How sports media should have covered Tua's injury
A lot of really smart, really talented sports journalists are asking the Miami Dolphins and the NFL tough questions today. They were asking them last night too, after Tua Tagovailoa suffered a severe head injury in Thursday night's Miami-Cincinnati game.
Why was Tua cleared to play so quickly and cleanly after suffering what, to most observers, looked like a head injury four days earlier Buffalo? Why did he return so quickly to that game? Why did the team claim it was a back and ankle injury, in spite of the visual evidence?
They are smart, talented journalists asking good tough questions today.
Questions that should have been asked on Monday and Tuesday.
That's what stuck out to me watching the story unfold on social media Thursday night. Where was all this concern for Tua in the days leading up to the game? Why is that that journalists accepted the teams’s word as gospel?
Why was coverage about Miami's surprising 3-0 start, rather than this potential injury to a potential star player?
Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Legacy Foundation posed this question on Twitter before the game.
If Nowinski could see it, where was the football media?
To be fair, this actually raises a really important and interesting question. What do you do when your sources lie or mislead you? What do you do when the source lies or mislead you, but you have no conclusive proof or way to get at the truth?
In this case, we all saw what we saw on Sunday. But as my pal Michael Mirer tweeted, the solution is not necessarily to have football beat writers diagnosing injuries from the press box. I can tell you that medical diagnostics are not a part of the sports journalism program I lead at St. Bonaventure.
But what is a part of the program is the Concussion Legacy Foundation's Concussion Reporting Workshop, which teaches young journalists about spotting the signs of head injuries and how to responsibly report on them. Any sports journalism professor reading this should run the workshop for their students, and I think it should be mandatory for members of the Pro Football Writer's Association and the Football Writers of America Association.
I reached out to Brandon Boyd, the foundation's education programs manager who runs the workshop, and asked him what journalist’s should do when we see what we think is evidence of a head injury but the team is lying or misleading the media. Here's what he said:
Journalists are put in a tough position when they see such obvious concussion signs of a concussion but get a conflicting report from the team. In those instances, we recommend outlining the specifics of concussion protocol and then press as much as possible to get details on why concussion was not the diagnosis.
The NFL’s concussion protocol is easily available online. You can’t (and shouldn’t) try to go in and force an alternative diagnosis, but you can relay the details of the protocol to explain what had to have happened to clear Tua from a concussion. CBS’ Jonathan Jones did a really good job of explaining how the protocol would have had to determine Tua’s “gross motor instability” was not due to neurological causes in this Twitter thread.
After outlining protocol, it’s about asking the hard questions to team representatives about what happened. In this case, the question to ask was, “Specifically, how did Tua’s back injury cause his balance to be off as obviously as it was on Sunday?” We got the back/ankle injury substitution, but I never saw any specifics about how the back injury was connected to the imbalance. A somewhat similar situation occurred in the NWSL in 2019 when Rose Lavelle was labeled with a “general head injury” after a suspected concussion. Jeff Kassouf of The Equalizer did a really nice job investigating that label and incorporating protocol into the conversation in this story.
For more info on the workshop, click here. (This is not a paid endorsement. I think it's a critical skill for all journalists to have, as Thursday's game showed us.)