We’re At An Unprecedented Moment With Tua Tagovailoa
Credit: Jasen Vinlove-Imagn Images
The NFL is no stranger to scary moments that can alter careers and even lives. We’ve seen players suffer spinal cord injuries and paralysis. We’ve seen a star player in Joe Theismann sustain a gruesome, career-ending leg injury. Damar Hamlin is, thankfully, alive and even healthy enough to play, but every fan remembers the sport’s existential crisis after his life was in jeopardy on the field in January 2023.
Even with that in mind, what we saw on Thursday night with Tua Tagovailoa feels different.
Tagovailoa suffered his fourth concussion in a span of little over two years on Thursday, on an innocuous-seeming hit. Everyone knew something was very wrong right away. The Dolphins ruled him out to return almost instantly, with his family attending to him. Coach Mike McDaniel kissed his quarterback as he went off the field. Since then, we have seen many players calling for Tagovailoa to retire.
As we’ve learned with the public’s increasing awareness of CTE, all brain injuries are serious. But even with that in mind, Tagovailoa is dealing with something even more dire than a typical brain injury. The quarterback made an involuntary movement known as “fencing,” which indicates trauma to the brain stem and spinal cord. It’s truly frightening.
We won’t weigh in on what should be done, as Tagovailoa needs and deserves the agency to make the best decision for himself and his family. But so many factors are coming together that make this moment completely unprecedented in NFL history.
We’ve seen star players retire at a relatively young age before, and we’ve seen players retire after a history of concussions. If Tagovailoa’s career is over at age 26, he will be the youngest, highest-profile player to be forced into retirement by concussions since the football world learned about CTE. It’s not even just about him quarterbacking one of the league’s best offenses and leading the league in passing last year. Tua is a mononymous household name, and has been since he came off the bench to lead Alabama to a heroic NCAA Championship Game comeback.
If Tagovailoa retires, this moment will be cemented into the history of the NFL. It might even be a point on the timeline of the sport adapting to the dangers of concussions.
The fact that we’re living in a post-Hamlin world is also a major factor. The fact that someone could die on the field isn’t a hypothetical in the NFL anymore. The football world had to grapple with that possibility, and it raised the question of “How long can we keep playing this sport?” into the national consciousness. It’s not the first time the sport has faced the question, but it is the first time it’s happened since American Football made the jump from an Ivy League hobby to a billion-dollar colossus of a business.
As gross as it is to think of these human moments as “business,” you reliably count on the NFL to do exactly that. It won’t be a good PR story to see a star like Tagovailoa retire so young, but the worst-case scenario for Tagovailoa’s return to the field could be downright apocalyptic for the league. Is it possible that the NFL would intervene to discourage or even stop him from returning to the field? These are the kinds of questions we’re facing as we enter uncharted territory.
Again, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we don’t even know what should happen. All we can say is that last night felt different than before, and that it’s possible things might never be the same afterward.
Up Next