This is one time when Florida QB Tim Tebow could do more good sitting on bench than playing

Note to Tebow: Real men won’t shrug off concussion

Real men don’t shrug off concussions. So if Tim Tebow still wants to be a role model when his head clears, he could start by role modeling for a few of his teammates.

Concussions aren’t just an occupational hazard, no matter how many times football players stubbornly try to convince themselves otherwise.

“Everyone gets concussions. Stuff like that happens,” Florida linebacker Ryan Stamper said after practice Tuesday, marveling at the media circus gathered for an update on Tebow’s condition, and whether the star quarterback would return from last weekend’s concussion in time for the Gators’ Oct. 10 game at LSU.

“I guess because it happened to him everyone is blowing it up,” Stamper added, “but I think he’ll be fine.”

To make his point, the fifth-year senior recalled two concussions he suffered playing at First Coast High in Jacksonville. Both times, Stamper couldn’t remember the play, the hit, how he got back to the sideline or much about the rest of the game. Both times he returned to play the following week.

“There’s just a part of your life,” Stamper said, “that you don’t remember.”

Without a change in the culture, a lot of football players might have to get used to the feeling. No one seems certain whether there are more violent collisions than ever before — as opposed to better reporting — but we know much more about concussions than just a few short years ago. Little of it is good.

Players who rush back or suffer multiple concussions risk serious brain injury as early as their 40s, the result of repeated blows to the head that begin piling up from pee wee football on.

“There’s a ‘code’ players adhere to — get back, finish, win,” Cardinals receiver Sean Morey said Tuesday over the telephone from Arizona. “Your competitive interests outweigh concerns for yourself. …

“But once you understand the risk, once somebody sits you down and explains the damage cumulative shots to the head cause, you’ve got an obligation to be outspoken and an advocate for not just your peers, but every athlete playing contact sports,” he added. “Tim Tebow can help put this issue in perspective for a lot of people.”

Morey is hardly a soft touch. No one who’s made a living returning kicks and playing special teams in the NFL is, let alone someone who’s made it to the Pro Bowl.

But it’s not surprising that he considers Tebow’s setback a “teachable moment.” He sits on the union’s Player Safety and Welfare Committee and two weeks ago, Morey tried creating a teaching moment of his own. He joined Baltimore’s Matt Birk and Seattle’s Lofa Tatupu as the first active NFL players to announce they’ll donate their brains to a Boston University medical school program studying such injuries.

Researchers there and elsewhere have examined brain tissue culled posthumously from retired NFL athletes and so far have identified six cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a disease previously limited in the medical literature almost exclusively to boxers. One of the tissue samples came from Andre Waters, the hard-hitting former Eagles defensive back who committed suicide in 2006 at age 44 after repeated bouts with depression.

“The assumption in the 1990s, when I played, was you miss a day or two. Before that, it was zero. Now it’s a week,” said Chris Nowinski, who played at Harvard, then wrestled in the WWE before concussions cut short his career.

He went on to become co-director of BU’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy

“In some ways, we’ve shed light on the issue. But in terms of true science, what it means to strap on a helmet and run into someone at 20 mph, we’re still in the dark ages. It wouldn’t surprise me in five years to prove that brains don’t adequately recover for 4-6 weeks.”

More than one researcher has already advocated a month off, minimum, following a first concussion. Currently, though, doctors often clear a return to play within a week, once neurological test results return to normal and the player no longer exhibits confusion, memory loss, headaches or blurred vision.

“The real problem is we don’t have tests sensitive enough to determine when the brain is ready, so the standard instead becomes, ‘What’s an acceptable level of risk?’” Nowinski said. “The truth is if everybody who suffered a concussion sat down for a month, some teams would be playing with skeleton crews.”

The good news is Florida coach Urban Meyer has turned responsibility for the decision over to Florida’s medical staff, which has state-of-the-art facilities and resources available. The bad news is that the state of the art, as any number of neurologists will attest, is dismal.

Tebow’s toughness, on the other hand, is such that he won’t sit a second longer than commanded to. He finished a high school game with a broken leg, and played nearly all of last season with a shoulder injury that required an injection of painkillers or anti-inflammatory medicine before kickoff.

In an excellent post on the college football blog, “Every Day Should Be Saturday,” writer Orson Swindle summed up the dilemma perfectly and called on Tebow to let backup John Brantley start against LSU.

“That is not meant to be an emotional plea. If anything, it is as cold and logical a call as one could hope to make. The sort of statement one makes when you use your healed, rational, and firing-on-all-synapses brain looking at the evidence-based prescriptions of medical science. (Exactly the kind of decision he and other football players will not make.)”

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org