To say that Elliot Pellman’s departure from the NFL didn’t come a moment too soon would be an insult to all the other moments over the last nine years that he didn’t depart.
In the community of concussion specialists who have studied the effect of football on the human brain, Pellman’s name was practically a profanity. As recently as May of this year, Pellman was tied to the congressional investigation that accused the NFL of improperly influencing a National Institutes of Health study on football and brain injury.
If he's not technically the father of the NFL's ongoing concussion crisis, he's the closest thing to it.