We’ll never believe the Miami Dolphins or the NFL again. Not after what happened with Tua.
On Sunday, Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a concussion, obvious to anyone with eyes: He hit his head on the turf, rose, staggered, and left for examination. One of those sets of eyes belonged to Dr. Kester J. Nedd, a neurologist and the former team physician for the University of Miami’s football team.
“No question at all,” Nedd told The Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday. “If you experience loss of motor functions — that’s a no-go sign. Clearly, he was neurologically impaired.”
The Dolphins said Tagovailoa had a back problem and trotted him back out on the field for the second half. Then they cleared him to play just four days later. Tagovailoa absorbed a similar hit. This time, he left on a stretcher.
“I was appalled,” Nedd said. “I didn’t agree with the judgment to allow him to return to play in the first game.”
Nedd is the medical director at the University of Miami’s Sports Center and is the director of the concussion program. He spoke Friday morning, as the world awakened to film and images of the latest NFL miscarriage of safety: Tagovailoa on his back, seemingly paralyzed.
It’s called “fencing reflex”: A person takes a head shot, falls, and his splayed fingers petrify into unnatural positions. The person’s brain has been slammed against its skull, the cerebrum shuts down, and the more primitive brain stem takes over.
We saw it in 2019 when Ravens safety Earl Thomas connected with an illegal helmet-to-helmet shot on Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph that knocked out Rudolph and left his right arm frozen, like a fencer in the “en garde” stance.
We saw it again Thursday night, when Bengals tackle Josh Tupou legally brought Tagovailoa to the ground. Tagovailoa’s head slammed onto the turf, and he spasmed into a grotesque position that horrified viewers.
Their horror was amplified by what had come before.
Just four days earlier, Bills linebacker Matt Milano slammed Tagovailoa to the ground on a similar play. Tagovailoa rose unsteadily, shook his head twice, ran seven steps, stumbled, fell toward the ground but caught himself with his hands, rose again, took six more steps, then fell into the arms of a teammate. At that point, team staff was running onto the field. He was removed from the game and, clearly, that’s the last we would see of him ... right? Clearly this was a bad concussion ... right?
No.
Tagovailoa was back on the field about 45 minutes later. He and team personnel claimed his balky back had spasmed. They claimed he cleared concussion protocols. He finished the game.
The NFL, through its website’s reporters, claimed Friday that Tagovailoa never exhibited concussion symptoms after Sunday’s hit. Except, of course, for falling all over the place.
Almost nobody believed them then. Absolutely nobody believes them now.
Said first-year Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel, with all the concern of a tax auditor:
“The best news we can give is that everything is checked out that he didn’t have anything more serious than a concussion.”
As if Sunday’s game hadn’t happened. As if Tagovailoa hadn’t staggered to the locker room four days prior. The hubris is galling. Breathtaking.
“The person becomes more vulnerable if he’s reinjured within the next few days,” Nedd said. Long-term effects of brain injuries suffered closely together can be devastating, he said.
And, again, from his vantage point, Nedd — who published the book, "Concussion: Traumatic Brain Injury from Head to Tail" in 2020 — is certain that the first injury was neurological. Tua’s energy plant, his electrical system, short-circuited.
“He lost control of his motor functions instantly,” Nedd said. “That’s the first sign that he lost control of his neurological system.”
This whole thing stinks.
Fire McDaniel. Fire the medical staff.
Fire everybody.
Suspend suspended owner Stephen Ross for the rest of this season and the next. Take their remaining first-round pick from the 2023 draft.
This is a rotten organization. Successful former coach Brian Flores accused Ross of offering him cash to lose (that claim was not substantiated), and Ross told him to recruit Tom Brady, then the Patriots quarterback. That claim was substantiated, along with other rampant tampering violations. That cost the Dolphins a first-round draft pick in 2023, a third-round pick in 2024, and Ross was suspended until Oct. 17.
Let’s just keep him away until 2024.
Make him an example. Make it hurt, the way they see their players hurt.
The NFL and the NFL Players Association have spent the last decade trying to convince us that they care about the players. But both signed off on the monstrosity that is Thursday Night Football, a cruel, four-day turnaround no team should ever have to endure. Both allow teams of the most profitable sports league in history to play on low-cost artificial turf, which ruins players’ bodies. And both collaborated on concussion protocols that simply don’t work.
Former Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins admitted that he’d covered up a concussion in 2015. Former Bengals offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth, now an Amazon Prime Video analyst, recalled how he fooled sideline doctors in 2012: “I go back in the game because you want to play. I was able to get myself through the test, explain that I’m fine, knowing that I had been dinged pretty good.”
And, of course, after the 2018 season, former Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz took a helmet-to-helmet hit from Seahawks headhunter Jadaveon Clowney in a playoff game. Wentz rose unsteadily — nothing like Tua, but still — and remained in the game for four more plays. Finally, on the sideline, Wentz asked to be examined, and was determined to have sustained a concussion.
But he had to ask.
At least he understood the dangers. Wentz doesn’t want to wind up like CTE victims Andre Waters and Junior Seau, who died by suicide. Like Whitworth and Jenkins, Tua seems less concerned.
So do his handlers.
The man who uncovered Waters’ issue, Chris Nowinski, was gravely concerned hours before kickoff. He tweeted, “If Tua takes the field tonight, it’s a massive step back for concussion care in the NFL.”
Nowinski implied that Tagovailoa was misdiagnosed Sunday, and that he was likely to suffer amplified consequences if he sustained a hit to the head Thursday night.
Nowinski, a Ph.D. who played football at Harvard, appears to have been prescient.
The team and the league had too much to lose had Tua sat out. He’s a marquee attraction. He’s the most important player for McDaniel, a first-time head coach.
If Tagovailoa had been diagnosed with a concussion on Sunday, he could not have returned to play against the Bills. He returned, and the Dolphins moved to 3-0.
Further, if he’d been diagnosed with a concussion, the five-step NFL concussion protocols would have kept him out of Thursday’s game, too. When Tagovailoa was injured in the second quarter, the Dolphins were driving toward a field-goal attempt that would have given them the lead.
After the game Sunday, the NFLPA promised an investigation into the Dolphins’ treatment of Tagovailoa. Thursday night, NFLPA chief DeMaurice Smith texted Whitworth: “We will pursue every legal option, including making referrals against the doctors to licensing agencies and the team that is obligated to keep our players safe.”
Bottom line: Smith and the NFLPA didn’t move quickly enough to protect Tagovailoa on Thursday.
This is the ugliest this very ugly industry has looked in a long time. Riddled with examples of domestic violence tolerance, institutional sexism and racism, and punishable disregard for player safety — its concussion coverup cost it $765 million in 2013 — the NFL continues to be a repository for irresponsibility and wrongdoing.
