head coach can pull a player off. When we finally reach the head coach and impress upon him the seriousness of an injury, the players come off.”
Sitting in the audience, mesmerized, was a Michigan State graduate student named Michael (Micky) Collins. He had made the five-hour drive down from East Lansing with his faculty adviser, mostly out of curiosity. Collins felt like he was at a personal crossroads. A former pitcher and outfielder at the University of Southern Maine, he was in his second year studying for a master’s degree in clinical psychology. But Collins had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He missed sports and had thought about coaching or perhaps a career as an athletic trainer. He had traveled to Pittsburgh at the suggestion of his adviser, who thought the combination of sports and brain research might stir Collins’s interest.
Collins was attentive to what the players had to say, but for him the real stars were the doctors and the scientists. He watched as Joe Maroon and Mark Lovell presented their latest findings on concussions. “These are the coolest guys in the world,” Collins thought. During the drive back to East Lansing, he told his adviser: “This is what I want to do with my life.”
At this point in the looming concussion crisis, Merril Hoge was nolonger a professional football player; he was a case study and a cautionary tale. During the conference, Lovell had presented slides showing how Hoge’s brain function had fallen off a cliff after the hit in Chicago. Lovell’s concussion test already was becoming known in neuropsych circles as the Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery, although the Steelers didn’t own it and the test was not yet the marketing juggernaut it would come to be. Collins was fascinated. After watching Lovell’s presentation, he approached him and asked if he could use the Steelers Battery as the basis for his own research into football-related concussions. Lovell readily agreed. Thus began the steep upward trajectory that within five years would turn Collins into one of the leading concussion experts in the country and a member of a partnership with Maroon and Lovell that would shape the NFL concussion saga in huge and controversial ways.
Collins was nothing if not enterprising. He first used the Steelers Battery on the Michigan State football team, having secured permission through a trainer. Collins baselined a Spartan a day for months, all the while thinking to himself, No way this is gonna work. Then one day a lineman named Chris Smith came off the field with a concussion. Collins tested him the next day. “He looked normal, he talked normal, he acted normal, and he went right back to play,” said Collins. There was one problem: The test indicated that Smith was a walking zombie; he shouldn’t have been playing at all. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow. This really works,’ ” said Collins. At that point, he was in no position to influence whether Chris Smith played or sat out, but he was emboldened. He secured a small grant to study other colleges. He traveled to the universities of Utah and Pitt and then got an internship to study the University of Florida football team.
When he was done, Collins wrote up his findings. He submitted the paper not to some minor publication for young researchers but to the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, or
JAMA
, the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. “ ‘What the hell, it’s a sexy topic, isn’t it?’ ” he thought. Collins titled hissexy paper “Relationship between Concussion and Neuropsychological Performance in College Football Players.” He cold-called a
JAMA
editor, who agreed to take a look. The fact that the paper was accepted, he later acknowledged,was a tribute less to its quality (“It’s probably the worst paper I’ve ever published”) than to the sudden appetite for a subject that researchers had ignored for years but that now seemed critically
Sitting in the audience, mesmerized, was a Michigan State graduate student named Michael (Micky) Collins. He had made the five-hour drive down from East Lansing with his faculty adviser, mostly out of curiosity. Collins felt like he was at a personal crossroads. A former pitcher and outfielder at the University of Southern Maine, he was in his second year studying for a master’s degree in clinical psychology. But Collins had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He missed sports and had thought about coaching or perhaps a career as an athletic trainer. He had traveled to Pittsburgh at the suggestion of his adviser, who thought the combination of sports and brain research might stir Collins’s interest.
Collins was attentive to what the players had to say, but for him the real stars were the doctors and the scientists. He watched as Joe Maroon and Mark Lovell presented their latest findings on concussions. “These are the coolest guys in the world,” Collins thought. During the drive back to East Lansing, he told his adviser: “This is what I want to do with my life.”
At this point in the looming concussion crisis, Merril Hoge was nolonger a professional football player; he was a case study and a cautionary tale. During the conference, Lovell had presented slides showing how Hoge’s brain function had fallen off a cliff after the hit in Chicago. Lovell’s concussion test already was becoming known in neuropsych circles as the Pittsburgh Steelers Test Battery, although the Steelers didn’t own it and the test was not yet the marketing juggernaut it would come to be. Collins was fascinated. After watching Lovell’s presentation, he approached him and asked if he could use the Steelers Battery as the basis for his own research into football-related concussions. Lovell readily agreed. Thus began the steep upward trajectory that within five years would turn Collins into one of the leading concussion experts in the country and a member of a partnership with Maroon and Lovell that would shape the NFL concussion saga in huge and controversial ways.
Collins was nothing if not enterprising. He first used the Steelers Battery on the Michigan State football team, having secured permission through a trainer. Collins baselined a Spartan a day for months, all the while thinking to himself, No way this is gonna work. Then one day a lineman named Chris Smith came off the field with a concussion. Collins tested him the next day. “He looked normal, he talked normal, he acted normal, and he went right back to play,” said Collins. There was one problem: The test indicated that Smith was a walking zombie; he shouldn’t have been playing at all. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow. This really works,’ ” said Collins. At that point, he was in no position to influence whether Chris Smith played or sat out, but he was emboldened. He secured a small grant to study other colleges. He traveled to the universities of Utah and Pitt and then got an internship to study the University of Florida football team.
When he was done, Collins wrote up his findings. He submitted the paper not to some minor publication for young researchers but to the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, or
JAMA
, the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. “ ‘What the hell, it’s a sexy topic, isn’t it?’ ” he thought. Collins titled hissexy paper “Relationship between Concussion and Neuropsychological Performance in College Football Players.” He cold-called a
JAMA
editor, who agreed to take a look. The fact that the paper was accepted, he later acknowledged,was a tribute less to its quality (“It’s probably the worst paper I’ve ever published”) than to the sudden appetite for a subject that researchers had ignored for years but that now seemed critically
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