Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

July 29 update: After wrestling with the decision all summer, Varga decided to retire from pro football last week and informed the Colts of his decision. He said his long-term health was the deciding factor.

Want to see the ugly side of professional football? Tyler Varga can show you.

Chances are you forgot about him. He was the surprise survivor of the Indianapolis Colts’ final cuts last August; the Yale grad with the incredible backstory; the running back who began training camp sixth on the depth chart who never saw any practice snaps and the player no one gave a shot to make the team.

Then he did. Then he played in a few games.

Then he disappeared.

What you didn’t see was the concussion that lasted four months, the days and weeks he spent inside dark rooms, the test he kept failing, the words that got stuck in his mind that his mouth couldn’t spit out. Tyler Varga can tell you about the headaches, the nausea, the dizziness and the doubts. He'll tell you about the drugs he says the Colts told him to take and why he refused. He'll tell you why, after all that, he still wants to play football.

One hit — one jarring hit that popped his helmet loose and had him wobbling to the wrong sideline. That’s all it took for a 22-year-old who had never suffered a diagnosed concussion in his life to watch his rookie season in the NFL go up in smoke, and maybe his career. It took him two full days to tell the Colts’ team doctors what he already knew but refused to admit.

You know why. We all know why.

Colts' Tyler Varga: Athletic genes, international roots

“I didn’t want to go through the concussion protocol and maybe lose my job,” Varga says now. “That’s the pressure. I can’t miss anything. There’s no wiggle room. I hardly get any reps in practice as it is, and I’m missing days, I’m getting even fewer. I don’t get to show the coaches I know my stuff. And if I don’t get to play in the game, I get replaced.”

It’s an NFL reality. Varga is right: Like a lot of NFL players, he’s one play from being replaced. Couple that with the age-old tough guy mentality ingrained in professional football — “rub some dirt on it and get back out there” — and this is a league, no matter the rule changes and buckets of money it has poured into concussion research, that can never truly protect its players from their greatest foe: themselves.

And its players, particularly those clinging to the bottom of the roster, are willing to risk anything to be a part of that machine. Tyler Varga’s story embodies it.

“I’m pretty sure everybody who plays the game the way we’re taught to play it has had some sort of head trauma, and that’s the unfortunate truth,” he says.

The Hit and the Aftermath

It was September. Week 3. Varga, a rookie running back and special teamer, exited the Colts’ 35-33 win over the Tennessee Titans after absorbing a vicious hit on kickoff coverage. “It was like, 'Whatever, shake it off,’” he remembers. “I’ve had hits like that before.” He had no clue the reverberations of that hit would linger for four months and make him question ever wanting to play football again. He wouldn’t take another snap all year. His season was over. He wouldn’t be right until January.

He remembers calling his parents on the bus ride after the game, waking up the next morning feeling like he had the flu, then ignoring it and showing up for work anyway. He lifted weights. He practiced. He went home and went to bed.

“I wanted to believe I was just sick,” he says.

He wasn’t. The following day, Tuesday, was when Varga was forced to come to grips with what was wrong. He’d been denying the obvious to himself, ignoring the signs — the fatigue, the dizziness, the confusion. It was the Colts’ off day. Varga was apartment shopping. He toured four complexes that afternoon, then, sitting in the parking lot after he walked out of the last one, it hit him: He couldn’t remember being inside any of the apartments. Something was wrong.

“It was pretty scary at that point,” Varga says. “I mean, I was in one of the apartments like five minutes earlier.”

On Wednesday morning, he showed up at the Colts’ West 56th Street practice facility and told the team doctors that he thought he’d suffered a concussion. So the Colts did with Varga what they do with any player in a similar situation — they had him take the ImPACT examination, which a player must pass before resuming on-field work. (Nearly 50 percent of NFL players are back on the field within five days of suffering a concussion, meaning they don't miss a game.)

Only Varga failed the test miserably. “I had a feeling while I was taking it, ‘This isn’t going good,’” he says. They told him to stay home for a week. So he did. They told him not to exercise, not to look at screens, not to do much of anything at all. So he did.

The Colts beat the Jacksonville Jaguars in overtime in Week 4. Varga stayed at home. A day later, he took the ImPACT test a second time. Failed it again. He took it a third time that Friday, nearly two weeks after the concussion. Failed it again. What had begun as a hit to the head had suddenly placed his season in jeopardy. Worst of all, he couldn't shake the symptoms.

One morning the following week, Varga’s phone buzzed. It was a text message from one of the team doctors, instructing him to arrive at the facility at 2 p.m. that day to pick up some drugs to aid his recovery. “They’ll make you feel better,” he remembers the message saying. Varga hesitated.

“My first impulse reaction: What are the drugs? I’m not just taking things. I’m smarter than that.”

Indeed. Varga owns an evolutionary biology degree from Yale and hopes to one day become an orthopedic surgeon. Prescription drugs are not foreign to him: In his final high school game, he tore the peroneal tendon in one of his legs, which led to acute compartment syndrome, which led to him nearly losing that leg. Amputation was considered but eventually dismissed. He spent months in the hospital and eventually recovered. He ran for 2,985 yards and 31 touchdowns at Yale.

Varga said he spoke with a Colts team doctor — he won’t say who — and explained that he wasn’t going to take a drug he knew nothing about. The drug in question was Amantadine, which the doctor said, according to Varga, is commonly prescribed to players who’ve suffered a concussion. “You should definitely take it,” Varga remembers the doctor telling him. (The Colts do not discuss individual players’ injuries and declined to comment on the Varga situation.)

Varga said he wanted to know more. He reached out to a handful of doctors he knew from Yale and asked for advice.

“They got back to me within five minutes,” he says. “And all of them were like, ‘Don’t take that.’”

What Varga learned: Amantadine was developed to treat influenza, and also is prescribed for Parkinson's disease. Most concussion experts acknowledge the drug is sometimes used to treat concussionlike symptoms, but after hearing from his own doctors, Varga wanted nothing to do with it. The side effects were what scared him most.

“The worst case, they told me, were some psychotic reactions," he says. “And you just can’t stop taking it. You up the dosage until you’re symptom-free. That’s my understanding of it. It sounded pretty scary to me.”

So he called the Colts’ team doctor back, told him he wasn’t taking Amantadine and told him why.

“It sounds like you got some good advice,” Varga says the doctor told him. “You should go with your gut.”

So he did. And about 45 minutes later, Varga’s phone buzzed again. The Colts wanted to see him. They were putting him on injured reserve.

‘No one has a tough brain’

The message was clear.

“This is not something to play around with,” Varga said Colts General Manager Ryan Grigson told him that day. “You should take some time off and get your head better. We’re putting you on injured reserve, and we want you back next year.”

That was the end of Varga’s rookie season, in the middle of October. The lingering effects of his concussion would last until late January.

“I totally understand it from a roster perspective,” he says. “It was the right thing to do on their part. I couldn't play."

It took him about another month before he felt comfortable driving home to Canada. When he did, he sought to learn more about why his body was still feeling the effects of a hit he had suffered six weeks before. It’s among the greatest riddles in sports: Some athletes return from a concussion in three days. Some, like NHL star Sidney Crosby, don’t return for 16 months.

Every concussion is different because every brain is different. As the research evolves, so does our understanding.

“We sort of have this cultural understanding that it’s easy, that it’s two weeks at most and you’re back out there,” said Dr. Patrick Kersey, the medical director of USA Football, a former physician for the Colts and a concussion expert with Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Sports Performance. “Like you just press a Staples easy button and move on. But in reality, each concussion is its own individual entity.”

Kersey has worked in sports and studied concussions for decades. He’s seen the tough-guy mantra up close. He knows it oftentimes camouflages the severity of these injuries, and drives athletes to exercise impatience instead of prudence. He knows the dangers that follow.

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“That warrior mentality,” Kersey calls it. “With some injuries, players can just tough them out. These are different. A colleague once summed it up like this: ‘You can be a tough person. But no one has a tough brain.’”

Dr. John Leddy, director of the University at Buffalo’s Concussion Management Clinic, is another leading expert in the field. While it’s important to note neither Kersey or Leddy treated Varga, their understanding of the injury paints a broader picture as to how much uncertainty remains. The advice Varga got initially — stay at home in a darkened room until the symptoms go away— is what Leddy calls the “cocoon method.” He doesn’t agree with it.

“That’s starting to fall out of favor,” Leddy said. “It’s important for someone to rest initially, but we know that activity and exercise are good for the brain. It helps it heal and balance the nervous system. When people are having a prolonged recovery, telling them to rest until the symptoms go away is exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Both Kersey and Leddy said that Amantadine is sometimes prescribed to treat concussionlike symptoms, but neither is a staunch believer. “I don’t use it that often,” Leddy said. "I know some people do. What I’ve found is most people stop taking it because of the side effects.”

Because he resisted taking the drug, Varga never had to deal with those side effects. The Colts asked him back to Indianapolis for an on-field workout in early December, almost three months after he’d suffered his concussion. He slipped on shoulder pads and a helmet for the first time since the injury. With the training staff watching, he ran through drills, including hitting the tackling dummies.

Problem was, it stirred up his symptoms. Varga felt awful after the workout.

“Basically I went backwards,” he says. “I came back in the locker room afterwards and some of the guys were like, ‘Why are you doing that? Why do they have you hitting stuff if you’re on injured reserve? I was like, ‘I don’t know.’”

He had more workouts scheduled with the Colts’ training staff for the following day, but refused. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he told them. So the Colts flew him back to Canada.

At this point Varga began to wonder if he’d ever get right again — and if he’d ever play football again. One hit? One jarring hit that popped his helmet loose and sent him wobbling to the wrong sideline? That’s all it would take to end his NFL career?

“Scary,” he calls it. “I’d be lying, anybody would be lying, to say that wasn’t a thought that crossed my mind. I just remember thinking, ‘Thank God I went to Yale.’”

The road back

So that’s where he retreated to. Varga took an internship at the Yale Investments Office, working as a financial analyst for three months, and waited for his mind to heal itself. It did. Slowly.

“The internship sort of forced me to think creatively, to think outside of the box, and mentally I started to feel better,” he says. “By February I felt like I could express myself normally again. I was feeling creative again, and that’s something I was really missing before. I was like, ‘Thank God. It’s finally over.'"

He thought long and hard about giving up football for good. In the end, he couldn’t. So he dug into his training, lifting weights and running through auxiliary workouts five days a week. He focused on flexibility and mobility on the other two days.

In his words, he wanted to “fix himself.”

Then there he was, at the Colts’ first voluntary offseason workout in late April, anxious to begin the quest of earning a spot on the 53-man roster for the second consecutive season. He still hasn’t put on the pads. He’s still not sure how his body — and his brain — will respond to contact. It's been seven months since he left the field in Tennessee.

“Obviously it was a hard decision, an extremely hard decision,” he says. “You have to look at both outcomes, and if you don’t, you’re not thinking right.

“But it comes down to this: I’m back here because I wanted to compete again.”

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.