ESPN's reputation took a serious hit this past week as The New York Times reported that "The World Wide Leader in Sports" suddenly broke off a 15-month partnership with PBS to produce a documentary highlighting the safety concerns surrounding concussions in the NFL.

The news came right after ESPN executives met with Roger Goodell and the NFL, who apparently pressured ESPN to pull out of the mix for the documentary, which is called "League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis." The immediate reaction was negative across the board as writers, fans, and others criticized ESPN and the NFL for covering up the health issues facing professional football players in favor of business interests.

It is quite obvious at this point that the NFL is scared of its fate as the increasingly glaring safety concerns continue to mount. More than 4,000 former players are suing the NFL for hiding safety risks, and news events such as the death of Junior Seau have sparked a conversation asking whether football is even safe enough to play.

ESPN came up with an excuse to try and convince the general public that their decision had nothing to do with the aforementioned reasons, but nobody is buying it.

"Because ESPN is neither producing nor exercising editorial control over the Frontline documentaries, there will be no co-branding involving ESPN on the documentaries or their marketing materials," the statement said.

ESPN has a very strong relationship with the NFL, most noticeably with the highly-rated "Monday Night Football" program, which switched over to ESPN from ABC in 2006. ESPN also has "NFL Live" as well as "Sunday NFL Countdown" and "Monday Night Countdown." Both the NFL and ESPN are well aware that negative PR about safety will only hurt their ratings.

Dave Zirin, who serves as the Sports Editor for The Nation, said in his article today that he "spoke to several of the biggest names in journalism at ESPN" and many of them expressed their very honest opinions about what ESPN really cares about.

One journalist told Zirin exactly what everyone suspected about ESPN's strategy.

"Our corporate strategy right now is to go all-in on football no matter the cost [to journalistic integrity]," the anonymous journalist said to Zirin. "We are going all-in on football at a time when you have damn near 5,000 people suing the sports that made them famous [for head trauma]. You have empirical evidence that something is going on with this game that is really dangerous. We are now carrying water for a game that is on a deeply problematic trajectory. We are going all in on this sport and this sport is in peril."

The documentary, which is based on the investigative reporting work carried out by ESPN reporters Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, will air Oct. 8 and 15.