But what can’t be changed summarily by league office fiat is culture. And in football, a sport in which Ronnie Lott once removed part of his pinkie to stay on the field and Jay Cutler was eviscerated as being soft because he wouldn’t return to the field after being injured in the NFC championship game, attitude shift is more difficult to achieve than rule changes.
Remember Week 14? When Steelers linebacker James Harrison delivered a crumpling, helmet-to-helmet blow to Browns quarterback Colt McCoy during a Thursday night game? Anyone who watched the replay winced. Harrison was given a roughing-the-passer penalty (and later suspended and fined).
But McCoy was never given a concussion test on the sideline and, in fact, returned to the field after missing two plays.
In the aftermath, Harrison asked the most pertinent, sobering question regarding the NFL’s proactive concern for players suffering head trauma.
“If he was hurt so bad, I don’t know why they let him back in . . . two plays later,” Harrison said. “Something should be done to them, I would think. I don’t know. I got a game, what should they get?”
What they did get was nothing. Instead, as a direct result of the Browns’ failing to test McCoy for a concussion on the sideline, the NFL told its 32 teams that an independently certified athletics trainer will be assigned to monitor all suspected concussion-related injuries from the press box.
That was another positive step, but it treated the symptom more than the disease. On paper, the league’s directive is clear: Team doctors have final say in a player’s ability to take the field after being tested on the sideline. But the idea that a team-employed trainer’s voice would supersede a head coach’s immediate game needs is still difficult for most players to genuinely grasp.
“Is it realistic for someone to do that? Yes,” Redskins linebacker Lorenzo Alexander said. “But will it happen when you’re trying to win a game you need to win? I don’t know if that will happen. Especially when it’s one of your top two guys.”
Alexander knows of which he speaks. When he returned to the sideline woozy after making a hit during the Redskins’ game against Arizona in the second week of the season, he remembered his helmet was taken from him and he was given a concussion test in the locker room at halftime.
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