FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

Luke Falk, Mike Leach, and College Football's Ongoing Concussion Conundrum

Washington State's thrilling win over UCLA also highlighted college football's myriad problems with brain trauma.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Something happened deep into last Saturday night at the Rose Bowl, one of those funky insomniac Pac-12 miracles that topped off yet another 15-hour tableau of televised college football. With his school trailing UCLA by three points, the quarterback for the Washington State Cougars, Luke Falk, rolled to his right and hurled a game-winning touchdown pass, thereby transforming a team that appeared dead to the world after a season-opening loss to Portland State into one of the most redemptive stories of 2015.

Advertisement

And really, I hope that's the whole of this story. I have already mentioned on this site and others that I am not completely objective when it comes to the fortunes of Washington State coach Mike Leach: I find him one of the most purely interesting people I have ever interviewed in a professional capacity, and I hope he remains in coaching forever just for the entertainment value. Just last week, Leach turned his press conference into a referendum on the overratedness of both Johnny Rotten and Donna Summer. Why a reporter asked him about a question about Neil Young, I'll never know, but that's not important right now.

Read More: Georgia Special Teams Coach Injures Player With Celebratory Head Slap

Falk is the latest in a long line of astoundingly prolific quarterbacks under the Leach Air Raid system. A former walk-on, he's led several late comebacks for the Cougars, who moved to 7-3 after the win at the Rose Bowl. In a year when the Heisman Trophy race has transformed from essentially a one-man competition into an open audition, there's little doubt that Falk has at least vaulted into the conversation. There are so many wonderful elements to this story of a long dormant Pac-12 football program reviving its fortunes—except that what happened to Falk in the second quarter against UCLA was the kind of moment that tends to sober you up pretty damned quickly. It was the kind of thing that—even if no one technically did anything wrong, and even if the system worked the way it was supposed to—made you wonder, once more, what we know and what we don't know about football and concussions and the violence inherent to this sport.

Advertisement

Yes to pirates; no to Johnny Rotten. Photo by Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

This is what happened: dropping back on a pass play, Falk faced pressure, and he couldn't escape. His arms were pinned to his sides by a UCLA defender and, with no way of bracing his fall, he went down hard on the side of his head. He crawled along the grass, tried to get up, and couldn't. The thought was that Falk probably had a concussion; there were shots of a team trainer carrying Falk's helmet on the sideline to keep it away from him. But then Falk went in at halftime and underwent a concussion protocol. And he passed.

Asked about it afterward, Falk insisted the protocol he underwent was extensive. He said he "got his bell rung a little," which is the kind of phrase that I hoped we'd stricken from the Great Big Book of Football Clichés by now. He said he felt fine and he passed the tests "with flying colors," which is exactly what you'd expect any athlete to say in a situation like this one. Leach, his coach, said that he had nothing to do with the decision; he said the doctors told him Falk had passed the tests, and once he'd heard that, he didn't hesitate to insert Falk back into the game.

I would like to think Leach would not be callous enough to put pressure upon team trainers to clear Falk, especially given the concussion-related controversy that (fair or unfair, politically related or not) cost him his job at Texas Tech; at this point, there appears to be no reason to suspect that. This episode, however, calls attention to the fact that the NCAA's concussion protocol is still very much a work in progress. It calls attention to the fact that the NCAA is embroiled in several lawsuits over concussions, and it calls attention to the fact that even the published concussion policy for a school like Washington State leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. There is a Concussion Protocol Safety Committee that oversees and reviews these policies, but there are no uniform penalties for violators (except in the Big Ten, where the penalty structure remains somewhat unclear) "because some people aren't doing it correctly," according to Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby. "They want to have local control and their coaches saying, 'I don't want to be told what to do on the sideline.'"

There is an argument to be made that penalties might be a form of second-guessing, a way of overregulating the problem. I get that, but I also think the bigger problem is the one Bowlsby pointed out: that there are certain coaches who would prefer to have control over decisions that shouldn't be in their hands anymore.

Again, I have no reason to believe that anything untoward or sinister happened at the Rose Bowl on Saturday night—but this raises the other issue inherent to concussion science, which is that there is so much we don't know at this point. Concussion science is imperfect, and concussion protocols can fail, and maybe Luke Falk was perfectly fine, but it's not hard to wonder if he wasn't fine and he managed to pass the test anyway. Later that night, between jarring hit and redemptive touchdown pass, Falk slid down on a quarterback keeper and nearly took a severe blow to the head from a UCLA defender who probably should have been ejected for targeting. You couldn't help but wonder in that moment, What if something terrible had happened?

Luke Falk reportedly passed a halftime concussion protocol, but was he OK? Photo by Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

I wish this could be strictly a column about the redemption of Washington State, because I want to believe in the miracle, but it's become more and more difficult to feel completely comfortable with a moment like this, to simply brand Falk with musty adjectives like "tough" and "gritty" and not deconstruct and contemplate what those words really mean anymore. It's a hell of a story, what's happening in Pullman, and I hope it's as real as it seems. As with so many things associated with college football these days, though, I can't help but wonder if there's something about the system that isn't quite working.