AP 
 
 The NFL didn’t have a response to the news of the Aaron Hernandez lawsuit against the league and the Patriots on Thursday. On Friday, the league definitely had one. 
 
 League spokesman Joe Lockhart, during a periodic media briefing, stressed that the news of Hernandez’s “severe” case of CTE should not result in Hernandez being treated as a victim. 
 
 “His personal story is complex, it doesn’t lend itself to simple answers,” Lockhart said. “He was convicted of a homicide and his well-documented behavioral issues began long before he played in the National Football League. . . . The real victims are the friends and family of those he killed, along with his young daughter.” 
 
 As to the status of the CTE phenomenon, Lockhart emphasized that more research is needed. 
 
 “It’s a very complicated puzzle,” he said. “Every piece is important. . . There are a lot of dots here, and science just hasn’t been able to connect them.” 
 
 As to the lawsuit filed by Hernandez, Lockhart was unequivocal and clear: “We intend to contest the claim vigorously.” However, Lockhart had no specifics regarding the strategy. The argument that the labor deal prevents any lawsuit surely will be made; before it gets to that point, however, the league may argue that Hernandez’s rights already have been determined by the settlement of the class action. The NFL doesn’t yet know whether Hernandez was part of the class, or whether he opted out of it. ||||| The National Football League and New England Patriots will fight hard to get the Aaron Hernandez estate’s concussion lawsuit dismissed, but they could have an incentive to settle if that strategy fails, according to legal experts. 
 
 “The NFL will fight tooth and nail to get this case thrown out of court,” said Daniel Wallach, a prominent sports law attorney based in Florida, said Friday by phone. 
 
 His comments came one day after lawyers for Hernandez’s estate filed a $20 million lawsuit against the league and the Patriots, on the grounds that both parties failed to protect Hernandez from the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain condition linked to concussions and repeated blows to the head. 
 
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 Wallach, who has advised top athletes and pro franchises, said the league probably will cite a number of factors in its bid to get the suit tossed, including the exclusion of any players who retired on or after July 2014 from signing onto a prior class-action concussion settlement expected to top $1 billion. 
 
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 Hernandez was in jail awaiting his first murder trial in July 2014, and the league could argue he fell into the retired player category because he had “no reasonable expectation” of resuming his playing career, Wallach said. 
 
 In addition, he said, the league will cite the full scope of Hernandez’s football career going back to his youth Pop Warner days, as well as his violent tendencies that predated his selection by the Patriots in the 2010 draft. 
 
 The team released the once-promising tight end immediately after his June 2013 arrest for murder. 
 
 Michael McCann, an attorney and founding director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, agreed that Hernandez’s estate faces challenges. 
 
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 “These are difficult cases to bring, that a finding of CTE proves liability against the NFL,” he said. 
 
 At the same time, McCann added, the league might be tempted to settle if it can’t get the case dismissed, to avoid turning over documents in a protracted legal battle. 
 
 “It’s still a potentially threatening lawsuit to the Patriots and the NFL,” said McCann, who is also a leading expert on the Deflategate saga. “We know the Patriots are known to be private about various issues.” 
 
 So is the league, Wallach said. 
 
 “Five years into this overall concussion litigation, one thing the league has been very successful at is keeping its executives off the witness stand, avoiding testimony under oath, and not having any of its so-called treasure trove of documents in the public eye,” Wallach said. 
 
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 But a third expert, Andrew Brandt, said he doesn’t see a settlement on the horizon. 
 
 “My sense is they would not settle, as they would have a lot of defenses around Hernandez’s lifestyle and his short career in the NFL compared to other levels of football,” said Brandt, who heads the Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova University. 
 
 Hernandez was acquitted in April on charges of killing Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu in a drive-by shooting in Boston in 2012. Five days after the acquittal, the 27-year-old Hernandez hanged himself in his prison cell at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. 
 
 He was serving a life sentence for the June 2013 killing of Odin L. Lloyd. A judge later vacated Hernandez’s first-degree murder conviction in the Lloyd case because Hernandez had not exhausted his appeals at the time of his suicide. Bristol County prosecutors are challenging that decision. 
 
 The league, citing Hernandez’s criminal history, vowed Friday to vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit. 
 
 Material from The New York Times was included in this report. Ben Volin and Milton J. Valencia of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. ||||| News broke Thursday that Boston University researchers found former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez to have a severe case of CTE, the degenerative trauma-based brain disease that has been found in numerous former football players and other athletes. 
 
 Hernandez’s brain, which was donated after his death, was examined by Dr. Ann McKee at BU. Dr. McKee diagnosed Herandez with Stage III CTE (out of four) and released images of his brain which show early brain atrophy and “severe deposition” of the protein associated with CTE. The disease is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, which is why it often affects football players, hockey players and boxers. 
 
 The below video shows what the research team found. Stage III CTE is frequently associated with dementia. Hernandez hung himself in prison in April while serving a life sentence without parole for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013. 
 
 Hernandez is the latest in a long list of NFL players who have committed suicide and later been found to have CTE, including Junior Seau and Dave Duerson. CTE is also associated with a propensity for violence, as with former Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide in the parking lot of the team’s facility. ||||| The brain scan came as a surprise even to researchers who for years have been studying the relationship between brain disease and deaths of professional football players. 
 
 Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and a convicted murderer, was 27 when he committed suicide in April. Yet a posthumous examination of his brain showed he had such a severe form of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E. that the damage was akin to that of players well into their 60s. 
 
 It was, a lawyer for his family said, in announcing the findings on Thursday, “the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron’s age.” 
 
 C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, has been found in more than 100 former N.F.L. players, some of whom committed suicide, according to researchers at Boston University. ||||| The CTE made him do it. 
 
 That’s the charge leveled Thursday in a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Aaron Hernandez. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is what turned him into a homicidal maniac. 
 
 I’m no doctor, but you don’t have to be a doctor to know CTE is a devastating mental condition. 
 
 You also don’t have to be a doctor to smell a money grab. 
 
 The amount here is $20 million, and the defendants are the Patriots and the NFL. The lawsuit’s filing coincided nicely with the news release from Boston University’s CTE. Center. 
 
 It said Hernandez had an advanced form of CTE, which can only be diagnosed in an autopsy. It was “the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron’s age,” said attorney Jose Baez. 
 
 Hernandez was 27. 
 
 This is terrible news for the NFL, which was already getting scorned for not doing enough to prevent concussion-related damage. But at least most of its CTE victims were players who had long careers. 
 
 Hernandez played 38 games for the Patriots. If young NFL players weren’t panicky about life-altering concussions before, they should be now. 
 
 It’s a reach, however, to say Hernandez wouldn’t have broken bad if only the Patriots had been more caring. 
 
 Then again, it was a reach to say Caylee Anthony drowned in the family pool and her grandfather George disposed of the body. 
 
 But hey, that defense worked for Baez when he defended Casey Anthony. 
 
 Sentinel file photo Casey Anthony Casey Anthony (Sentinel file photo) 
 
 That tabloid-crazed trial might be upstaged by the mere sight of a court registrar telling Bill Belichick to raise his right hand and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 
 
 One question I’d like asked is of all the people who were posthumously diagnosed with CTE, why did only one start acting like a mob hitman? 
 
 Maybe CTE aggravates a pre-existing condition. There is no doubt, however, that the condition existed long before Hernandez put on a Patriots helmet. 
 
 His troubles date back to at least 2006, when his father died from complications following hernia surgery. By the time Hernandez got to Florida a year later, he was ready to detonate. 
 
 “It was a rough process, and I didn't know what to do for him,” his mother, Terri, told USA Today. “He would rebel. It was very, very hard, and he was very, very angry. 
 
 “He wasn't the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.” 
 
 A 17-year-old Hernandez got in a bar fight and ended up busting a bouncer’s eardrum. He was also identified as the person who fired five shots into a car one night following a dispute over a gold chain necklace. 
 
 The case quietly took a number of twists and turns, and the witness later recanted his testimony. 
 
 Technically, the only blot on Hernandez’s record was a one-game suspension for a failed drug test. The USA Today story even referred to him as a “good kid (who) was headed down the wrong path.” 
 
 Most people familiar with the routine criminality and covering up during Urban Meyer’s tenure might have a different description for Hernandez. 
 
 Gary W. Green / Orlando Sentinel Florida tight end Aaron Hernandez (81) runs for a 28 yard pass completion during the second quarter of the Gators game against Charleston Southern at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, FL Saturday, September 5, 2009. (Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel) ORG XMIT: 00124324A Florida tight end Aaron Hernandez (81) runs for a 28 yard pass completion during the second quarter of the Gators game against Charleston Southern at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, FL Saturday, September 5, 2009. (Gary W. Green/Orlando Sentinel) ORG XMIT: 00124324A (Gary W. Green / Orlando Sentinel) 
 
 The Boston Globe reported Hernandez failed as many as six drug tests at Florida. He left after three seasons, but NFL teams were so leery that a first-round talent wasn’t picked until the fourth round. 
 
 “We stayed away,” one scout told CBSSports.com, “because we hated the people he hung out with and how trouble always seemed to find this guy.” 
 
 Don’t be surprised if Baez adds Florida and the NCAA to the complaint. Heck, why not throw in Bristol Central High? 
 
 The cynical answer is because there’s no money to make suing a high school. If CTE turned Hernandez into a murderer, however, who’s to say which blow to the head started the spiral? 
 
 Baez will surely find an expert witness who will blame it on the Patriots and/or the Gators. But Hernandez would have been a thug if he’d never played a down after high school. 
 
 Even the Casey Anthony jury could see that. 
 
 David Whitley can be reached at dwhitley@orlandosentinel.com ||||| The dots are awfully close to each other, daring you to connect them. Aaron Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE when he committed suicide, after years of inexplicable violent behavior, including at least one murder. It would be simple and easy to blame football for what happened to him. 
 
 Dot: The hits to the head gave him brain damage. Dot: The brain damage made him paranoid. Dot: The paranoia made him violent. Dot: The brain damage eventually made him suicidal. 
 
 Maybe all the dots really do connect in this case. Maybe just some of them do. But the truth is that we don’t know, and we may never know. 
 
 There is so much—so much—we still don’t know about concussions. We know repeated head trauma can ruin a life, but not every brain reacts in the same way. We know there is a direct correlation between football and CTE. And we know that the NFL’s response to this issue, for many years, was to sweep it under the rug—and when that didn’t work, to buy bigger rugs. 
 
 The CTE problem in football is real, and it is enormous. But it has also led to facts-based hysteria. We take what we know about football and CTE, which is obviously significant, and we apply it to every single player, every case of dementia, every football life gone awry. And it’s just not that simple. 
 
 On the surface, the Hernandez case may seem like the clearest case of football-related head trauma causing a player to literally and figuratively lose his mind. After all, nobody went crazier than Aaron Hernandez, right? 
 
 I would argue the opposite: the extreme nature of Hernandez’s transformation, and the early age when it began, makes his story even foggier than most. 
 
 Hernandez’s widow is suing the NFL on behalf of his daughter. The suit claims that the NFL in general and the Patriots specifically were “fully aware of the damage that could be inflicted from repetitive impact injuries and failed to disclose, treat or protect him from the dangers of such damage.” 
 
 Maybe Shayanna Jenkins and her daughter Avielle will triumph in court. I’m not going to speculate on that; my colleague Michael McCann is far more qualified and capable of examining the lawsuit than I am. 
 
 I will say this, though: Pinning his suicide on the NFL makes for a good headline. It may be a winning legal strategy. But it’s a hard theory for me to buy in this case. 
 
 Aaron Hernandez played 40 games in the NFL. He also played 40 games at the University of Florida, and he played a lot of football before he arrived at Florida. Even if you do pin his suicide on football, can you really isolate his NFL career as the cause? 
 
 Hernandez’s behavior started to change radically when he was in high school, almost immediately after his father died. He showed signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, though it was never diagnosed. He hung out with a different crowd. At times he was distant, at others charming, and he seemed to go back and forth with frightening ease. We still don’t know the full extent of his drug use. He was investigated for a double shooting in Florida in 2007—when he was a college freshman. Character concerns caused him to fall in the NFL draft. 
 
 Nothing in that last paragraph can be pinned on the NFL. Nothing. 
 
 Of course, the thrust of the lawsuit is that the CTE made Hernandez suicidal, not that it made him a violent criminal. But can you really separate the two that easily? Hernandez took his own life while serving a life sentence for murder. He did it just after being acquitted in another murder trial. 
 
 You can come up with a bunch of theories for Hernandez’s suicide that seem sensible on their own. He couldn’t stand to live the life ahead of him. He was filled with regret, though he didn’t show it publicly. Once he was acquitted, there were no battles left to win. He knew that dying while he was appealing his conviction would technically vacate his conviction, possibly shielding his wife and daughter from any civil suits. He had CTE. 
 
 Or: We don’t know. Maybe someday we will. 
 
 The link between football-related head trauma and CTE is a serious issue. The NFL deserves heavy scrutiny for its actions, both past and present. We should absolutely continue that conversation, but maybe it’s best, for now, to leave Aaron Hernandez out of it. ||||| On Thursday it was revealed a 27-year-old with 44 career NFL games had the brain of a 67-year-old man. Will the league do anything about it? 
 
 We probably didn’t need Aaron Hernandez’s attorney to declare Thursday that his dead client had the brain of a near-70-year-old with severe dementia. Too many decisions the one-time New England Patriots star made before killing himself earlier this year at 27 made no sense. Experience has told us that when young, wealthy football players start making erratic life choices, there is probably a physical reason lurking inside their skulls. 
 
 The question is: what will anyone do about it? 
 
 The time for hand-wringing about the role football plays in the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy is over. Science is only beginning to understand CTE. It’s going to take decades to assess how much the pounding of football helmets affects players’ brains. But enough is known now to say that dire measures need to be taken. 
 
 Aaron Hernandez lawyer says ex-NFL star had 'severe' case of CTE Read more 
 
 For more than 10 years, neurologists have been drawing a connection between the blows players take to their heads and the growth of tau deposits that signal CTE. They have measured the power of enough hits to the head and looked at enough slides of brain tissue to say football has some culpability in the sudden aging of otherwise healthy men’s brains. 
 
 Even the NFL has conceded this fact. 
 
 And yet for all the talk about better helmets or smarter tackling or trying to get players to not turn themselves into human torpedoes when going for the hit, no one wants to deal with the bomb ticking inside their helmets – the one that makes sane, smart men go crazy. We get lots of chatter. We get promises about brain study initiatives, but we don’t get the kind of action needed to maybe save players’ lives. 
 
 A few days ago the Canadian Football League and the league’s players union together announced that the league is eliminating full-contact practices during the season. 
 
 “It was clear we had an opportunity to get this out and do something proactive for player safety,” CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie told the CBC while unveiling the new policy. 
 
 The move isn’t as significant as it sounds. CFL teams only have 17 full-contact practices during the season which amounts to slightly less than one a week - NFL teams are allowed roughly the same number. But it’s a message that the CFL and their players’ union is committed to at least addressing the root of the problem – a message the NFL has said it doesn’t expect to match. 
 
 An impression is stuck in people’s minds that the biggest cause of CTE is the big, booming hits players take in games, those where they are smashed to the ground or knocked out completely. It’s an impression built in the earliest days of the discovery of CTE in dead football players and further fed by the movie Concussion, which tells the story of how a link between CTE and football was first made. But most research now is focused less on those crashing blows but on the seemingly benign day-to-day cracking of helmets in practices and games. 
 
 It might not seem like much to watch a football practice and watch players bump heads over and over and half speed – or even to see them do the same with more power in games. And yet each crack of hard plastic against hard plastic triggers some kind of trauma. The wounds might be small at first but they build up over time. At some point the damage can reach dangerous levels. This, scientists suspect, may be where the real trouble lies. An invisible killer. 
 
 The NFL has been slow to embrace CTE discussion, perhaps for obvious reasons. Litigation from former players has cost the league close to $1bn in settlements. Hernandez’s attorney Jose Baez said Thursday he is suing the Patriots and NFL on behalf of the player’s young daughter. The league seems to operate with litigation in mind, employing fleets of lawyers to counter potential lawsuits related to many of their decisions. 
 
 In some ways the NFL is right in raising questions about how much CTE affects their players. It will take years for scientists to properly study the disease that can only be detected posthumously. The brains doctors have been given to study have come from players like Hernandez, whose behavior troubled relatives enough to allow researchers to take chunks of their dead loved one’s brain. Brains of the thousands of ex-players who have lived normal lives have not been examined, meaning CTE studies are self-selective and perhaps misleading. 
 
 CTE can’t be the reason for everything that goes wrong in a player’s life. Sometimes bad behavior is just bad behavior. We can’t say CTE led Hernandez to kill Odin Lloyd in 2013, the crime for which he was sentenced to life in prison. But CTE is something and that something is serious. 
 
 It will take more than cutting full-contact practices during the season to reduce the risk of CTE, Maybe teams at all levels have to eliminate nearly all their contact practices. Maybe football has to reinvent itself completely. But at least the CFL has taken a positive action to deal with the menace that has destroyed lives. 
 
 A small step, perhaps, but a step nonetheless. 
 
 The time has come to stop listening to the lawyers and take many steps more. ||||| CLOSE SportsPulse: USA TODAY Sports' Peter Barzilai discusses the ramifications of the findings that Aaron Hernandez had severe CTE. USA TODAY Sports 
 
 Aaron Hernandez was found to have CTE. (Photo: Mark L. Baer, USA TODAY Sports) 
 
 Aaron Hernandez just became the most dangerous man in football. 
 
 It’s a strange statement, given the former New England Patriots tight end is dead and had spent the last four years of his life not on the field but behind bars for murder. But the revelation Thursday that Hernandez had chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he killed himself will shake the NFL to its core. 
 
 As it should. 
 
 Hernandez was just 27 when he died, yet an autopsy of his brain showed he had Stage 3 CTE, the second-worst stage of the disease. His brain had also begun to shrink, and there were large holes in a central membrane. 
 
 To be clear, this is not normal, as was noted in a lawsuit filed Thursday against the NFL and the Patriots by Hernandez’s fiancée and their young daughter. 
 
 “The Boston University neuropathy report also notes that Aaron’s CTE pathology was unusually severe considering his age,” according to the lawsuit. 
 
 And that’s a problem the NFL can’t spin or double-talk away. 
 
 Lawsuit: Aaron Hernandez's family sues NFL, Patriots amid CTE revelation 
 
 More: Ex-Patriots star Aaron Hernandez had severe CTE, examiners conclude 
 
 It was easy to absolve football when it is players in their 60s and 70s whose memories and personalities had disappeared, turning them into people their loved ones barely recognized when they died. There’s no definitive link, the NFL would say, alluding to a host of other environmental and lifestyle factors that might have played a role. 
 
 Even when it was Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, taking their lives in their 40s and 50s because their addled brains were already making their lives hell and they knew there was more to come, the NFL managed to tap dance around football’s responsibility. Tragic, but there are still so many unanswered questions, we’ve heard time and time and time again. More research is needed on genetics and mental illness and, well, anything else that might gum up the debate. 
 
 The number of former players with those telltale dark spots on their autopsied brains has piled up – 20, then 50, now more than 100 – and still the league insisted on playing dumb. 
 
 “There are still many unanswered questions relating to the cause, incidence and prevalence of long-term effects of head trauma such as CTE,” the NFL said in July, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that found CTE in the brains of 110 out of 111 former NFL players. 
 
 But a 27 year old? The NFL is going to own that whether it wants to or not. 
 
 The NFL spends considerable time and resources every year to reassure worried parents that it’s OK to let their kids play football at the youth level. But the news about Hernandez will only ratchet up the fear, making parents wonder if they’re consigning their kids to a jail cell or the morgue by allowing them to play. 
 
 If Hernandez had severe CTE before he was 30, how can you promise me that my kid won’t, too? 
 
 “According to the CTE Society, individuals suffering from CTE in Stage III, like Aaron, typically experience symptoms such as memory loss, executive dysfunction, aggression, explosive behavior, loss of concentration, mood swings, depression, apathy and cognitive impairment,” the lawsuit alleged. 
 
 NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said the league hadn’t seen the lawsuit filed by Hernandez’s family and could not comment. 
 
 While the NFL has always known this day was coming, it’s done everything it can to put it off. Casting doubt on the science and stalling the research. 
 
 But the league has had it wrong all along. Knowledge is power, and finding answers to what causes CTE – how many hits are too many, when do they do the most damage, why are some people more susceptible than others – is the only thing that can save football in the long run. 
 
 Hernandez’s death at such a young age is going to be a tipping point for CTE and repetitive head trauma. If the NFL doesn’t recognize that, it’s not just deceitful. It’s delusional. 
 
 Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.
– More than 100 former NFL players have been found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with repeated knocks to the head. One might think, then, that Aaron Hernandez's case of CTE is just another one. Not so. Hernandez's diagnosis "will shake the NFL to its core. As it should," writes columnist Nancy Armour at USA Today. He was just 27, yet had an advanced stage of the disease. The NFL can brush off cases in older men, citing other possible factors, but not here. "If Hernandez had severe CTE before he was 30, how can you promise me that my kid won’t, too?" writes Armour. The the only way the league can save itself is to honestly assess the question and find answers. Related coverage: 'Severe case': Doctors said Hernandez had "the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron's age," similar to what a former player in his 60s might have, says a lawyer representing Hernandez's family. The New York Times notes that it raises a big, perhaps unanswerable, question: Did CTE play a role in Hernandez's violent behavior off the field? (He committed suicide in prison.) What they saw: Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE out of 4, and Sports Illustrated has images and a video showing what doctors saw when they looked at his brain. Long odds: Hernandez's family sued the NFL and the New England Patriots for $20 million on Thursday, saying they did not protect Hernandez from the dangers of the game. The case would be difficult to win, a legal expert tells the Boston Globe. But he adds that the league and team may want to settle in order to avoid turning over related documents. NFL response: "It's a complicated puzzle," league spokesman Joe Lockhart said Friday in regard to football and CTE, per NBC News. "There are a lot of dots here, and science just hasn’t been able to connect them.” He also said the league plans to "vigorously contest" the lawsuit, adding that the CTE finding shouldn't cause people to view Hernandez as a victim, because the real victims are the friends and relatives of those he killed. Skeptical: Boston Herald columnist Michael Rosenberg writes that it is oh-so-tempting to connect the dots from CTE to Hernandez's criminal life and ultimately to his suicide. But too much is unknown about concussions to do that. "Pinning his suicide on the NFL makes for a good headline," he writes. "It may be a winning legal strategy. But it’s a hard theory for me to buy in this case." More skeptical: The lawsuit is a "money grab," writes David Whitley at the Orlando Sentinel. "One question I'd like asked is of all the people who were posthumously diagnosed with CTE, why did only one start acting like a mob hitman?" He also won't be surprised if attorney Jose Baez, who defended Casey Anthony, adds Hernandez's college team, the Florida Gators, to the lawsuit. Time to act, NFL: Yes, much is unknown about CTE, but enough is known for the NFL to be more aggressive in preventing it, writes Les Carpenter at the Guardian. A small first step could be following the Canadian Football League's lead and banning full-contact practices during the season.