MIAMI — Imagine how we would all be seeing the positive and defiantly doubling down on our optimism about the Miami Dolphins and this season had the game been simply a 27-15 road loss to a Cincinnati Bengals team that made the Super Bowl last season.
The Dolphins stand 3-1 at roughly the NFL season’s quarter mark, against the toughest four-game gauntlet on the NFL schedule. In succession they beat Bill Belichick and Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen before falling to Joe Burrow. Offered that, any sane fan would have jumped at it.
But everything changed Thursday night, as quarterback Tua Tagovailoa lay motionless on the football field, and in the ugly aftermath as speculation and innuendo went malignant and metastasized across Twitter and social media.
A foreboding shadow has been cast across the Dolphins for the way they handled, or failed to handle, allowing Tua to play at all in the game. Everybody is speaking with the luxury of hindsight. Self-appointed amateur neurosurgeons are declaring diagnoses from their living rooms.
Representative actual tweet: “My dad, a neurosurgeon, said that Tua most likely had a cervical spine injury. Season over, career potentially.”
That, from Dr. Dad watching on TV.
The national diagnosis and verdict seems to be that the Dolphins are guilty of letting Tagovailoa play when he should not have. Because he had briefly left Sunday’s game with an apparent concussion that turned out to be (said Tua and the team) a back injury. He was examined but not found to be concussed, and was questionable for Thursday’s game because of his back and also a mild ankle sprain.
Yet many in the the medical profession — none of whom has met or examined Tagovailoa or seen any of his medical charts — seem comfortable second-guessing and virtually indicting the Dolphins for wrongdoing.
One of them, Dr. Chris Nowinski, who has a PhD behavioral neuroscience, was invited onto the Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz on Friday morning. He said:
“This is such a medical disaster that if I’m Tua and I recover from this, which is not guaranteed, I might say I don’t want to play for this team anymore because of what they did. He should have been rested so his brain could recover. No doctor should have believed him when he said his back hurt.”
That’s a flagrant opinion not based on any examination or inside knowledge. It’s reckless.
Nowinski, who is not a medical doctor, also tweeted that Dolphins coaches and doctors should ”go to jail” if they knowingly covered up a Sunday concussion and face a murder charge if Tagovailoa died from the injuries. Just, wow.
The same doctor, whom I might diagnose from afar as suffering from acute hyperbole, said, “If he’s [back] on the field within a month, we need to give up on the NFL completely.”
I do not blame Le Batard (or any media outlet) for giving an aggressively available, attention-seeking doctor a platform, but a modicum of skepticism might be fair. As in, “Doctor, how can you refer to a ‘medical disaster’ when you have not examined Tagovailoa and cannot actually know what may or may not ail him?”
Tagovailoa lay on the field almost 10 minutes Thursday night before being carefully strapped onto a stretcher and taken to a local hospital. It was frightening, enough to make an agnostic pray. Please, not paralysis.
It seemed unlikely, then, but Tagovailoa would be examined and discharged in time to fly home with the team. He is said to have a concussion.
McDaniel, rushing to Tagovailoa on the field: “I could tell it wasn’t the same guy that I was used to seeing. It was a scary moment. He was evaluated for a concussion. He’s in the concussion protocol, but he’s being discharged. It’s an emotional moment. It’s not a part of the deal you sign up for. His teammates and myself were very concerned, but he got checked out and it’s nothing more serious than a concussion.”
Nothing more serious than a concussion, though, is itself a troubling phrase.
A concussion itself is serious. And if he had just suffered his second in five days, that compounds the seriousness. Concussions are the foundation of what can become Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain condition thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head and repeated episodes of concussion.
It’s the football disease. Some of the 1972 Perfect Season Dolphins whose feat is being celebrated by Miami on its 50th anniversary this season were diagnosed with it after their deaths.
Concussions are serious. If the Dolphins are found to have covered up a concussion their QB suffered on Sunday, that would be terrible, and punishable. Repeat that. It matters. But unless and until that is found to have happened, McDaniel and the team should not be accused of callousness because on a hard sack Tagovailoa happened to have suffered a concussion Thursday night.
The belief, without proof, that Tagovailoa had had a concussion on Sunday led Dr. Nowinski to tweet, “If Tua takes the field [Thursday], it’s a massive step back for concussion care in the NFL.” The NFL players union has asked for a review of Dolphins procedures this past Sunday. but team doctors and an independent neurologist found Tagovailoa was not concussed.
That makes professionals such as Nowinski irresponsible with assumptions to the contrary. They are accusing Dolphins coaches and medical staff of reckless disregard for players’ safety. That isn’t fair.
McDaniel, asked directly, said he was 100% certain Tagovailoa was not concussed after Sunday’s game, and that he had been cleared by medical staff and that an independent neurologist.
“People don’t stray. We don’t mess with that. As long as I’m the head coach, that will never be an issue,” McDaniel said.
In hindsight, would he have done anything different after Sunday’s Buffalo game and in the buildup to Thursday night?
“Absolutely zero patience for [putting] a player in position for them to be in harm’s way,” he said. “That’s not what I’m about at all. No outcome of a game would influence me to be irresponsible as a head coach of a football team.”
It is hard to imagine Tagovailoa will be cleared from concussion protocol to play as soon as a week from Sunday at the New York Jets. But there is every expectation he will be back playing at some point.
And — unless the Dolphins are found guilty of a cover-up this past Sunday — we will see fade the hysterical innuendo that bloomed Thursday night. Because doctors who have never examined Tua Tagovailoa should kindly shut up and quit questioning the ethics of doctors who have.
