What should have been a simple situation became far more complication on Sunday, when the various persons put in place to protect players from themselves when they possibly have suffered concussions failed to protect Rams quarterback Case Keenum from himself.
To the neutral observer, it was obvious: Keenum needed to be removed from the game and checked for a concussion. So why didn’t the team, the officials, or (most importantly) the ATC spotter accomplish that?
The early story-and-we’re-sticking-to-it seems to be that the ATC spotter didn’t feel compelled to call down to the sidelines to exercise the ATC spotter’s unilateral right to stop the game for medical reasons, because a member of the Rams training staff went onto the field to talk to Keenum.
That’s not an acceptable explanation; the notion of independence was introduced into concussion evaluations six years ago to ensure that team employees would not have the final say on whether a team’s player who may be concussed returns to action. Unless the ATC spotter saw Keenum being evaluated by an independent neurologist, the ATC spotter should not have deferred to the inherently conflicted evaluations of a team employee.
Rams coach Jeff Fisher apparently disagrees with that assessment.
“You can not under these circumstances place blame on anybody,” Fisher told reporters on Monday, via Kevin Seifert on ESPN.com. Frankly, the right approach is to put the blame on everybody.
Even though Fisher was focused on game management, the trainer whom Fisher employs failed to get Keenum to the sideline for an evaluation. That alone justifies a helping of blame for the Rams, Fisher, and the trainer.
The game officials, who were on the field and surely able to see Keenum struggling to get up after his head hit the turf, deserve blame, too.
Ultimately, the ATC spotter gets the bulk of the blame on this one for assuming that simply because a person on the team’s payroll walked onto the field, that person would under the specific crunch-time circumstances of the game have the nerve to remove the first-string quarterback from play.
To its credit, the league office isn’t willing to simply shrugs its shoulders and say, “Stuff happens.” Via Chris Mortensen of ESPN, the NFL will conduct a mandatory conference call on Tuesday with all head athletic trainers aimed at preventing these situations from occurring.
And here’s the ultimate problem, as Mortensen explained it: “Close game, it’s your starting quarterback. What are you gonna do? You have to do the right thing.”
The right thing is to remove the player from action for a concussion evaluation, even if it turns out to be the wrong thing for the team. After all, yanking a key player who didn’t have a concussion but missed five or 10 minutes (or more) of real time in a key phase of the game creates a competitive disadvantage. Still, given what we now know about head injuries, ensuring that a player who took the hit that Keenum absorbed and demonstrated the behaviors we all saw afterward, the only thing to do is to get him off the field.
It’s a pass/fail situation, and the NFL failed on this one. The NFL seems to be willing to admit it, even if those directly or indirectly responsible for it aren’t.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
NFL to conduct conference call with all head athletic trainers on Tuesday