The Dolphins QB is back. He gave a pretty detailed press conference about it.

Tua Tagovailoa is back. He will play football this Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals. The Miami Dolphins quarterback's brain has been a popular and heated topic of conversation for about two years. He suffered a concussion in 2019 while playing college football at Alabama. In 2022, he suffered two diagnosed concussions and lost his balance a week before one of them while trying to stand after his head was thrown back and hit the turf. Dolphins doctors did not diagnose him with a concussion and the team allowed Tagovailoa to finish the game, a decision that seemed absurd and led to changes in NFL policy. In Week 2 this season, Tagovailoa suffered another concussion, at least his fourth in six years.

Since this latest brain injury, few have disputed that Tagovailoa would make the decision to return. “It would be so, so wrong of me to even snoop on this topic,” his head coach Mike McDaniel said the day after the concussion. Not bringing it up was a matter of loving his player. This week, Tagovailoa approved the NFL's concussion testing protocols pending the final, formal step of returning to practice. He's Miami's best quarterback, but no one can blame the team for running him back. If anything, the Dolphins slowed his potential return by placing him on injured reserve, which caused him to miss at least four games. Tagovailoa said Monday that the Dolphins “did the best to protect me from myself.”

It was always a reasonable conclusion that Tagovailoa would return as soon as possible. He is an intense competitor, like all NFL quarterbacks. His father used to hit him with a belt when he played badly, which Tagovailoa has portrayed – strangely to many – as a story about instilling discipline rather than suffering abuse. There may be quarterbacks who shy away from accepting physical punishment to play the position. At no point in his career did Tagovailoa appear to be one of them.

Tagovailoa's return was a possibility. But the press conference he gave on Monday, in which he laid out his thought process regarding a return, was something different. His answers represented a frightening twist in a story that was already causing concern because, in many ways, Tagovailoa's comments were not about himself.

The problem isn't the return of the quarterback itself. A reporter asked Tagovailoa what he would say to people who were worried about him, and he gave an honest, understandable answer. “I appreciate your concern,” the quarterback said. “I really do. I love this game, and I love it to death. This is it.”

It was macabre, but also direct. Tagovailoa knows what he's doing. His eyes are open. Although the injury guarantees surrounding his contract are a matter of legal interpretation, no one is forcing him back. By saying he loves football more than anything, he acknowledges what the sport he loves might cost him.

Or maybe not; that could have been a figure of speech. During much of Monday's 13-minute session with reporters, Tagovailoa minimized the risk of concussions or misleadingly described the state of scientific opinion about them. The QB doesn't owe it to young athletes to end his career on their behalf or to become living proof that some things are bigger than sports. But he owes something else to the athletes who might come after him: not to view concussions as a murky, unclear danger or to describe the potential for suffering them as a routine risk-reward calculation. It is in this special obligation to those who may find themselves in a similar situation that Tagovailoa falls short.

A reporter posed a hypothesis to the quarterback, asking him how he would react if a doctor urged him to take additional time off, supposedly after suffering another concussion. Tagovailoa missed just over a month, although he said he felt symptom-free from the day after his concussion. Would Tagovailoa tell a doctor he wouldn't sit out that long again, or would he rely on their medical opinion?

In his response, Tagovailoa called the discussion about concussions “a thing” that the public began talking about after his injuries in 2022. “Man, I just think it’s based on what that person feels,” he said. “If you feel like you can go, you can go. That's just – I think that's just because of what happened to me two years ago in this sport. I hate that it happened. But we don't see boxers in the same way. We don’t look at hockey players the same way, but I just think it’s becoming more and more of an issue here in the league because of what’s happened and the magnitude that it’s had.”

Tagovailoa is not wrong that his concussions have become a central topic of conversation in football in a way that they wouldn't have been had he played in, say, the 1980s. He is wrong to believe that a greater focus on head injuries is despicable. He is also wrong that the fear of concussions also applies to athletes in other sports. Fights have declined sharply in hockey, with reasonable fear of concussion clearly playing a role. Last year, a study found that NHL “enforcers” died 10 years earlier than their hockey counterparts. Tagovailoa was a protagonist of the concussion story, but by no means its first character.

Another questioner asked Tagovailoa if he had spoken to his doctors about the consequences of another concussion. Did they tell him “it wouldn’t be a problem”? Here, Tagovailoa gave an answer that must have made NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league's lawyers proud. “I think the brain is — there’s just a gray area,” the quarterback said. “If you know that it's going to give you a long-term illness, or if you don't, then I think there's just a lot of gray involved.”

Tagovailoa may have been referring to legitimate disagreements between a consortium of sports medicine experts and scientists who believe they have demonstrated a link between concussions and the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. If so, the assessment that there is a “gray area” regarding the specific relationship between concussions and subsequent brain disease is justified. But there is no gray area at all about whether a fifth or sixth concussion is one It's very bad to have to go through thisand there is certainly no reason to believe that this could not have devastating long-term consequences. Meanwhile, scientists continue to provide new evidence to support their case for a link between concussions and CTE. A massive 2023 study, the largest to date on CTE, found that the cumulative effect of all the blows a player takes to the head is the strongest predictor of whether he will develop the disease. If there is a gray area, it doesn't just concern security.

Tagovailoa also poorly contextualized the risk a football player faces of suffering a concussion, let alone whether the head injury might be his first or his tenth^Th. When asked how much risk he thought he was taking by stepping back behind center, Tagovailoa responded with a question of his own: “Well, how much risk are we taking when we get up in the morning to drive to work?” In got into a car accident, I don't know.” He continued: “I think everything involves risk. To answer this question: Every time we all get dressed, we all run the risk that we could potentially injure ourselves, be it a concussion, a broken bone, or something else. If you get out of bed incorrectly, you risk spraining your ankle. There's a risk in everything and everyone, and I'm willing to take the risk. This is it.”

Of course, everything carries risk. There's more to playing quarterback in the NFL than just getting up or driving to work. Partly for this reason, most commuters do not have $93 million in contractual guarantees. It's okay to play up the odds, but it's less good to hide what the odds are.

How Tagovailoa ensures his own safety when he gets back on the field is his prerogative. He will not wear a protective cap, the recently introduced soft outer helmet shell that the league and its players union hope will reduce the incidence of concussions. He said this was a “personal decision” and did not elaborate. When asked if he might change his style of play — particularly regarding decisions to stop running — Tagovailoa said his goal is to “be smart” in order to remain available for his team. His last concussion occurred at the end of a running play when he lowered his head into a defender. Everyone watching will be hoping they don't see Tagovailoa go through more hell. Or they don't watch, which will be the viewer's decision, just as it is Tagovailoa's decision to play again.

NFL quarterbacks don't get where they are by accepting feedback from all comers. Tagovailoa said he paid no attention to the outsiders weighing on his future. As far as his own career is concerned, he has no obligation to absorb what others say about him, let alone listen. But as his story reverts to presenting the topic of head injuries to a massive audience, Tagovailoa has a responsibility to not make it more justifiable for other athletes to follow his course than it actually is. His story reaches a point where it becomes a matter of the world. At this point, Tagovailoa's comments are no longer about his own brain, but rather about the human brain generally.