PHILADELPHIA - A former West Virginia University football player who went on to play for the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants can’t sue the NCAA for concussions he claims he only discovered 20 years later.
Pennsylvania’s two-year statute of limitations prevents Sean Berton and his wife from suing the National Collegiate Athletic Association over his long-ago head injuries, which included getting hit over the head by a pipe after he tried to break up a party at a West Virginia University party.
The 6-foot-4, 270-pound tight end told the Giants in 2005 he was knocked out in that incident and suffered concussions playing college football from 1998 to 2002.
Berton and his wife Joy sued the NCAA in 2021, claiming he suffered from brain injuries the sports organization should have protected him against.
A state court judge allowed Berton’s case to go to trial in 2024, where he testified he suffered many “bell-ringing hits” playing for WVU and North Carolina State but was never diagnosed with a concussion. He said he only learned he’d suffered concussions after he viewed “internal NCAA documents in May 2021.”
The trial judge granted nonsuit, ending the case, after Berton finished his arguments. He appealed, but a three-judge panel of the Superior Court upheld the ruling in a Feb. 27 opinion by Judge Anne E. Lazarus.
Berton knew or should have known he had a claim no later than 2005, the court ruled, when he was picked up by the Giants and told them he’d suffered concussions in college. He said he began playing football at 8 years old and “learned to lead with his head,” then started having mental symptoms including clouded thinking and depression as early as 2005.
He also told a Workers Compensation judge he’d suffered a concussion with the Vikings in 2004 and told a doctor in 2011 about being knocked out with a pipe.
“We find that a reasonable person, facing the same circumstances confronting Sean in 2005, would have known upon the exercise of due diligence that his persistent headaches, dizziness, confusion, sensitivity to light, and vision and memory loss issues (i.e., injury) could have been factually linked not only to the concussions he sustained while playing in the NFL, but also to the `bell-ringing, seeing-star’ dings and hits (i.e., cause) he received while playing five years of NCAA Division I football,” the appeals court concluded.
The NCAA settled a federal class-action lawsuit making similar claims in 2019, offering $75 million for medical monitoring of former college football players. A South Carolina jury ordered the NCAA to pay a former player $18 million last year in another concussion suit.
