Steelers QB Kenny Pickett yesterday cleared concussion protocol but after a subsequent series left for the game for goodGetty Images
The NFL’s "game-day concussion 'protocol' -- the practice of evaluating a player on the spot to determine if he should return to a game -- is fundamentally flawed," according to Joe Starkey of the PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE. If symptoms “don’t always manifest immediately, how could medical professionals administer a legitimate real-time diagnosis?” The "safe and sensible move would be this: If doctors are concerned enough to examine a player for a concussion, that player should be removed from the game and evaluated later in the week.” Steelers QB Kenny Pickett yesterday went to the blue medical tent “after getting ragdolled to the ground” by Ravens LB Roquan Smith. CBS sideline reporter Melanie Collins shortly after said, “He has cleared protocol,” and Pickett returned to the game. Then, after a three-and-out on which he was not touched, Pickett "left for good, presumably because symptoms appeared.” Or, maybe it was because Pickett “decided to be honest about his symptoms.” It is “all the more reason why a player should be removed, no matter what, if he merely gets to the point where he is evaluated for a concussion” (PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, 12/11).
BRAINS ARE TRICKY: Steelers coach Mike Tomlin later explained that Pickett was pulled from the game “when he ‘became symptomatic.’” THE RINGER’s Rodger Sherman writes this would "imply that Pickett suffered a concussion, somehow went through test after test with the league’s independent neurologists and seemed fine, and then, 15 minutes later, started to show symptoms.” Sherman: "Maybe that’s what happened. Brains are tricky." But if that is the case, it "raises more questions than it answers.” Why is the NFL’s protocol “so heavily based on immediate sideline evaluations when the possibility exists for delayed reactions?” (THE RINGER, 12/12).
