Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa is expected to resume his NFL career and play again for the Miami Dolphins at some point this season, Coach Mike McDaniel said Monday.
By Mark Maske
McDaniel did not provide a firm timetable for Tagovailoa’s return to the field.
“There’s still information that he’s seeking this week,” McDaniel said at a news conference. “And as far as timelines go, I know he’s not playing this week. And I do expect to see him playing football in 2024. But where that is exactly, we’ll let the process continue since we still have time before you even could entertain anything. So we’ll make sure that he’s diligent this week and assess after that.”
The Dolphins are returning from their bye week to play Sunday at the Indianapolis Colts, the fourth game that Tagovailoa will have missed since suffering a concussion Sept. 12 against the Buffalo Bills. He was injured when he lowered his head into a jarring collision with Bills safety Damar Hamlin while running with the football.
Mike McDaniel says for the first time that he expects Tua Tagovailoa to play football again in 2024 pic.twitter.com/7dHx44D9JR
— Adam Beasley (@AdamHBeasley) October 14, 2024
“I know that he is seeing top experts,” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said in a recent video conference with reporters. “Not only the experts locally [to] the club but also some other experts across the country. And he’s going to be fully supported by the Dolphins’ medical staff.”
Some experts not involved in Tagovailoa’s care and other observers, both inside and outside the NFL, have said that he should consider retirement. Sills said recently that the decisions about whether and when to play will be Tagovailoa’s to make, once he is cleared under the NFL’s concussion protocol.
“In that sense about someone continuing their career after multiple concussions, it’s really not that different than day-to-day medical practice,” Sills said. “I’m a surgeon. If I walk in and talk to a patient in the room and I recommend that they have an operation for a variety of reasons and I outline those reasons and I give them the risks and the benefits of that surgery, then ultimately it’s the patient’s decision whether they want to have that surgery done or not. … Patient autonomy and medical decision-making really matters.
“And I think that’s what we have to recognize goes on with our concussion protocol as well is ultimately when patients make decisions about considering their careers, it has to reflect that autonomy that’s generated from discussions with medical experts giving them best medical advice.”
The NFL’s return-to-play procedures stipulate that Tagovailoa must be cleared by an independent neurological expert.
“We unfortunately do not have a detailed formula that can predict future risk of injury,” Sills said recently. “It’s not like we can put in your number of concussions and how long between them and your age and some unusual constant … and come up with a risk. It just doesn’t work that way. So what we end up having to do is look at the totality of the patient’s experience, how many concussions, the interval between those concussions, some about duration of symptoms after each concussion, and then very much the patient’s voice about where they are in their journey, their career, their age and things of that nature. And from that, we try as medical professionals to provide our best guess. … The final answer is it’s very difficult to predict.”
The league “doesn’t have a role in these individual decisions by players and their caregivers about their health-care decisions,” Sills said.
