When Tua Tagovailoa went down with a concussion in Week 2, it called his very future with the Miami Dolphins, not to mention the NFL as a whole, into question.
With multiple concussions on his resume since being drafted in the first round, including a pair of brutal injuries in 2022 that cost him five games in total, Tagovailoa is handling his latest trip to IR differently than most, consulting with independent experts who will, according to Kevin Seifert of ESPN, have no interfacing with the NFL or the Dolphins.
“Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who has been on injured reserve since Sept. 17 after suffering the third documented concussion of his pro career, is ‘seeing top experts’ around the country, NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills told reporters during a conference call,” Kevin Seifert wrote for ESPN.
“But other than enforcing the concussion protocol it administrates along with the NFL Players Association, Sills said the league will not have a role in determining when — or if — Tagovailoa returns to the field.”
Will fans get to see Tagovailoa on an NFL field ever again? Yes, he will eventually return to the Dolphins’ organization one way or another, but whether he actually plays another snap for the team remains to be seen, as his next appearance could be to announce his injury-induced retirement.
Dr. Allen Sills warns about Tua Tagovailoa’s future concussion risks
Discussing the broader issues surrounding repeated concussions and how they could impact someone long-term, Sills noted that each patient needs to handle their situations individually, as there is no one-size-fits-all for someone dealing with multiple concussions in such a short period of time.
“It’s not like we can put in your number of concussions and how long between them and your age and some unusual constant or Avogadro’s number that always seemed to be in freshman chemistry somehow and come up with a risk,” Sills explained via ESPN.
“It just doesn’t work that way. So what we end up having to do is look at the totality of the patient’s experience, how many concussions, the interval between those concussions, some about duration of symptoms after each concussion, and then very much the patient’s voice about where they are in their journey, their career, their age and things of that nature. And from that, we try as medical professionals to provide our best guess. But that’s really what it is, is a guess at what is someone’s future risk of concussion.”
With multiple bad concussions as a member of the Miami Dolphins alone, Tagovailoa is risking more than future injury by returning to the football field but also his long-term quality of life. Whether or not he returns to the field in the future, therefore, should solely be based on his own assessment based on the information provided by his doctors and experts.
