Another week of head injuries shows college football’s concussion problem isn’t going away

Oklahoma hung on to beat TCU Saturday, extending the Sooners’ hopes to make the College Football Playoff. But star quarterback Baker Mayfield didn’t return for the Sooners after halftime, after sustaining a big hit that got a TCU linebacker ejected for targeting.

That hit occurred with almost 13 minutes left in the second quarter. So whatever part of that hit convinced Oklahoma that it needed to pull Mayfield from the game, the Sooners didn’t decide on it for almost a full quarter. That’s particularly concerning if it was a head injury for Mayfield, and by all accounts, it appears that was the case.

Mayfield’s injury was the second troubling head injury of the day. Maryland quarterback Caleb Rowe, who sustained a concussion during Saturday’s game against Indiana, called for help from the sideline after a hit to the helmet, went out for less than a minute of game, then inexplicably came back in.

That’s three high-profile situations in the past two weeks. And it’s not to say that these coaches are clearly in the wrong, or that they are valuing winning at all costs. We don’t know what happens in the locker room. But what we do know is that, just like us, many coaches have absolutely no idea how to handle possible concussions. Here’s what Maryland coach Mike Locksley had to say:

“I don’t [know when he suffered the concussion],” Locksley said. “But I do know our athletic administration has protocols for concussions. I know the Big Ten has spotters upstairs that is involved. I don’t know what had happened. I just recall them telling me going into halftime that he was out. I know that he came out for a play but obviously the medical people and the spotters and all those people that’s involved followed the protocol that we have in place, and that’s who we played the game.”

“I do know our athletic administration has protocols for concussions.” That sounds great, but there are no uniform concussion protocols in college football. It’s really entirely up to the schools to do whatever they want. So if they want to ask their quarterback to recite the alphabet and assume that’s enough, they’re allowed to. The NCAA, fearing financial responsibility, does not punish schools for failing to apply proper concussion standards.

This is still a very primitive, wild west kind of practice, even though it doesn’t need to be. And that’s scary. Even more scary is the fact that many of these decisions aren’t made solely by trainers. In a recent survey, 42 percent of college trainers had to fight with coaches over concussions, and 53 percent “said they had felt pressure from football coaches to return a student to play faster than they thought was in his best interest medically.” According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, one trainer left Washington State after concerns about how coach Mike Leach dealt with concussions. Two former Pac-12 trainers also said they lost their jobs over concussion disagreements with coaches.

“It was scary,” said one trainer, who left a prominent California university over the conflict. “It was uncomfortably close to infringing on the medical well-being of the athlete.”

Here’s what we do know:

The concussion problem is in no way solved, and even as awareness has been raised, we are still woefully unprepared to deal with this issue. But without NCAA intervention, and without real structure, more players will be put in dangerous situations. That needs to change.