Rodney Harrison played his entire career before the NFL had its concussion epiphany in October 2009. For 15 seasons with the Chargers and Patriots, Rodney played without fear. He played without regard to his health and well-being. Now, with the benefit of age and wisdom and in light of his own experiences, Rodney had some strong advice on Sunday night for current players who may be tempted to ignore head injuries in order to keep playing.
“Number one, I would say, it’s not worth it,” Harrison said during Football Night in America. “I was that guy. I would get hit, the entire stadium is spinning around, and I would go back into the game. It’s not worth it. I would implore these young men, don’t go back on that football field if you get hurt because I don’t want them to feel like me and so many other former players that had to deal with concussions, whether it’s depression, anxiety, paranoia, broken relationships, not being able to communicate with your spouse, things like that. CTE takes you to a dark place, and I want these players to know it’s not worth it. Please take care of yourself. Don’t depend on the NFL. Don’t depend on anybody. If something’s wrong with your head, report it.”
Former NFL head coach Tony Dungy, who played defensive back in the 1970s, agreed wholeheartedly.
“Your advice is good and it’s true, but we understand that most of the players are like you when you were young,” Dungy said. “They want to play. So those safeguards have to be in place, and they were in place. My last few years of coaching, I had so many guys come to me and say, ‘Coach, I feel good, but they’re not allowing me to play.’ That is the right thing to do. That’s the way it should be. No one wants to send someone out there who is not healthy and is not ready to go, but we can’t rely on the player to tell them. We’ve got to rely on those tests. We’ve got to rely on the neurological findings. That needs to be done.”
At a time when the NFL and NFL Players Association continue to work to improve the concussion protocol to protect players, the simple truth is that, for many players, they have to be protected from themselves.
“Nobody’s going to think you’re soft or weak or anything like that if you’re reporting,” Harrison said. “So, please, I’ll tell you again, please report it if something’s wrong with your head because life after football is serious. Five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, you’re going to feel the effects of CTE.”
The problem, as noted by Maria Taylor, is the fact that players fear, if they step aside, someone else will step in and step up and the player who tapped out will be on the outside looking in.
“It’s a culture of next man up,” Taylor said. “Is someone else going to take my spot? And that fear of being out and being held out will keep you from reporting, but at the same time, those guardrails have to be in place, they have to be monitored, and it really has to be executed perfectly.”
At the end of the day, there’s no way to compel a player to raise his hand when he’s not feeling right, because there’s no way to guarantee that his absence won’t result in someone else taking his job. This makes it even more important that the doctors and spotters and anyone and everyone is looking for anything that would suggest a player possibly has suffered a head injury he may be trying to hide.
It also makes it more important that the doctors intervene when, as we all saw eight days ago with Tua Tagovailoa, a player had no business re-entering the game, regardless of whether he had a head injury or a back injury.