An ex-Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach has excoriated his former NFL franchise for sending a player back onto the field on Sunday night with a concussion—the second such fumble in recent days.
Just a week after concussion experts slammed the Miami Dolphins for seemingly putting quarterback Tua Tagovailoa in harm’s way, Bucs tight end Cameron Brate slammed into receiver Chris Godwin and hit his head on the turf shortly before half-time in Sunday night’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Brate was “shaken up and slow to get up,” NBC’s Mike Tirico said during the broadcast. He was able to gingerly jog off to the sideline but was back on the field after a “two-minute” chat with the head trainer and a team doctor, according to sideline reporter Melissa Stark. Brate never entered the blue medical tent, NBC Sports reported, and re-entered the game after just a few plays.
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He then played an entire drive before entering concussion protocol and being ruled out in the second half.
“Broken system,” Tony Dungy, a former player and head coach who spent 13 seasons with the Bucs and Indianapolis Colts, wrote on Twitter.
“I was on the sideline very close to Brate,” he continued. “[O]bvious he had his bell rung. There’s a league appointed spotter in the press box who should stop play & alert the referee. Brate shouldn’t have been allowed to return until after an evaluation. Why didn’t that happen???”
In a second tweet, he said that coaches, team doctors, and game officials can step in, too. “But the league appointed spotter has the ability to buzz the referee, stop the game and mandate that player leave the game to be evaluated—no penalty or timeout charged to the team.”
Dr. Chris Nowinski, a neuroscientist who specializes in concussions and CTE, fumed last week that the Dolphins’ medical staff and coaches should be fired and thrown in jail after Tagovailoa suffered two possible concussions in five days.
The second head knock caused the star quarterback’s hands and arms to seize up immediately and landed him in the hospital. The first hit five days earlier was listed by the team as a back injury despite being “an obvious concussion,” according to Nowinski.
“Two concussions in 5 days can kill someone. This can end careers. How are we so stupid in 2022,” Nowinski wrote. “You guys should go to jail for letting him play 5 days after an obvious concussion you covered up. If he dies from second-impact syndrome, I’m pushing form [sic] murder charges.”
The NFL Players Association later fired an independent neurotrauma consultant involved in Tagovailoa’s treatment.
Second-impact syndrome occurs when a player suffers a second concussion before their brain has had a chance to fully recover from the first one.
According to the National Library of Medicine, it can kill a player within five minutes. “The athlete will rapidly develop altered mental status and a loss of consciousness within seconds to minutes of the second hit resulting in catastrophic neurological injury,” the library says. “The catastrophic injury results from the dysfunctional cerebral blood flow autoregulation leading to an increase in intracranial pressure. The pressure rapidly develops and eventually results in brain herniation. The herniation may occur either medially across the falx cerebri or inferiorly through the foramen magnum, resulting in brain stem injury and rapid deterioration and leading to death within 2 to 5 minutes.”
