(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Monday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION Milwaukee 133, Washington 122 Charlotte 122, Sacramento 116 San Antonio 109, Detroit 99 Brooklyn 117, New York 112 LA Clippers 109, Dallas 99 Phoenix 122, Memphis 99 Denver 121, Indiana 106 LA Lakers 128, Golden State 97
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE Nashville 4, Tampa Bay 1 Washington 6, Buffalo 0 Pittsburgh 4, Boston 1 Florida 6, Chicago 3 Vancouver 3, Ottawa 2 (OT) Philadelphia 5, NY Rangers 4 (OT) Montreal 4, Winnipeg 2 Calgary 4, Edmonton 3 Vegas 2, San Jose 1 St. Louis at Los Angeles (Postponed)
Benjamin Solomon/Getty ImagesBY: LEIGHTON SCHNEIDER, ABC NEWS
(NEW YORK) — The top seeds in the NCAA Women’s College Basketball tournament have been released.
Stanford, UCONN, South Carolina and North Carolina State have claimed number one seeds with the Cardinal claiming the top overall seed.
The news of the Huskies seeding came just hours after the school announced head coach Geno Auriemma tested positve for COVID-19 on Sunday. Following contact tracing, no other coaches or players were deemed close contacts.
“After we received notification of the positive test result yesterday, we initiated contact tracing protocols, which included interviewing individual members of the basketball program and in-depth video analysis of practice,” director of sports medicine and head team physician Deena Casiero said in a statement. “Only household close contacts were identified. Given the fact that we have been doing daily testing for the past seven days, we feel confident that we were able to catch this very early on in the disease process. The remainder of Tier I tested negative yesterday and today.”
The basketball Hall of Famer has no symptoms and it isolating at home. He will continue to isolate until March 24, which would mean he would miss the opening two rounds.
UCONN is scheduled to leave for San Antonio on Tuesday for the tournament and play its first game on Sunday against High Point University. If they win, the Huskie have a second round match-up on March 23.
The Atlantic Coast Conference leads the way with 8 selections, followed by the Southestern Conference and Big Ten with 7 each.
The Final Four will take place on April 2 with the Championship game on April 4.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Former NFL players Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport are seeking to intervene in the upcoming court-ordered mediation between the NFL and the class counsel representing former players in the league’s landmark concussion settlement program, arguing that class counsel “cannot adequately represent the interests of Black former players on the issue.”
In a motion filed before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Monday, attorneys for Henry and Davenport took aim at Seeger Weiss, the prominent plaintiffs’ law firm that negotiated the terms of the original settlement, alleging that “the discriminatory status quo has emerged and persisted on Class Counsel’s watch.”
“Class Counsel Seeger Weiss cannot be solely entrusted with eradicating a discriminatory practice that it has had a role in effectuating, has allowed to continue, and does not view as discriminatory,” wrote the attorneys, led by Cy Smith of the firm Zuckerman Spaeder.
A spokesperson for attorney Christopher Seeger, one of Seeger Weiss’ leading partners, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, following an ABC News investigation into allegations of racial bias in the program, the federal judge overseeing the settlement sent the league and Seeger Weiss back to the negotiating table “to seek to address the concerns relating to the race-norming issue” that critics say has skewed compensation for some football-related head injuries along racial lines.
The NFL has consistently defended the settlement and its protocols, and in response to questions from ABC News, Seeger initially issued a statement saying that his firm had previously “investigated this issue” and “not seen any evidence of racial bias in the settlement program.” The following day, however, Seeger added that it was his view that “race-based demographic adjustments should be eliminated” from the settlement program, and he pledged to “fight for the rights of Black players to have [their] claims rescored” if improper adjustments were found to applied.
In Monday’s filing, Smith seized on the apparent discrepancy.
“It is not realistic,” Smith wrote, “to expect that concerns about race-norming will be addressed effectively by parties who do not view the current use of race-norming as a problem.”
Seeger has also been a target of the group of wives of former players who have organized their own effort to end race-norming in the concussion settlement program. The group, which launched a Change.org petition that has garnered nearly 50,000 signatures, has urged the judge overseeing the settlement to remove Seeger as class counsel.
“We demand that you choose an impartial attorney of record, one that will fight for the rights of ALL players, not just the NFL and their deep pockets,” they wrote.
Seeger’s spokesperson has not responded to ABC News’ multiple requests for Seeger to discuss his position regarding the mediation in an on-camera interview.
At the crux of the controversy: The NFL’s concussion settlement program manual recommends the use of a “full demographic correction,” in which a player’s cognitive test scores are compared to average scores, or “norms,” for supposedly similar demographic groups, and then adjusted to account for expected differences in age, gender, education — and race.
The practice of adjusting test scores for race, widely known as “race-norming,” is in use across several different medical fields as a supposed safeguard against misdiagnosis. But because these “norms,” as used in a neuropsychology context, assume that the average Black player starts at a lower level of cognitive functioning than the average white player at the outset of their careers, Black players need to show larger cognitive declines than white players to qualify for compensation.
“What the NFL is doing to us right now … when they use a different scale for African-Americans versus any other race?” former NFL running back Davenport told ABC News. “That’s literally the definition of systematic racism.”
In response to questions from ABC News, an NFL spokesperson issued a statement in February saying that the concussion settlement, which has paid out more than $800 million to retirees and their families to date, was “agreed to by all parties, with the assistance of expert neuropsychological clinicians and approved by the courts more than five years ago” and “relied on widely accepted and long-established cognitive tests and scoring methodologies.”
“The settlement seeks to provide accurate examinations to retired players,” said the spokesperson, “and thus permits, but does not require, independent clinicians to consider race in adjusting retired players’ test scores as they would in their typical practice.”
But ABC News uncovered emails between clinicians who evaluated former NFL players for compensation through the program in which they contend they were all but required to apply race-based adjustments to players’ cognitive test scores and express concerns that the league’s protocols discriminate against Black players. ABC News was also able to obtain a data analysis that suggests that the impact of the practice on payouts could be significant, making it much more difficult for Black players to qualify.
In Monday’s filing, attorneys for Henry and Davenport claim the NFL and Seeger Weiss were presented with evidence “at least as early as November 2018” of the discriminatory impact of race-norming in the settlement program, but neither of them “has lifted a finger” to address it since.
And, the attorneys argued, it was the lawsuit filed by Henry and Davenport this past August, which the judge recently dismissed as “an improper attack on the Settlement Agreement,” that alerted the court to the issue in the first place.
“If [Henry and Davenport] had not begun litigating the race-norming issue, Class Counsel and the NFL would never had brought it to the Court’s attention,” the attorneys wrote. “[Henry and Davenport] should be allowed to participate as parties to ensure that the NFL and Class Counsel address the Court’s concerns fairly and comprehensively.”
Phil Ellsworth / ESPN ImagesBy JEANETTE TORRES-PEREZ, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees is hanging up his cleats after 20 years in the NFL.
In a video posted to his Instagram account on Sunday, the 42-year-old’s four children announced their father’s retirement.
“After 15 years in the Saints and 20 years in the NFL, our dad is finally going to retire so that he can spend more time with us,” his children cheerfully announce in the video.
Brees wrote an accompanying caption to the video, saying, “I am only retiring from playing football, I am not retiring from New Orleans.”
“This is not goodbye, rather a new beginning. Now my real life‘s work begins!” he concluded.
Brees was drafted by the San Diego Chargers in 2001. He played with the Chargers through the 2005 season, and joined the Saints the following year. He remained with the Saints through 2020, his final season in the NFL.
In his two decades in the league, Brees amassed 80,358 passing yards, 571 touchdown passes and a 67.7% completion percentage.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Sunday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION Oklahoma City 128, Memphis 122 Golden State 131, Utah 119 Philadelphia 134, San Antonio 99 Miami 102, Orlando 97 Atlanta 100, Cleveland 82 Boston 134, Houston 107 Minnesota 114, Portland 112 Chicago 118, Toronto 95 New Orleans 135, LA Clippers 115 NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE Minnesota 4, Arizona 1 Carolina 2, Detroit 1 Dallas 2, Columbus 1 (SO) Colorado 4, Los Angeles 1 NY Islanders 3, New Jersey 2 (SO) Ottawa 4, Toronto 3
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL Illinois 91, Ohio St. 88 Alabama 80, LSU 79 Houston 91, Cincinnati 54
iStockBy ABC News
