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The NFL concussion protocol can’t protect a player from their own bad decisions, and that’s a problem.
It’s impossible for most of us to understand the singular focus and peerless competitiveness of professional athletes. An undying willingness to put winning and personal goals above all else, even if that means self-sacrifice.
That said, it doesn’t take an NFL resume to recognize when a player is on a collision course with disaster, and tragically Tua Tagovailoa seems destined to do just that. Tagovailoa needs to be protected. Not from hits, or football, but himself.
Tagovailoa will attempt to pass the league’s concussion protocol Wednesday with the aim of returning to the field on Sunday. It will mark the third concussion in two years he’s returned from, with the risk no longer being missed games or a lost season, but devastating traumatic brain injury that will define the remainder of Tua’s life. We’re left with a 26-year-old, stuck in the present, tunnel visioned on his career, tragically incapable of understanding that the risks he’s taking now will echo for the next 50-plus years of his life.
We know this because of how the quarterback spoke on Monday. Unrelenting loyalty to football, unwilling to change — an edifice of old-school, hard-nosed football sensibilities devoid of modern science or logic.
“I love this game, and I love it to the death of me,” Tagovailoa alarmingly told reporters. A cliche normally couched in hyperbole, for Tua the decisions he’s making right now could very well be to the death of him. Terrifyingly it seems like nobody is able to get through to him about the risks he’s taking.
Part of this is still because so much is unknown about the onset of CTE. We have ample examples of athletes who have sustained life-altering traumatic brain injury, but the majority played long enough ago that concussion figures weren’t adequately tracked, or ignored all together. The death of Junior Seau, Stephen Davis experiencing memory loss four years after his retirement, Gale Sayers, Frank Wycheck — the list goes on.
In the last decade we’ve seen two of the brightest young stars in the NFL retire far before their time over injury concerns. Luke Kuechly retired from the Panthers at age 28 over concussion concerns. On the trajectory to be the greatest linebacker in history, Kuechly sustained three concussions in three consecutive seasons, causing him to make the difficult decision to walk away from the game he loved every bit as much as Tua does now, understanding the risk to his future.
Similarly, quarterback Andrew Luck also retired at the top of his game at age 29. A variety of injuries compounded to lead Luck to his decision, but he cited worries of post-concussion trauma as well.
For Tagovailoa it’s seemingly impossible for him to leave the game. An addiction he’s incapable of shaking. We can have ultimate sympathy for the difficulty of change when you’ve been locked into the world of football your entire adult life, while also scrutinizing element of this choice, like not even entertaining the idea of wearing a Guardian Cap on his return, which has been proven to reduce the risk of concussion.
When asked Monday why he won’t wear the concussion-reducing helmet cover Tua curtly answered “personal choice,” and wouldn’t expound further. While some players have said they don’t like the feel of the additional cap, it seems like an obvious choice when you’ve sustained multiple concussions with more potentially resulting in your life being altered forever.
The primary issue in the NFL right now when it comes to concussions is that the onus is being placed on the player. The league has made tremendous strides in ensuring teams aren’t putting players back in harm’s way immediately, but by putting so much on players to make their own decisions about their health it opens the door for toxic culture and misplaced macho bravado to pressure guys returning from brain injuries far earlier than they should.
Tua Tagovailoa needs to be protected from himself, because while it’s certainly fair to say that athletes should be allowed to make their own choices, there also needs to be intervention when competitive athletes in their 20s are incapable of being forward-thinking enough to imagine their lives in their 40s and beyond as a result of the decisions they make now.
Nobody wants to see Tagovailoa ripped from the game he loves before he’s ready, but tragically his injury history has brought him to this crossroad. Someone needs to pull him aside and tell him that choosing to leave football over concussions isn’t a sign of weakness, but rather one of strength. Sacrificing your personal goals and dreams to ensure a better life for your children and family is the ultimate act of being a husband, a father, and a man.
