On Thursday night, Tua Tagovailoa was seen scrambling for a first down, but instead of slipping, he ran headfirst into Damar Hamlin’s arms and fell to the ground.
For the second time in three years, the Miami Dolphins star quarterback appeared to have a fencing reaction on “Thursday Night Football.” Flashbacks to his injury against the Cincinnati Bengals in 2022 sparked understandable fear and concern on social media feeds. “Oh, that’s tough, Tua,” “Not again.”
Unlike in 2022, Tagovailoa was carted off on a stretcher and walked out of the game under his own power on Thursday night. Minutes later, he was diagnosed with the third concussion of his NFL career, including another at Alabama.
I’m not in a position to tell Tagovailoa to retire — I’m not a doctor, I’m not one of Tagovailoa’s aides, and I’ve never had a concussion myself — but when former NFL players (not football critics, but actual stars) start telling me he should retire, I have to wonder if they have a point.
“I truly hope Tua is OK, but he should seriously consider resting,” Shannon Sharpe wrote on Twitter. “And that’s a good thing, as his concussion is getting worse and he’s a young man with a lot of life ahead of him.”
“Yes…NFL, do the right thing.” Dez Bryant reportedly argued that the league should step in and force Tagovailoa to retire.“Tua has had too many concussions. Due to health concerns, he needs to retire.”
Sharpe and Bryant aren’t the only ones whose opinions are not given much respect. During the postgame show on Amazon Prime, Tony Gonzalez said he was “considering retirement,” before awkwardly adding with a terrible choice of words: “For me, it’s a no-brainer.”
“Part of the discussion is going to be whether he should play anymore. Ever. That’s the reality. It makes me feel bad. But that’s part of the discussion right now. We just want him to be safe and healthy,” former player and front-office executive Louis Riddick said.
Some keyboard reactionaries will say Tagovailoa knew what he was signing up to going into his football career, and that the concussion thing is overblown. The issue is that there is no law dictating whether tackle football should be legal for everyone, or at what age you should start tackling. That’s a separate issue. We’re not agonizing over what will happen when the hits start. For Tagovailoa, the hits are already here.
Keep in mind, Tagovailoa has already admitted to considering retirement after a tough 2022 season in which he surprisingly cleared concussion protocol in Week 3, shocked the football world in Week 4 and then suffered another concussion in December, less than two years after the injury.
Amazon sideline reporter Kaylee Hartung reported that Tagovailoa was awake and had movement in all of his limbs late in Thursday’s game, and that his family was with him in the locker room. His mother has asked him to reconsider his playing career in the 2023 offseason. This time, the family’s pleas may be stronger.
Whatever Tagovailoa decides to do, his NFL career will be defined by his struggles with concussions. We know too much about CTE to ever ignore a player with a history of concussions again. Different people recover differently, but at the end of the day, we only have one brain.
