It took five days. And it landed just after 4:00 p.m. ET on a Friday.
The NFL and NFL Players Association have issued a joint statement defending the process that allowed Bills quarterback Josh Allen to return to action in the fourth quarter of a Week 5 game against the Texans, after striking his head on the ground and appearing to be in some degree of distress.
He missed two minutes and thirty seconds of game time, and six minutes and six seconds of actual time. Someone offered Allen smelling salts before he re-entered the game.
Here’s the statement that was issued to Tom Pelissero of the league’s in-house media operation. (As best we can tell, the statement wasn’t widely distributed; we definitely didn’t receive it.)
“The NFL and NFLPA have reviewed the reports from the Unaffiliated Neurotrauma Consultant and Booth Spotters and those reports confirm that the steps required by the concussion protocol were followed in the evaluation and clearance of Bills’ quarterback Josh Allen in last Sunday’s game.
“The protocol has been jointly developed and is jointly administered by the NFL and NFLPA. Under the program the parties jointly identify, retain and train Unaffiliated Neurotrauma Consultants and Booth Spotters.”
Pelissero added a supplement, which isn’t in the statement.”Both the league and union reviewed the video of the play and came to the same conclusion as the unaffiliated neurotrauma consultants, booth spotters and team medical staff,” Pelissero’s follow-up declares. “There was no loss of consciousness.”
Loss of consciousness obviously isn’t the threshold for removal from play. The concern was, and still is, whether the evaluation was performed slowly and deliberately enough to come to a conclusion that Allen should have had a locker-room evaluation — or that he shouldn’t have returned.
We’ve got no reason to doubt the unnamed Unaffiliated Neurotrauma Consultant or the unnamed Booth Spotters referenced in the bare-bones, self-serving statement. The broader question, again, is whether the in-game protocol is a checklist that can be expedited in a plastic tent on the sideline of a raucous 70,000-seat stadium, or whether it’s healthcare.
The late John Madden advocated for patience and prudence with players who are suspected of suffering concussions. The league and the union continue to utilize a process that would both permit and, five days later, ratify what we saw on Sunday. Right or wrong, it can be concluded by reasonable minds the events did not reflect patience or prudence. It reasonably reflected urgency to get the losing team’s quarterback back on the field, as soon as possible.
If the league, the union, and the player are fine with this approach, so be it. And the protocol will likely stay this way — until someone is cleared to return from a concussion when he shouldn’t have been cleared, sustains another one in the same game, and experiences a serious health consequence.
