Steve Young proposes NFL head injury cap exemption to remove teams’ financial interests

There’s been a lot of discussion on what could be next for Miami Dolphins’ quarterback Tua Tagovailoa after his concussion last Thursday against the Buffalo Bills.

The concussion marked the third he’s been diagnosed with since entering the NFL, and Tuesday saw the Dolphins place him on injured reserve, meaning he’ll be sidelined for at least the next four weeks. But some of the conversation here has gone into if he should try to return at all, and what role the team should have or not have in that decision. And former NFL QB/ESPN analyst Steve Young had a particularly notable dialogue about a specific dimension there with Amy Trask and Suzy Shuster Tuesday.

That conversation came on the latest episode of Shuster and Trask’s What The Football podcast. The full show with Young (who played in the NFL from 1985-99 and then worked at ESPN for 22 years before being caught in layoffs last summer) is available here, covering a variety of NFL topics. But the four minutes of discussion after Shuster relayed the news of Tagovailoa going on IR are especially interesting:

That has Shuster discussing how Tagavailoa will now have time to visit top neurologists and consult with his family. And that sees Young (who experienced a number of concussions throughout his playing career; he spoke about his own experiences there with Dan Patrick Monday) talk about how the neurologists may not have definitive conclusions for him.

“He’ll search for the answers that are not going to be there: what is the risk?” he said.

That led Trask, who worked for the Raiders for more than two decades, including as CEO from 1997-2013, and has been an analyst for CBS and others since, to discuss how teams, in her experience, react to these conversations about players’ head injuries much differently than many of those on the outside might presume.

“And I’ll tell you from a front office perspective, because everything you two both said is of course accurate as to Tua having to make these decisions, speaking with his wife, taking into account his children, this is his decision to make. But I can assure you from the perspective of the front office, there are people in front offices who don’t want players to further jeopardize themselves,” she said.

“And this has nothing to do with money, it has nothing to do with guarantees, it has nothing to do with the team performance. It has to do with compassion. And I want to put to rest forever for anyone who’s listening who think that people in front offices or team owners don’t care, because they do. I remember having discussions with Al [Davis] where the first issue was compassion for the player, ‘Do we want to further jeopardize the player, do we want to put the player at risk?’ So those discussions are going on in the Dolphins’ organization as well, I’m sure.”

Notably, Young responded:

“It feels like we should figure out a way to codify that. In other words, we do know that people are concerned primarily about the player’s health. That being the case, let’s allow for these [potentially] career-ending injuries and decisions that need to be made, especially around head injuries, to not impact the team. In other words, let’s figure out a way so that Tua, whatever he decides, the team…because what cynics will say is if you have a financial incentive for him to play, you’re going to do the wrong thing.

“And what you’re saying, Amy, is that that’s not true. Well, then, let’s put it in the system so that no one can say that because it’s not a financial interest, it’s an exemption. Like, Tua gets paid, and he can decide what he wants, and it doesn’t hurt or help the team. And it might be a nice thing to have, because I think most people, because it’s money involved, now become cynics immediately. Which I understand, because it’s the world we live in, but it doesn’t paint the picture.”

There’s some merit to that idea from Young, especially in the current era where the NFL salary cap is so important and so closely tracked. And it’s worth noting that there’s an existing NFL mechanism that perhaps could work for this with a little tweaking. Players on injured reserve or physically unable to perform lists do count against the salary cap, but players on exempt lists do not.

That’s primarily the Commissioner’s Exempt List, which is essentially paid leave that doesn’t impact the salary cap or roster limits. Players can only be placed there by commissioner Roger Goodell, not teams. It’s often been used after players get into legal trouble (and before the NFL and/or court proceedings there have been fully resolved), but not always; it was used for Cowboys’ receiver CeeDee Lamb this year to give the team roster flexibility while he works back up to game speed after a training camp holdout.

Putting players like Tagavailoa pondering their NFL future on a list like that would mean they still get paid, but would reduce the financial and roster incentives for teams to try and rush them back. It’s worth noting players returning too early is a crucial part of the concussion conversation in many leagues.

While, as Trask and Young say, teams may not be trying to hurry players back anyway, removing the possible financial incentive to do so would certainly help with the discussion around these issues. And an advantage of the Commissioner’s Exempt List is with it being a commissioner decision rather than a team one, it could be used when it makes sense for the league without concerns about teams using it for cap manipulation.

At any rate, this is merely a floated idea at this point rather than an actual proposal. But it’s also one that would seem to have some advantages.

That speaks to the value of NFL discussions that involve people with backgrounds just beyond playing in the league. While Young certainly has a remarkable history there, he’s also known for his private equity work with Huntsman Gay Global Capital, with him even saying in 2017 he prefers making deals and kept his ESPN job mostly because his partners wanted him to stay high-profile. (He did try to walk that back afterwards, but the point remains that he is very, very well-versed in the big business side.)

Meanwhile, Trask brought her background from her front office, legal, and other business work (including time as the CEO and board chair of the BIG3) to this discussion, and Shuster brought her experience from her wide journalism career (including time in sideline reporting on everything from college football to the NBA, work on HBO’s Real Sports, regularly guest-hosting her husband’s The Rich Eisen Show, and more). Shuster told AA last year around the launch of What The Football that she and Trask provide a different podcast than many NFL ones given their perspectives from work in different areas of sports:

“She’s spent a long time in the business, and I’ve been doing television since I was 22. You often find the list of people you actually enjoy working with is pretty brief. So when you find someone you actually really enjoy spending time with, you capitalize on it.

…The difference is that we’ve both been there getting our hands and feet dirty as opposed to opining based on watching it from home on the sofa. I think that’s the biggest difference. I started out working in television the day after I graduated from college, I literally went straight to work the next day, and pretty much haven’t stopped since except for the time I took off to have our three kids.”

Shuster and Trask are continuing to do the work on this second season of What The Football (this was its second episode following the season premiere with Jim Nantz). And that’s making for some quite interesting conversations and ideas, including this one floated by Young.

[What The Football on YouTube and Apple Podcasts]