“I couldn’t believe what I saw last Sunday. It was just something that was just astonishing to see. I’ve been coaching for 40 years … never seen anything like it before. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
-John Harbaugh, speaking Friday about Tua coming back into the game in Week 3 after being (clearly) concussed so badly that he couldn’t walk two feet without falling down. Tua, of course was then subsequently cleared to play four days later in a game where he suffered such a brutal head injury in a primetime game that millions of people watched as his hands did the gruesome “fencing reflex,” a neurological reaction to severe brain trauma.
I’ll try not to get too deep into the weeds on this one, as you are gonna be bombarded for days and weeks about it by people somehow way more annoying than me. But as I am finishing this up the day after the Dolphins/Bengals game it feels remiss to not at least chime in.
Mina Kimes commented on Twitter how stunned she was to hear a coach speaking so candidly about the situation, which just goes to show how far up its own ass the NFL is about literally everything. Harbaugh only vaguely hinted at condemnation, which he would most certainly deny if pressed further. He merely expressed the same level of incredulity that one might over any number of Nathaniel Hackett’s coaching decisions (which, admittedly is a lot). Yet, this is somehow revolutionary, because by nature, most NFL coaches are borderline sociopaths who inherently toe even the most detestable party-line.
Two separate neurologists apparently cleared Tua to go back into the game last Sunday, and they later ruled it a back injury (seriously, wtf), and the stumbling induced by a temporary (and somehow not serious?) nerve response. They also claim Tua was checked for concussion symptoms every day between Sunday and Thursday. Which, if I may be candid (am I ever not?), is some all-time Republican-grade bullshit. I’ve seen every early-era Tyson fight (and most of the others) and Tua was straight-up KO’d. That’s how people walk when you knock them the fuck out.
Someone else asked on Twitter: “[T]hrow out ‘the doctor cleared him’… If your kid suffered an injury like Tua did on Sunday would you support them playing in a thursday game?” A lot of the responses were along the lines of “He’s a professional adult who gets paid millions of dollars, not a kid. He gets to make his own decision.” Which is also some all-time codswallop. Tua is an NFL quarterback. On a hot streak. Playing for a rising AFC contender. He’s trained to feel invincible. He’s never going to voluntarily sit. He’d go in to play with a broken neck and two broken ankles if you let him, and the Grit is the Only Thing That Matters crowd would praise him for it. He’d play with his skull split open and his brains spilling out his ears, and they would lionize the performance like it was the Bloody Sock Game (fuck Curt Schilling till he dies, btw). So he is innately incapable of making short-term decisions about his long-term health when every single win matters so much.
His coach is the one who has to make the call for him, and McDaniel chose the win over his QB’s long-term health. The Dolphin’s first year coach is avidly denying responsibility for putting Tua in harm’s way, just as anyone who clearly made such a heinously selfish mistake would do. In that case, the NFL has to do it for him, but we know how that goes. They are only swayed by public opinion when it might affect their bottom line, and perhaps this is bad enough to qualify. But as usual, they’ll lop off the head of somebody insignificant like the neurologist, throw some completely ineffectual band-aids at the situation, and wait till it blows over and everyone forgets so they can get back to business. A mere flea flicked from the back of a monstrosity, fueled by a culture of denial and greed.
Look, I get that people want to see Tua play over Bridgewater. So do I! It absolutely sucks that he shouldn’t. The 2022 Dolphins are a fun team, representing a franchise that hasn’t won shit since 1974. I’ve got Tyreek on my fantasy team. I too admire NFL players’ seemingly superhuman ability to play through intense pain and put their bodies on the line for our entertainment. But in a purely pragmatic manner, instead of Tua missing one and half games by caring about his safety, he might now miss a whole lot more. But even if he doesn’t, on a human level, these players aren’t robots. They deserve our empathy. Every NFL player knows that broken bones, torn ligaments, lacerated organs are possible consequences from the game. But a broken brain can destroy a guy’s life. The instinct to gut it out through any and all adversity makes the sport great. But sometimes we gotta care enough about these guys to protect them from their own greatness.
“That’s Tom Brady, what do you want me to do?”
-Bucs WR Mike Evans to the refs that threw him out of the game against New Orleans, after he charged into the middle of a quickly escalating fracas that the 5-years-from-qualifying-for-AARP QB was in the midst of, and leveled his arch-nemesis, Saints Corner Marshon Lattimore, setting off a full-fledged, sideline-clearing brawl.
We’re all happy to have a WR/CB duo that is fueled by pure animosity on our screens again, aren’t we? Intra-divisional battles between teams that genuinely dislike each other are always fun. Guys who charge in to protect their teammates, even if they way overdo it? Good shit.
But wait a second… Hold Up [*record scratch*] More importantly, are we sure that’s Tom Brady? Have you seen his (its) face recently? No? Well, here you go:
Remember when Brady mysteriously disappeared from training camp for eleven days in August? The picture above is from his first press conference upon returning from the sudden absence, and boy did it roil up a pretty robust Twitter theory that he had used his time off to undergo some pretty significant facial enhancement surgery.
Which is patently ridiculous, of course. I don’t mean it’s ridiculous to think that he would do such a thing, because Tom Brady is a weird fucking dude who has a very long history of questionable aesthetic choices. Making his jaw look like it belongs to a cartoon villain is exactly the kind of thing Alex Guererro, the Wormtongue of TB12, might talk him into as part of becoming The Perfect Specimen. Yet I still have a hard time believing that, barring a serious injury to his face, Brady would consider an elective cosmetic procedure a worthwhile reason to miss crucial prep time with his coaches and teammates. Sure, the HOFer has seen every little thing there is to see in the NFL, and camp doesn’t really mean as much to him as it does to literally every other player on the team, and possibly in the league. What’s new that Brady’s gonna learn? He knows how to win already, and he has even done it with pretty much this same offense.
So sure, if anyone has earned the right to miss 11 days of camp, it’s the dude who has been to ten Super Bowls and only lost three of them (and oh what satisfying losses they were). But Brady also has an obsessive work ethic (remember this is a guy who could not even retire for more than 40 days), a razor sharp attention to detail, and a compulsive desire to get every single thing right. He’s not giving that up for a little bit of GigaChad vanity.
The prevailing theory is, of course, that he left to save his marriage, which he imperiled by unretiring before St. Patrick’s Day even hit. Sure, okay. But I think that’s only part of it. I think it’s pretty obvious that what happened was that at some point during the spring Brady (with the NFL’s help) enlisted the military (big sponsor of the NFL, if you hadn’t noticed – politically, the organization remains firmly lodged in 2004), Boston Dynamics, IBM, and Amazon’s Next Gen Stats to create a cyborg version of himself, in order to save both his health and his marriage. It was finally ready in August, so he went to go help with the final touches before having it secretly delivered to camp. Then he went to hide out with the family, I think this is the only reasonable explanation, and also explains why he hasn’t looked quite the same under center. It certainly can’t be because he the entire offense is a walking infirmary and he is literally as old as Jason Alexander is in this picture:
ASTRAL GEEKS FFL 
