In a heartbreaking Good Morning Football Interview that no one was prepared for on Monday, former NFL running back Chris Johnson told host Michael Strahan he has ALS at age 40 and couldn’t move or speak. Instead, he used his eyes to trigger a device that played his own recordings, and shared how drastically his life has changed since being diagnosed at 39. Strahan didn’t ask him about football or whether Johnson ever regretted playing. For many around the league, including sports host Dan Le Batard, that was a red flag.

On his Dan Le Batard Show, Dan played a TikTok video where sportswriter Jeff Pearlman called Strahan “irresponsible and grotesque” for dodging the football question. Le Batard called that “reasonable criticism,” and then added his own criticism.

“Football does not want you talking about the violence causing early deaths or ALS or any risks involved with a sport that just keeps growing and growing and growing,” he said.

Le Batard kept going, highlighting that PBS did the first major reporting on the link between concussions and the NFL, and also outlined how ESPN backed out of that project.

“John Skipper is the head of ESPN. He’s got a partnership with the NFL. He partners with PBS on this reporting,” Dan recalls. “And the reporting is being done by ESPN. ESPN is shining a light on what PBS is doing, and John Skipper soon realizes, ‘wait a minute, the conflict of interest here on journalism and my partnership with America’s most popular league is me. I’m the conflict of interest.’ And so, ESPN recuses itself from the concussion reporting.”

In 2013, ESPN pulled its branding from Frontline – a PBS documentary on NFL concussions – after a contentious meeting between the league and network executives. The New York Times reported that NFL pressure led to the split, though the league denied it. ESPN said that the decision was about editorial control, and not the business relationship. Dan Le Batard, on his show, drew this line straight back to Chris Johnson’s interview with Strahan.

“Michael Strahan has a responsibility in that instance to ask some sort of football question, and he did not do it,’ Le Batard said. “And he came under no criticism from anybody except Jeff Pearlman, because we don’t actually want to know.”

The league has long pushed back on the idea that football causes ALS or CTE. It even settled a tentative $765M concussion lawsuit with former players in 2013, but kept denying the link. Many notable peer-reviewed studies have shown that NFL players are 4x more likely to suffer from Lou Gehrig’s disease than the general adult male population – something Jeff Pearlman also highlighted in his video.

Chris Johnson’s GMA interview didn’t mention these stats. Michael Strahan didn’t bring any of this up. Pearlman and Le Batard both make the case that this is because Strahan is paid to talk football, not to question it. But in the process, perhaps the most crucial question for Johnson went unasked.