The National Football League will be funding, at least in part, eight new concussion research projects through the National Institutes of Health.

According to a report in USA Today, the NFL will give two $6 million grants to a cooperative partnership focused on examining long-term changes in the brain years after a head injury or multiple concussions. The partnership includes the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, along with several academic medical centers.

The NIH will also kick in just over $2 million to support sports-related concussion project start-ups and if those efforts yield promising results, they could become the basis for more comprehensive research.

Under the terms of the funding initiative, the NFL was not given the ability to direct where the research monies would go.

The cooperative awards bring together two different teams of independent scientists to study and draw conclusions from the brains of donors both at high and low risk of developing long-term effects from traumatic brain injury.

Ten neuropathologists from eight universities will confer to develop standards for diagnosis.

Four science teams will correlate brain scans with recorded changes in brain tissue -- a technique that could lead to the development of similar brain imaging technologies to diagnose the chronic effects of traumatic brain injury in people who are still living.

"We need to be able to predict which patterns of injury are rapidly reversible and which are not," Story Landis, director of National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said in a statement. "This program will help researchers get closer to answering some of the important questions about concussion for our youth who play sports and their parents."

The NFL reached a tentative $765 million settlement in August over concussion-related brain injuries among its 18,000 retired players. The league agreed to compensate victims, pay for their medical exams and underwrite brain-injury research.

More than 4,500 former athletes, some suffering from dementia, others from Alzheimer's disease or depression they blame on blows to the head they suffered during their pro football careers, have sued the league, accusing it of concealing the dangers of concussions and rushing injured players back onto the playing field, all the while glorifying and profiting from such damaging collisions between players.

Said Jeff Miller, the NFL's senior vice president of health and safety policy, after the concussion funding announcement: "We are optimistic that these research projects will help advance the understanding of the complex issues involving traumatic brain injury."