- We're about to watch some NFL gruesome injuries
and I have the man, the legend, Brandon Marshall
in the house to help me dissect some of these.
Talk about it from a doctor's and athlete's perspective.
Let's get started.
Pee whoop.
- [Announcer] Here's Wilson gets hit.
- Ooh, this is a hand issue.
- [Announcer] Overthrown.
Aaron Donald gets a hit on Russell Wilson and,
oh the middle finger of Wilson.
- Are we making it worse as players when we start
grabbing these things and-
- Yeah, trying to make it work again.
I mean, it's not helping.
You wanna right away put a turn, not a tourniquet,
splint on it in order to decrease the motion,
especially with an injury like that.
Mallet finger, what happens is you actually have a fracture
from the tendon that attaches to the top of the finger
that allows you to move your finger this way.
So imagine you lose that tendon,
the finger just hangs.
You remember this one?
- This is a couple years, yeah for sure.
Take off to the left, get pulled down by Logan Ryan.
- [Both] Ooh.
- The leg is facing the other way.
This mechanism here of having the other players' knee
fall directly onto his ankle and see the change.
You know this is a compound fracture cause it's poking out
of his skin.
Have you ever seen on the field
an injury this like gruesome?
- Absolutely.
And also this play, right?
This play is a banned play.
This is a horse collar, right?
So like grabbing the guy by the back of his neck
and pulling him down.
But it's how they do it with their body weight.
It's a very dangerous play.
We can play hard and play rough but we should also try
to protect each other on the field.
He's lucky actually it wasn't his knee as well.
- Probably, I wouldn't be surprised if he broke both,
a tibia and fibula.
But there you could put hardware.
Recovering a knee is tricky 'cause now you're talking
about soft tissue damage as opposed to bones.
Bones heal well, soft tissue, ligaments, tendons
those can be tricky in some cases, especially
for an athlete like Dak, so...
- It's another one.
- [Announcer] Here comes the blitz
and there goes Alex Smith down at the 40 yard line.
Kareem Jackson.
- He doesn't know that Alex is injured.
- [Announcer] Alex Smith is down.
- Here's the mechanism.
- Leg got caught.
- Oh geez.
Oh my goodness.
- Okay, so you could see again loose bones, yeah.
What's unique about this fracture upon after reviewing it
is it's a spiral fracture, which means
that there was like a torsional force on the bone.
So it doesn't just break on one line
it kind of breaks on a diagonal line going up the bone.
And that obviously is a different level of fracture
because now it's creating a sharp point that comes out
through the skin and becomes really problematic.
And for Alex Smith, this was even worse
because then he developed a bacterial infection,
ended up with sepsis.
Sepsis is basically when the infection actually enters
from the wound into your blood, goes throughout the body
and then that bacteria causes all your blood vessels
to dilate.
And when your blood vessels dilate
your blood pressure drops.
So you don't get enough circulation
to your brain and your vital organs.
We actually invited Alex Smith to the podcast.
- Alex Smith, come.
I love you.
- [Announcer] First and 10.
- Here we go again.
- [Announcer] And it was Lawrence Taylor who's slammed
down to the ground at the 42 yard line.
We'll look at him with the reverse angle.
- I didn't see what exactly happened.
- It's similar to-
- Oh yeah, the leg got caught.
- But it's similar to that same horse collar
from Dak Prescott.
- You know and now we have different rules for quarterbacks.
Do you think the rules have gone and the pendulum
has swung a little bit too far in protecting quarterbacks?
Or do you think it's fair?
- Too far.
Like, listen, we gotta make the game safer.
I'm all for that, protecting guys.
But what I don't want to see is what we saw
a few times this year.
Defensive player running in the pocket and literally
just chest bump the quarterback.
The quarterback stands up, shocked and get out the pocket
throws it away, or throws a completion
or throws a touchdown.
It's tough.
It's a tough thing, it's a business.
But right now I don't think it's all the way
fair for the defender.
- Oh, this is college.
- Mm-hm, this was nasty.
- [Announcer] Setting up the screen.
- Oh my god.
- This was brutal.
- This is the knee injury.
- This is the ACL, MCL here. - That's right.
- See, this is where I'm talking about where,
on this exam there's tears, there's massive global swelling.
You can't make a diagnosis.
- [Brandon] That's right.
- You just know something is torn.
- That's right, you need to get images on it.
- You need to get images, you need to go back on the replay,
see what happened and then you could make
an educated guess
Oh this is terrible.
- Oof, oof.
- Oh, this is really problematic.
- Oof, when you see some of these injuries, you know
a lot of times you just look at the player on the ground,
but there's so many other people
that's like counting on this person to get up
and be healthy.
And you're thinking about that as an athlete.
Some of the first things you think about is like,
"Oh, can I play again?"
- [Announcer] There steady on the back end for the Patriots.
Here's Murray.
He takes-
- Don't slide.
- [Announcer] And stumbles, brought down-
- Yeah, he got caught, he got caught.
- You know what, when you see a non-contact injury,
you automatically think the worst.
It's like when a guy goes down and no one touches them,
you're like, oh this is bad.
- Right there from the footage I could tell you
it looks more ACL 'cause he's trying to move forward.
Like his body's trying to move forward, but his cleat
is planted so his upper leg continues to move
but the lower leg is stuck.
So that tells me the thing that keeps your knee in place
from full, extra forward motion is the ACL is gone.
- [Announcer] To a rolling left with the-
- Oof.
And this wasn't on purpose.
- No.
- By the Bengals, by any means.
- No, not at all.
- It's momentum.
- When you see this as a doctor, you know, seeing him
in this state fingers, everything's stuck like that.
- The concern for me goes into a situation is,
is there bleeding inside the brain?
Is this a seizure from such a bad injury?
Because all those things are very possible
with a hit like that.
That was vicious.
And the fact that that happens so often
and then under reported under-recognized,
I understand from players like I've had players ask me
to clear them for things and I understand
that they're coming from a good place
but I still don't know how to have that conversation
in a good way because it feels like I'm keeping them
from something that they want success in.
But I'm also looking after their health.
So I don't even know what the right things
to say is to pacify that situation.
How do you feel as an athlete?
Have you ever had a concussion?
- One, for me, I mean, just going off a Tua,
it's hard cause I masked the one that I had
because it was my contract year.
It's tricky because there's a lot of emotion,
there's a lot of like-
- Business?
- Business behind it but not even business.
It's like, it's everything.
Like when I said with Willis McGahee, when you're laying
on the ground, you know, I probably would've been thinking
about, you know, my mother, my sister who had just
had a kid at 16.
So a lot of times, not even just about you, but with Tua
the older me, wiser me, mature me,
again it's like sit your ass down.
- Yeah. - Right.
- 'Cause like there's this discussion after he suffered
his second one and we're looking at, you know
this third one that he actually reported.
It's like, will he play for the, in the playoff game?
Is he going to come back?
And it's like that doesn't matter right now.
To have two, three, four in one year.
Now you're looking at your career definitely being over.
- Life, I mean, worry.
You know, there's personality changes that happen
with a concussion. - Right.
- Especially in the short term.
They get aggressive.
I've seen the sweetest high school kids that I met them
before the game.
Sweetest kids, they get a concussion,
yelling, screaming, cursing out their trainers
who they have a great relationship with.
So you see that on the sideline from one of your teammates
are you telling 'em sit down?
- What did I like to say?
- What do you like to say?
- Sit your ass down.
- You said that before?
- Oh absolutely.
Especially with concussions.
Even you know, in the height of this discussion, you know
even in boxing right, someone gets knocked out.
Immediately, everybody just like you feel it.
Everybody feels that, you know,
so no I'm telling my brother, you know
to go sit down, you know, it's not worth it.
- For sure.
- [[Announcer] Here's Higgins wide open to midfield
and lowers the shoulder.
- This one's hard and is emotional
because you know he died on the field, right?
- Yeah, that's something most people don't say.
That's accurate, actually.
- [Brandon] That's right.
- [Dr.] So obviously, initially you see contact,
chest contact but then you also see his head hit the ground.
So, it's hard for me to know right at the outset
what's happening. - Yeah.
- But you know what we do differently as sports med doctors?
Mechanism of injury, like how an injury happened
sometimes gives us more info than actually doing an exam.
Knowing that he became pulseless,
knowing that his heart stopped abruptly.
And then seeing that hit to the chest is the reason
why a lot of doctors jump to speculate
that this is that commotio cordis condition,
where in a very specific millisecond of a moment
during the electrical rhythm of your heart,
you take a physical trauma to the chest wall
and your heart goes into an abnormal rhythm,
which basically leaves you pulseless.
- So everybody should be certified to do CPR.
- Yes.
- Right?
You know the assistant athletic trainer to be the one
to jump in there and get the job done.
- Yeah.
- Like that says a lot about him and that was big.
- Because that saved his life.
What happens in CPR is you're squeezing the heart
through the outside of the chest by putting the pressure
in two inches deep.
And then you're actually moving the blood in the body
as if the heart was beating and the blood
does not get reoxygenated, but there is some oxygen
still left in the blood.
So you're circulating that blood, extending the time
to get the defibrillator, the medical assistance,
all of these tools that can be used to bring
this person back.
So CPR absolutely saved this life here.
- Will he play again?
- Speculation.
Even the condition that I was talking about
that doctors thought he was having,
that's one level of speculation and maybe we can get there
'cause we can watch the mechanism, but not being his doctor,
not knowing the full medical history,
that's not even right for me to say.
- [Announcer] On the catch by the rookie, Josh Mullen.
- Oh, this was a tough one.
- [Announcer] Out of Tennessee and Ryan Shazier,
the leader of this Pittsburgh defense is not getting up.
- There's a spinal injury here.
- [Announcer] And that's never a good-
- Geez.
Oh my goodness.
- It's scary watching a hit with the crown of the head
obviously for the player receiving the hit
but also the player delivering the hit.
- [Brandon] That's right.
- 'Cause you're putting a major compressive force
onto your spine.
Remember, there are bones there but then there's also
soft discs that cushion the padding.
The gravity and the bones from rubbing on each other.
And those can pop, those can go and start putting pressure
on your actual spinal cord.
- [Announcer] Miller and Alan and Talib then comes over.
- Oh. - Oh, he did that on purpose?
- Man, Talib. - That's savage.
- I forgot that play.
You know, yeah there's a lot of dirty plays,
there's a lot of things that happen in that pile, you know.
- Yeah, I've heard like pinching and hair pulling.
- Grabbing nuts. - Really?
- All that type of stuff. - All the time.
- But it's funny, you're telling me about this brotherhood.
You guys respect each other.
- Not everybody respect their brotherhood.
- And then you guys are stabbing each other.
- Not everybody respect the brotherhood.
You gotta kick that person out the brotherhood.
- Remember this?
- Oh yeah.
My deltoid, snapped my deltoid, freaking turf.
Oh my goodness, I knew it was over.
- No way.
The medial ankle?
- Yeah, so the deltoid, which is hard to snap.
- Yeah, that's really hard to, that's like a car accident.
- So there's been a lot of players complaining
about this turf.
Even this year you had guys go down
with non-contact injuries.
It' really ruining careers.
That was pretty much the last of me.
I felt like I could have played a couple more years,
you know but that play was over because it-
- Did you have a full fracture?
- No, I just snapped my deltoid.
- So it just cut in half. - That's right.
- That's usually one of the strongest ones.
- That's right.
- And usually breaks off bone.
- That's right, yeah.
So we've been talking about it all day, right.
You know, the athlete way, the athletes approach.
So there's a lot of people right now that are Googling
how to get in shape, how to eat better.
I just find that, you know, we're the healthiest people
on the planet.
So being able to take the way we train, the way we sleep,
the way we approach our mental fitness and put it
into one platform, one app, and give that to people.
It keeps me online when it comes to my life's work
and my purpose.
A lot of people just need to lean into the fundamentals.
- So we can decrease these.
- And outside of the big injuries,
it's also just want to feel better.
- Yeah. - Want to perform better.
- Yeah. - Just simple, that's it.
- Yeah, it's not about just preventing disease and injuries
it's about improving wellness with enjoyment.
- That's right.
Let's just feel better.
- All right, so where can people learn more about it?
- [Brandon] You go to the app store,
a search House of Athlete Plus,
see a beautiful little plus sign right there.
House of Athletes.
- I need some plus in my life.
Let's do it.
Click here to check out the full interview we just did
with Brandon Marshall.
He spills all the beans of Terrell Owens playing in the NFL.
The drugs that they actually gave the players
to numb them up.
Really interesting podcast, full interview.
Click here and as always, stay happy and healthy.
(gentle music)