I'm a health reporter, and I have a crush on Aaron Rodgers, so maybe I'm being a bit overprotective. But there's something about Sunday's Green Bay Packers game I don't get. After all the attention paid to concussions in the NFL this season, after all the recent Congressional testimony about long-term brain damage football players can get from the sport, and after all the drama over Rodgers suffering two concussions and getting pulled out of one game and missing the next last fall, why haven't there been more questions about what most of us saw Sunday, even if some of us don't want to admit it?
I'm talking about how Rodgers looked and acted right after Bears defensive end Julius Peppers' illegal helmet-to-helmet whack to his head. Rodgers was woozy and wobbling about with dazed eyes. If you didn't notice he was wobbling, surely you noticed his football was wobbling. His magic was gone for the rest of the game. He couldn't even hit the mark with a couple of short passes.
And yet for all the consciousness-raising lately about the dangers of concussions in football, hardly anybody seems to be talking about the possibility that our star quarterback suffered another one yesterday. I mean, those Fox announcers don't stop yakking, but their silence on this was deafening. Nobody on the Green Bay coaching and medical staff on the sidelines called Rodgers over for a check up, either, at least that we could see, and there was little in the papers about the whole thing Monday.
I called Dustin Fink, an athletic trainer from central Illinois who writes theconcussionblog.com, to ask him if he noticed anything weird about Rodgers' behavior after that hit Sunday. Fink, who coaches high school football, told me he sure did. "If this had happened to one of my players on Friday night I would have pulled him off the field, just based on his gaze," Fink says. "We call it the gaze' when we see somebody concussed. It's like they're looking right through you. Their eyes don't look like they're as focused."
There's a big difference between how such situations get handled at the high school and professional levels, though, he says. Prep players' immature brains are at much more risk from the jolting and shaking they get on the field, and coaches now must take them off the field if there is any suspicion at all of a concussion. The kids can not return to play until cleared by a doctor, which can take anywhere from a day to weeks.
The NFL also now forbids a player who suffers a concussion from returning to play without clearance from medical experts not on the team. But there's a catch: it is up to the players themselves, and their trainers and coaches, to admit that someone has suffered a concussion, or may have suffered one. And naturally most pro athletes and teams are loathe to do so, especially during a playoff game. Fink says he would have been "shocked" if Packers staff had hauled Rogers off the field after that smack. And given how tough Rodgers is, he probably was determined to scramble back up to his feet no matter what it took. "If he gets up quickly, even if he does have some symptoms, they can quietly test him for a concussion later," Fink says. "But they almost always will tell you everything is fine. There's a lot riding on this game."
And that is their call, he says. "These guys get paid millions of dollars to make their own decisions," he says. "If they want to go out there and beat their brains out, that's OK."
He is less understanding about the media, noting that one of the announcers, Fox commentator Troy Aikman, has "distanced" himself from the issue even though he was forced to retire from quarterbacking for the Cowboys because of concussions. "The media should have at least asked about it," he says. "But they're afraid to get the NFL mad."
One reporter who hasn't worried about getting the NFL mad is New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz, who has done a bang-up job of riding herd on the issue of NFL players and concussions for years. (For some of his articles on how brain injuries in football have led to serious problems with memory, concentration, speech impediments, depression, and Alzheimer's disease click here.)
On Dec. 17, the New York Times even did a piece on Rodgers and his concussions. It was a feel-good story about how Packers veteran receiver Donald Driver managed to persuade the young quarterback to pull out of the December game against the Lions after sustaining his second concussion of the season.
According to the piece, written by Mark Viera, Driver saw the same look in Rodgers' eyes that some of us worry we saw Sunday. "I was very concerned about him," Driver said. "I kind of whispered in his ear, walked behind him during the time he was sitting on the bench and kind of told him: "This is just a game. Your life is more important than this game.' I told him I love him to death, and you've got to make the choice, but this game is not that important."
So what does the silence mean now? Maybe when it comes to the Super Bowl, the game is that important.