Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who might well be the NFL’s most exciting player, took a snap during the third quarter of a close divisional playoff game Jan. 17 against the Cleveland Browns.
Mahomes ran right then darted forward. He was stopped just short of a first down. It was a clean tackle, but Mahomes’ helmet smashed forehead-first against the turf. He didn’t get up. He stayed on the ground for six seconds. When he finally stood, a woozy Mahomes pitched over into the arms of a lineman. Two trainers assisted Mahomes off the field.
It was a telltale concussion. “He is absolutely dizzy — you can see it in his eyes,” CBS announcer Jim Nantz said. The NFL’s reigning Most Valuable Player was out for the game, a potentially momentous turn of events. The Chiefs still ended up winning, and are playing in this weekend’s Super Bowl LV against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But the bigger story of that concussion’s impact — of that mild traumatic brain injury, as doctors call the injury that can occur with the rattling of the human brain — had nothing to do with the Chiefs squeaking out a victory or with Mahomes’ availability to play in the AFC championship game the next weekend.
The bigger story was this: In a tight playoff game with the season in the balance, the independent neurological consultants who now roam NFL sidelines deemed the league’s premier player unfit to return.
Mahomes’ dramatic, scary injury was a powerful marker of this sport’s progress.
That same weekend, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson suffered a concussion and did not return in his team’s playoff loss. In the course of one weekend, the league’s two most recent MVPs were told an invisible brain injury would sideline them, underscoring football’s dramatic culture shift in the past decade. The NFL has taken those decisions out of the hands of coaches, who would have obvious incentive to push a concussed player back, and into the hands of independent neurological consultants.
The early years of the sport’s concussion crisis were marked by NFL denialism. Instead of attacking the problem, the NFL instead “went to war against science,” as Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru put it in their book, “League of Denial.” Since then, a sea change has occurred. Football’s power brokers recognize the problem as an existential threat to the sport’s future. Instead of attacking science, the NFL is now — crucially, and in the most important of games — led by science.
A generation ago, even a decade ago, the idea of a wobbly star player being pulled from a game was anathema to what football stood for. A broken leg was one thing. But a dinged-up brain? Suck it up. “No one is ever hurt,” Vince Lombardi said. “Hurt is in your mind.”
But the tragic suicides of revered and concussion-afflicted players such as Junior Seau has shone a light on this antiquated thinking. A reckoning has begun. “Tomorrow I may not remember who I am, I may not know where I live,” Brett Favre told journalist Christiane Amanpour a few years ago. “That’s the frightening thing for us football players.”
Football’s reckoning is far from over. During the 2013 season, the year after Seau’s suicide, NFL players suffered 229 concussions. During the 2019 season, the most recent season with available data, NFL players suffered 224 concussions. Despite the league’s efforts to take the head out of the game — some four dozen rule changes over the past 15 years in the name of players’ health and safety — the sport will never be concussion-proof. Nobody would watch the National Flag Football League. We love the National Football League, even knowing the game can bring disastrous lifelong consequences. Danger is part of the allure.
These improvements are incremental, certainly, around things such as safer helmets and more rigorous return-to-play protocols after concussions. And they do not tackle the subconcussive hits that occur on every single football play — lesser hits to the head that pile up over time and may contribute to the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
This weekend, when you watch Mahomes face off against Brady — who has spoken about his own fears of concussions — pay special attention to any hits to the head. Many of them will be deemed necessary roughness, an unavoidable part of playing a contact sport. But any bigger, scarier hits to the head that a generation ago might have been featured on NFL-sponsored highlight videos (“King-Sized Hits,” “Thunder & Destruction”) will almost certainly be penalized or lead to immediate ejection. Fans of the penalized team will groan. Old-timers will complain the sport isn’t what it used to be.
But moments like that will be tangible moments of progress for the long-term survival of America’s favorite sport. Football is not safe. It never will be. But it is safer.
About the author: Reid Forgrave is a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter and author of “Love, Zac: Small-Town Football and the Life and Death of an American Boy.”
