After Tua Tagovailoa suffers another high-profile concussion, Eagles players grapple with football’s ‘give and take’

Head injuries once forced Grant Calcaterra to walk away from the sport he loves before he could legally buy a beer. Calcaterra was 20, a Southern California kid playing college football at Oklahoma, when he stepped away from football following his third concussion.

It was a choice he made for himself in 2019, not because of the advice of medical professionals. It was time to look ahead to life after football. Calcaterra wants to one day be a firefighter, and so he applied to be one in Southern California while working in construction. He passed a test to become an emergency medical technician and was about to start working for an ambulance company near his home in Orange County before football pulled him back.

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“At the end of the day, I have a lot of passion for the game and I didn’t want to live the rest of my life wondering what if,” Calcaterra said. “So I just wanted to take my shot. Honestly, I’ve gained such a great perspective because of that whole situation.”

It’s been nearly four years since Calcaterra, an Eagles tight end, returned to football. And while he suffered a minor concussion last season, head injuries aren’t actively on his mind when he’s running routes these days.

“I’m able to go out there and play free and let whatever happens happen,” he said.

But Calcaterra and other Eagles again were presented with another high-profile head injury Thursday night, when Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered his third known concussion late in the third quarter during the second game of his fifth NFL season. What followed was multiple calls for Tagovailoa, who recently signed a four-year, $212.4 million contract extension with the Dolphins, to end his football-playing career. Las Vegas Raiders coach Antonio Pierce said he would advise Tagovailoa to retire. Former NFL receiver Dez Bryant posted on social media that the NFL should “go ahead and do the right thing.” Hall of Fame tight end and analyst Tony Gonzalez said Tagovailoa should seriously think about retiring.

“He needs to, for sure, think about his family,” Eagles cornerback Darius Slay said. “This is a game that you only get to play once. I know he’ll probably want to continue to play because it’s a fun game … but your health do come first. I ain’t going to be his adviser or nothing, because I’m going to let his heart decide on what he wants to do, but I just hope and pray for the best for him.”

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Eagles left guard Landon Dickerson didn’t want to play doctor or adviser either but was hoping that his former teammate at Alabama was all right. He wasn’t watching the injury live Thursday night but saw a replay of it Friday morning.

“I hope that nothing serious or significant comes out of this,” Dickerson said. “It’s a negative part about this profession that we all understand can happen.”

That was the resounding sentiment in the Eagles’ locker room Friday: hopeful that Tagovailoa is OK but cognizance that this is life in the NFL.

“I think at the end of the day, football is a violent sport, and those things are going to happen,” Calcaterra said. “I think the league tries to do things to try and help that problem — improving helmets every year, making rules, and things like that to try to keep it from happening. At the end of the day, we all play this sport, we know it’s violent, we have to play violent, and that’s just kind of the way it is.

Said rookie Eagles receiver Johnny Wilson: “When you’ve got grown men running at each other 20 miles per hour, not saying it’s bound to happen, but there’s a higher chance of it happening. I don’t really see that changing as much as I wish it did.”

One of the first reactions to Tagovailoa’s injury around the league was wondering why the quarterback dove forward instead of sliding to protect himself. It was a fourth-down play, and the Dolphins were trying to erase a 21-point deficit. But it’s a pertinent topic for the Eagles, given how often Jalen Hurts runs with the football. The Eagles’ quarterback was asked Thursday, hours before his former teammate’s injury, about balancing protecting himself and taking contact, specifically during a fourth-quarter run last Friday, when Hurts fought through two defenders for a critical first down.

“There are certain moments in a game where sometimes it’s just, it’s on, and it’s kind of like, make it happen,” Hurts said.

Tagovailoa’s injury came the same week that The Inquirer published a story highlighting how Eagles icons from the ’80s struggle to get compensated through the NFL’s controversial concussion deal. Three members of the 1980 team were found to have the rare neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

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Calcaterra and others said they don’t actively think about the long-term impacts of head injuries in football. The third-year tight end, in addition to mentioning helmet technologies and rule changes, pointed to other advancements like the Eagles giving players access to a hyperbaric chamber, with studies showing that oxygen therapy can increase healing in the brain.

“There’s positive and negatives to every profession,” Dickerson said. “I don’t go into games thinking I’m going to get hurt. It’s there, but it’s not at the forefront of your mind. If there’s a D tackle in front of me, I’m not thinking about how my back is going to feel when I’m 55.”

Wilson, whom the Eagles drafted in the sixth round this past spring out of Florida State, suffered a concussion during training camp. That concussion came less than a year after Wilson was concussed during a Florida State victory over Duke in October.

“Brain injuries are never an easy thing,” the 23-year-old Wilson said. “For my family, they were there when I suffered a concussion in college last year. They were scared, and they told me, at the end of the day, football is going to last so long, but you have a whole life ahead of you. That kind of stuck with me because I want to have a family, I want to do things after this is all over, and I want to be healthy.”

Therein lies the dilemma. Football, right now, is more than a game Wilson loves. It’s his ticket to enjoying those things in the way he eventually wants to.

“It’s a give and take,” he said. “You give your body to this game to reap the benefits at the end.”