This week, Locker retired from the National Football League at age 26, after an unremarkable career as a quarterback for the Tennessee Titans. He could have signed on somewhere as a backup, but he chose not to. Locker did not specifically cite his injury history as a reason for his retirement; he mentioned that he no longer had the “burning desire” to play professional football, and that he was going to spend time with his family and remodel his house. But it’s hard not to make at least some sort of correlation here, because Locker is a mobile, roaming quarterback who was so susceptible to the kind of brutal hits I saw on that night several years ago.
Of Locker’s first 32 potential starts with the Titans, he missed 14. After the 2012 season, he had shoulder surgery; his 2013 season was cut short by a foot injury and his 2014 season ended after he dislocated his left shoulder. But it goes beyond that, because I couldn’t find the hit I remembered Locker taking in college, but I did find several others that felt like the same sort of thing: Here’s one, after which Locker kept on playing. Here’s another, after which Locker kept on playing. And here’s mention of another, after which Locker kept on playing.
Maybe it’s unfair to speculate whether those specific plays had anything to do with his retirement, but I think it’s equally naïve to presume they exist in a vacuum. On the second of those hits documented above, a shot Locker took during the Holiday Bowl, he insisted that he wasn’t concussed, that his helmet had fallen down over his eyes, causing him to briefly think he’d gone blind. Locker was mic’d up that day, and the video would seem to confirm this, but it still doesn’t answer the question of whether the fact he thought he’d gone blind might have been the sign of a brutal hit on its own.
And yet the larger, more existential question here goes beyond Locker. In the same week he announced his retirement, three other prominent players – 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis, a potential Hall of Famer, Raiders running back Maurice Jones-Drew and Steelers linebacker Jason Worilds – who were all 30 or younger and still appeared to have something to give also called it quits. This raised questions, as Grantland’s Bill Barnwell wrote, as to whether “players aren’t at least thinking about retiring earlier than they have in the past, or that their logic might be shifting from getting as much as possible for as long as possible to getting enough before getting out.”