Back in March, when NFL Vice President for Health and Safety Jeff Miller acknowledged a direct link between football-related head trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy — a degenerative brain disease associated with depression, memory loss and dementia — it seemed possible that we had turned a significant corner.

The multibillion-dollar business that had, for years, denied and obfuscated over the cause and effect of head injuries among athletes in the most popular sport in America appeared to be ready to square with the public over the risk associated with football.

Miller’s comments, made to members of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, weren’t without qualification, but they weren’t parsed either. And they came just a month after the NFL’s crown jewel event — the Super Bowl — where a league doctor repeatedly refused to acknowledge such a connection existed.

If Miller earned the NFL some social currency with parents on the issue of head injuries, those chips were cashed in Wednesday, when a New York Times story revealed that the NFL’s keystone safety initiative — Heads Up Football — for youth football amounts to a sham.

The program, which is overseen by youth football’s governing body, USA Football, has been sold as a miraculous step forward for on-field safety. Both the NFL and USA Football, which was formed by the NFL and the NFLPA in 2002, have claimed for more than a year that an independent study shows the program — a series of courses that teach coaches safety procedures and proper tackling drills — reduces injuries by 76 percent and concussions by about 30 percent.

There are two problems with this, reported the Times. First, the study itself was paid for with a $70,000 grant from USA Football. It’s hardly “independent.”

Second, and more importantly, the organizations’ claims regarding Heads Up Football’s effectiveness were completely false.

A review of the data — it was published in 2015 — found that the program actually didn’t do anything at all to improve player safety. Instead, it was measures imposed by Pop Warner youth leagues, which forbid certain blocking and tackling drills and drastically reduce full-contact practice time — steps Heads Up Football doesn’t take — that created meaningful outcomes for player safety.

The leagues have responded by apologizing for what they call an unintentional error and promising to remove the erroneous information from websites and promotional materials, but the damage is already done. At a time when participation in youth football has fallen dramatically — from 3 million in 2010 to 2.2 million last season — the claims were widely reported by news media.

And it’s ridiculous to assume that this correction will trickle down to all of the youth programs that have been convinced — wrongly — that this program actually provides some measure of increased safety for their players.

In the meantime, this revelation will rightly fuel the criticism of those who are suspicious of the NFL’s moves toward reform, and discourage parents who want reliable data on the risks associated with the sport at the youth level.