty.

He argued that the organization’s historical role was to issue health and safety “recommendations” — not legally binding rules — to its member institutions, placing ultimate responsibility on the schools themselves.

“The NCAA role is to support its members in carrying out their retained responsibility and legal duty … to care for their health and safety,” Paul said, citing the association’s long-standing principle of “institutional control,” in which member institutions retained control over the day-to-day medical care and supervision of their student-athletes.

He emphasized that in the 1960s, the NCAA had fewer than 10 employees nationally and could not practically oversee safety for thousands of student-athletes.

“You can’t impose a duty on the NCAA in the 1960s … by hindsight,” Paul told the court.

He pointed to U.S. Supreme Court precedent, warning that “to impose liability on these sorts of organizations would disincentivize them from issuing health and safety guidance,” and maintained that in the time period at issue, “the schools … were the ones who would have been [with the athletes] day in and day out at every training session, every practice, every scrimmage, in every game.”

Still, Riggs’s attorneys said that interpretation ignores decades of the NCAA’s own statements and conduct. In court filings, they noted that by the 1930s, the NCAA’s medical committee had acknowledged links between head trauma and “punch drunk” syndrome, an early term for CTE, and recommended rules requiring injured players to be withheld from play for weeks.

Those recommendations, Zipes said, were never enforced.

“The NCAA failed to implement any such rules before or during the time Riggs played NCAA football,” the appellants brief stated.

Zipes further compared the NCAA’s stance to prior Indiana cases involving hazing and other campus safety issues, saying the NCAA was asking the court to read Yost v. Wabash College and Lanni v. NCAA too broadly.

“That’s not what the Supreme Court intended,” he said. “This is not that case. The relationship here is the only questionable factor — reasonable foreseeability.”

No timeline for decision

Paul, for the NCAA, emphasized that CTE was not diagnosed in a football player until decades after Riggs’s career.

“What exactly should the rule have been in the mid-1960s, when Riggs played, given the state of the scientific evidence?” the NCAA wrote in an earlier motion. “How would the NCAA have known whether that rule would have minimized the potential for a type of brain injury that would not be diagnosed until decades down the road?”

The trial court’s decision — issued by Marion Superior Court Judge Timothy Oakes — created what Riggs’s attorneys called a “split” with other rulings in similar cases against the NCAA where other judges found the NCAA owed a duty to warn.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the appellate judges pressed both sides about the scope of that duty and whether the question should be left for a jury. The case is one of several pending in Indiana involving the NCAA’s responsibility for concussion-related injuries among former college athletes.

The court took the matter under advisement and did not indicate when it will rule.

The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, nonprofit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.