Few sports glorify toughness and playing through pain more than football. Generating and enduring collisions, then acting like they don’t hurt, are central to the game’s ethos. But a parade of injuries accompany the hits. That inevitably produces tension between impaired athletes who want to perform – abetted by those who want them to perform – and those who possess the cooler heads that supposedly prevail.
Doctors fall into the cautionary category, or should. So it’s no surprise a recently formed consortium of ACC team physicians joined the league’s top administrators in advancing a plan to oversee player welfare from the press box during games.